How Eastern Europe’s villains changed sides in the malware war – and made you protect your PC

He called himself Dark Avenger. Nobody knew who he was. Back in the late 1980s, when Bulgaria was still a communist country, he engineered clever viruses that passed from one floppy disk to another. His code reached Western Europe and the US and brought about fear into company after company. At that time, 10 percent of viruses found in North America could be traced back to Bulgaria, and almost all of those were the work of Dark Avenger.