Dressed in loose-fitting khakis and worn leather sandals, Elnitiarta needs all the relief he can get: He is one of the front-line virus slayers at Symantec's AntiVirus Research Center, a kind of computer-infection mission control founded by the makers of the popular security software Norton AntiVirus.
Take, for example, one morning last Mayâ€"at four o'clock, in factâ€"when Elnitiarta was jarred from a peaceful sleep by a ringing telephone. The next thing he knew, he was speeding through the palm-lined streets of Santa Monica and into the shadowy garage of SARC. "All I was thinking was Melissa," says Elnitiarta, 26. "It was Melissa all over again."
Melissa isn't one of Elnitiarta's ex-girlfriends. Melissa is the godmother of computer viruses. Released in the spring of 1999, it clogged e-mail servers around the world by infecting Microsoft Word documents and then shooting out copies of itself to others using Microsoft Outlook. It wasn't the first or most insidious virus, but it was the first to make front-page news worldwide. Melissa was a virus superstar, and, like Madonna or Eminem or any groundbreaking megacelebrity, it spawned an ever-growing legion of wanna-bes.
By the time Elnitiarta sprinted upstairs to his desk, the latest wanna-be had a name, the Love Bug, inspired by the infectious message's subject line, "ILOVEYOU." Within a day, it struck more than 45 million machines and clogged e-mail servers from the Pentagon to the British Parliament. Melissa had finally been upstaged. During the ensuing manhunt and firestorm of consumer awareness, along came a meaner, nastier variant known as NewLove, which supposedly had the power to wipe out an entire hard drive. Not long after that, a third variant sprang up, deviously cloaked in the guise of a résumé.
Attorney General Janet Reno held a press conference to alert users to the possibility of even more viruses, and the country braced for digital destruction.
