![]() ![]() (A judge ruled in his favor.) Popp died in 2007. His attorneys also argued he was not fit to stand trial he reportedly wore condoms on his nose and curlers in his beard to prove he was unwell, according to journalist Alina Simone. He allegedly told authorities he had planned to donate the ransom money to AIDS research. Some reports indicate Popp had been rejected by WHO for a job opportunity.Įddy Willems with his original floppy disc with ransomware from 1989 Courtesy Eddy WillemĪfter his arrest at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, Popp was sent back to the United States and imprisoned. Perhaps someone else was involved - as a biologist, how did he have money to pay for all of those discs? Was he angry about the research? Nobody knows.” “Even to this day, no one really knows why he did this,” said Willems, noting how costly and time intensive it would have been to mail that number of floppy discs to so many people. He was arrested and charged with multiple counts of blackmail, and is widely credited with being the inventor of ransomware, according to security news website. Law enforcement traced the effort to a PO box owned by a Harvard-taught evolutionary biologist named Joseph Popp, who was conducting AIDS research at the time. The floppy discs were sent to addresses all over the world obtained from a mailing list. It’s unclear if any people or organizations paid the ransom. Although it was a pretty basic malware, it was the first time many people had ever heard of the concept - or of digital extortion. The scheme made headlines and appeared in Virus Bulletin, a security magazine for professionals, a month later: “While the conception is ingenious and extremely devious, the actual programming is quite untidy,” the analysis said. This disc was one of 20,000 sent in the mail to attendees of the World Health Organization's AIDS conference in Stockholm Courtesy Eddy Willem It was not a marginal thing - it was a big thing, even then.” “The incident created a lot of damage back in those days. “I started to get calls from medical institutions and organizations asking how I got around it,” said Willems, who is now a cybersecurity expert at G Data, which developed the world’s first commercial antivirus solution in 1987. He was one of the lucky ones: Some people lost their life’s work. “I didn’t pay the ransom or lose any data because I figured out how to reverse the situation,” he told CNN Business. ![]() Instead he became a victim of the first act of ransomware - more than 30 years before the ransomware attack on the US Colonial Pipeline ignited a gas shortage in parts of the US last week.Ī few days after inserting the disc, Willems’ computer locked and a message appeared demanding that he send $189 in an envelope to a PO Box in Panama. Willems was expecting to see medical research when the disc’s contents loaded. The disc was one of 20,000 sent in the mail to attendees of the World Health Organization’s AIDS conference in Stockholm, and Willems’ boss had asked him to check what was on it. Eddy Willems was working for an insurance company in Belgium back in December 1989 when he popped the floppy disc into his computer. ![]()
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