News ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ Back in april... HenKy left Matrix group and viruses, returning later to the scene. Anaktos joined Matrix and the group released their first issue. New virus group formed named Silicium Revolte. They disappeared in some months and never released anything. Is this group disbanded? Any information for the news section of 29A #6 would be appreciated. Codebreakers group moved their site to codebreakrs.cjb.net, being this one of their last acitivities. Actually it looks like the group is disbanded. Shadow Dancer issue 1 was released, being a magazine written in indonesian language with an introduction in english. Sophos and WildList Organisation International introduced a system called "Rapid Exchange of Virus Samples" (REVS), supposed to help on fast spreading infections exchanging samples between AV companies. Back in may... Online computer retailer Shoppingplanet.com sent virus WScript/Kak with their e-mail newsletter to about 50,000 customers. Later on, they warned subscribers with: "Please delete our previous newsletter. Potential virus thread attached to our previous email newsletter." G9N zine issue 1 released by The Spy. Annual vx meeting was scheduled for 1st august somewhere in Czech republic being unknown the exact location. Variants of ILoveYou virus were still appearing all around the world being the coder of the original virus unknown. Lifewire left ShadowVX group. It's unknown if actually ShadowVX could be considered a virus group. Altavirus, a search engine for virus sites was created by SnakeMan. VDAT 2.000.1 was released by Cicatrix. Back in june... B0z0 left IKX group. The charismatic guy that used to be the leader of the group left IKX group and the scene taking StarZer0 the responsability inside the group. Back in july... Pascal Virus Team was formed. The time showed that PVT can not be named as group. SMF group released DVL issue 10. Duke, leader of SMF did another good work with this release. SMF informed that SST, a russian virus coder, was being investigated due: "Creating, distribuiton and usage of harmful computer programs", according russian criminal code. Actually SST is still releasing viruses. AntiState Tortoise released the very first virus for Autocad 2000. Kefrens group got disbanded and one of the members released posthumous issue 1. Evul, coderz.net owner and virus coder, had a car crash but he was not very damaged fortunately. Rhape79 appeared on british TV. Linezer0 Network 2K group released second issue. Black Jack left the group and got a reply to the reasons he gave for his quit from his ex-group. Back in august... Foxz retired of vx scene. He did it to avoid problems with police because he is married and he has a son. Feathered Serpents group announced their very first issue after some years of activity (bad tongues would say inactivity). After a time DrOwl announced the release had been cancelled, something that didn't surprise in the scene. Vx annual meeting had place in Brno (.cz), but it didn't have too much success. Only GriYo and GigaByte, vxers not from the "zone" were assitant of the meeting. This situation should create a debate between people thinking that meetings should be done in different places every year and people that think meetings should be done in places where the amount of assistans would be big. More information about the meeting can be found in this zine inside an article written by Benny. Metaphase #2 was released. Red Elephant, norwegian virus group placed his site at redelephant.cjb.net but after a time several members left the group and the group finally was formed by 2 vxers. It's unknown if they will release any zine some day. Toro should have more information regarding the group and the zine. Lucky 2000 also known under other nicks, a famouse code ripper left the scene. Back in september... Virus Bulletin Conference 2000 was allocated this year in Orlando-Florida. Typical avers took part in the annual AV meeting plus some vxer too. Renegade, leader of ASM group released DIE #2. In a first release, zine had a backdoor being fixed in a posterior release. Due the backdoor incident Renegade left the scene: "The limit has been reached As to the statements and reactions of September 19th, I cannot stand the shit of some VX persons and even the behaviour of most of the "coders" nowadays anymore. Thus I retire completely from the virus scene." Bumblebee created VxNews a site placed in coderz.net dedicated to announce news related to viruses. Cicatrix released VDAT 2.000.2, and some days later stopped releasing publicly VDAT due discrepancies with some vxers and due the key was leeched. PalmOS got his first virus named Phage. CIH got arrested. It's unknown if actually he is facing jail or not. Benny/29A and Ratter released the first virus for Win2K platform named "Stream". Back in october... Jackie Qwerty, ex 29A member, informed that he had been father of a girl. Another vx meeting had place in Valencia, Spain. Being this a "local" meet it was more succesful than the international meeting. Well known vxers as Billy Belcebu, The Mental Driller, Tcp, Super, Bumblebee and some other were there. Evul had to close Matrix's site in Coderz due the impact of Matrix virus all over the world. Nick Fitzgerald confirmed what some people were already thinking: Tests performed by VTC (Hamburg) are corrupted. T-2000 and Kamaileon stopped writing viruses. Back in november... ILoveYou virus reached record guiness due to be known as the most spreaded virus ever. A new virus channel named #vxers was created due to the discrepancies from many vxers with the guys (Darkman, Evul, Knowdeth, Roadkil) managing #virus channel. DrOwl was interviewed by PC World. AVP announced they were going to change the name of their product from AVP to Kaspersky Anti-Virus. It seems like AVP people wanted to break business relations with Central Command, american distributor of AVP, and to do this they had to change the name. Central Command, company that used to distribute AVP in USA, started to distribute AVX a romanian antivirus of less quality than AVP, in a try to fool customers selling an antivirus of similar name. They were succesful because many people started to use AVX thinking they were using the new version of AVP. A new group named Mions was created. Formed by Worf and Mimi as virus collectors and Radix16 as virus coder. Coderz issue 1 magazine was released. In this month... Prizzy/29A left the virus scene. Matrix #3 scheduled for february. Shadow Dancer #2 was released. Maskbits released the first PHP virus, and later he left the scene.