brunnstein@rz.informatik.uni-hamburg.dbp.de (Klaus Brunnstein) (06/22/90)
On June 19-21, 1990, IBM held some kind of a development conference for GDR universities, in the research center of the ministry for science and technology in (east) Berlin-Koepenick. Similar to an annual conference for West German universities (`IBM university forum'), invited speakers from West and East German universities as well as from IBM informed about their actual work. A broad diversity of areas was covered, from CD-ROM based 'Thesaurus Linguae Graecae' to CAD, simulation of complex molecules and synthetic speech. The conference was accompanied by an exhibition where many additional applications and software products of scientific interest were shown by East and West German scientiests as well as IBM people, on IBM owned PS-2s. Many demonstration diskettes were freely available. Among the exhibitors, the Virus Test Center demonstrated how to detect and eradicate viruses. In many discussions, we were surprised to learn that many scientists regarded viruses as some kind of a joke as they had suffered mainly from viruses of the funny kind, e.g. playing Yankee Doodle in the Bulga- rian version "TP 44" or "legalizing marijuana"; only a few seemed to have experiences in really damaging viruses such as Israeli or Dark Avenger. Yet at the end of the exposition, our essential task was to eradicate some damaging viruses such as Dark Avenger (the Bulgarian "Eddie" which broadly migrates through Eastern Europe) from most of IBM's PS-2 as neither protection nor careful work had been practized nor prescribed. With surprise we learned that there existed a secret research unit in GDR to which every virus or other threat had to be reported; this secret group would then produce an antivirus and send it to concerned institutions. In its latest version (which we hope to receive afterwards), 11 viruses could be detected and eradicated. Lesson learned: there should be a special antivirus service for exhibitions, not only for large ones (in FRG's CeBIT and Systems exhibitions, about 15-20% of the workstations and PCs were found to be infected *at exhibition's end*). Klaus Brunnstein University of Hamburg