A teenager discovered the ‘Málaga’ virus and ended up founding VirusTotal. The enigma that remains is the same since 1992: who programmed it

Bernardo Quintero (@bquintero) was 14 years old and his first PC, an Amstrad PC-1512, had just arrived home. It was 1987, and the co-founder of VirusTotal He was excited by this machine that allowed him to exploit his computer curiosity. His hobby ended up being trying to circumvent the copy protection systems of some games, and he was there one day when something suddenly happened.

A little white ball moved on your screen. By itself. Without him having done anything.

He soon discovered that it was a computer virus. One that he ended up studying to know how to detect and eliminate it. He succeeded, and over the next three years he ended up improving his first antivirus, a tool that allowed him to recognize and eradicate seven different viruses he had encountered.

It didn’t seem like that project was going to go much further, and Quintero began his studies in Computer Science at the Polytechnic University School of Malaga. In one of the first classes, a professor asked if anyone wanted to raise a grade with a Pascal programming project. He signed up, and when talking to the professor, he asked him if he had done any previous projects.

“Well, yes,” he replied. “An accounting program, disk utilities, an antivirus…”. The teacher cut him off. “Did you say antivirus?”. When he answered affirmatively, the professor asked him to accompany him to his office. There he showed him how the entire IT department had been infected by a virus that the antivirus did not recognize.

Fragment of the code in Turbo Pascal 5.5 of the antivirus that Bernardo Quintero developed to eliminate the “Málaga-2610” virus (1992). Source: Bernardo Quintero.

Quintero soon detected where the problem could be and went home with an infected disk to work on an antivirus. It took him more than he thought, but after a few hours he managed to figure out how to detect it and delete it. That helped him pass the subject, but it also ended up being the definitive seed of the professional project that would end with the founding of Virus Total.

He tells it all in more detail in his novel, ‘Infected‘, which he published at the beginning of the year and in which he narrates those beginnings and how that ended up leading him to create VirusTotal, the Malaga company that would later end up being bought by Google.

That virus in his faculty was called “Málaga”, and Quintero spent years without paying much attention to it again. So, three years ago, this expert posted a message on Twitter (X) to try to solve the mystery of who would have created it.

Already then he discovered that according to several sources the virus had been created at the Polytechnic School of Informatics. The objective, I counted thenit was not about bringing the name to light, but about chatting with that person and remembering those times. He failed to reveal the mystery, and that mystery remained unsolved again.

But Bernardo Quintero never forgot that and returned to the fray with a new attempt a few days ago. After first publishing a message on X, the next day he published a summary of that story on LinkedInand asked for help in that post to try to solve the mystery once and for all.

We contacted him, and he told us how while in the past he had focused on discovering how it infected and creating the disinfection tool, he never tried to find out who had created the “Malaga” virus. But he told us that “now, looking at it with new eyes, I have seen a couple of interesting details and I have discovered the motivation.”

In fact, he adds that thanks to those messages on X and LinkedIn “I have received stories from several people who studied those years at the Polytechnic of Malaga and who believe they know the author.” Of those candidates, he explains, “I have ruled out 3 or 4, but there is one that fits very well with the new data I have.”

The mystery seems to be close to being solved. “I just need to clear up one unknown to confirm the author.. And if it is confirmed, there is a beautiful and sad story that will be worth telling.” Everything therefore indicates that it will finally be known who was the author of that virus, and Quintero has promised to tell more details these days. We will be attentive.

Image | Mika Baumeister

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