newsbytes@clarinet.com (02/04/90)
WILLOWICK, OHIO, U.S.A., 1990 FEB 03 (NB) -- Joseph Louis Popp, a 39- year-old anthropologist, has been arrested at his home in Willowick, Ohio, in connection with the AIDS information disk mailed to more than 20,000 PC users - predominantly in Europe - late last year. The arrest follows a behind-the-scenes investigation by four Scotland Yard detectives, headed by Detective Inspector John Austen, who had been working long hours in pursuing the AIDS disk case. Sources suggest that further arrests are now quite likely. As previously reported by Newsbytes, the AIDS disk was mailed out from London to at least 20,000 PC users in Mid-December last year. Preliminary investigations revealed that a group of men had rented a post office box in Panama and in London in order to obtain mailing lists to post the disks out to unsuspecting PC users. The disk invited users to load and run the AIDS information program, making a passing reference to what looked - at first glance - to be a complex shareware agreement. On closer inspection, the agreement committed the user to paying a license fee to PC Cyborg Corporation in Panama. The AIDS program, meanwhile, encrypted and trashed the user's hard disk directory in such a way as to make the PC useless. Initially, industry sources had suggested that the disk was a thinly veiled extortion campaign, design to persuade panicked PC users to pay money to a post office box in Panama. Popp's arrest, however, appears to have changed this thinking. Detectives are now holding Popp with bond, pending a psychiatric evaluation. According to the Associated Press, Popp is already receiving medication for a previous mental condition. UK news sources now suggest that, when arrested, Popp was in the process of preparing for a mass mail-out of two million AIDS- style disks. If true, then the actions of the FBI and London's Scotland Yard computer crime division have almost certainly saved the computer industry several hundred million dollars worth of damage. According to Guy Kewney, computer journalist and editor-in-chief of PC Dealer, a UK computer trade newspaper, if the AIDS program case had taken place just a few years ago, then it would have caused far more damage. "The thing that saved the day, and alerted the user community quickly to the case was online computer conferencing. If it hadn't have been for conferencing, then the industry really would have been taken unawares," he said. (Steve Gold/19900203)