A plague called Prilissa

There was a time when humans became too ambitious and decided to build a tower tall enough to reach heaven. The idea was to do away with God when they reached there. God, however, struck back in a very strange manner. Rather than hurl a bolt of lightning into the midst of His enemies, He cast a spell upon them and humans lost the ability to communicate with each other. This breakdown in communication between humans was the beginning of different languages and dialects. It was also the end of a civilisation.

Today, we have built another such tower, rather an electronic network which facilitates rapid transfer of information over great distances. This network is linked to home and office computers that run the engine of our civilisation. Our ability to communicate with each other depends on this fragile, electronic Tower of Babel. Those who mess around with it are neither God nor angels. They could be called minions of the devil.

The computer virus, a programme that plagues emails and causes computer memories to fail is the gift of these minions to civilisation. It threatens to tear apart the very fabric on which our communication structure rests. The latest is a variant of the Melissa virus that hit computers early this year. This new virus -- Prilissa -- is poised to strike on December 25. Self propagating, it infects Word 97 documents and spreads itself by sending the infected document as an e-mail attachment to the first 50 addresses in each address book it encounters. It eventually formats the C drive of its victims.

This scenario reminds one of images from Cold War era movies, which show rogue scientists huddled together in a laboratory planning to bring the world face to face with nuclear annihilation. There is not much difference between them and the creators of Prilissa. Destroying information on such a large scale has a historical parallel. It can be compared to the burning of the University of Alexandria during the time of the Roman Emperor Aurelian in the late third century ad. Just as civilisation suffered a setback by this so will it again, if the criminals who design computer viruses are not brought to book.