What's happening in Immortal Riot ? Metabolis asked me what was really happening with Immortal Riot and more or less forced me into contributing to the magazine that he and his rad posse publishes. Well... after writing about us in the introduction/news article in both issue #3 and issue #4 this seemed to be quite a natural question to ask. Ok, but before I answer jack shit, let's go over what you would've seen by reading the (superior) zines from Vlad. issue #3: ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ "Immortal Riot the Swedish virus crew now has a new member, Conzouler has joined them. I'm sure there'll be a lot of input from him in the next IR magazine." issue #4: ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ "Red_a and Blonde have joined Immortal Riot so there's another couple of helping hands to get their Insane Reality magazine out. The Unforgiven tells me he has some full stealth viruses ready to put out so issue 7 of insane reality should be something to check out." It seems like Metabolis is quite well informed, but maybe his readers don't know the whole story. So, let's go on... Ever since we released IR#6 we have all been in hibernation and haven't had the right motivation to awake, "pull ourself together" and release the damn magazine. We have however coded/spread a shitload of new viruses and even though they haven't been distributed in a nice format (like a magazine), it doesn't mean they don't exist. It would be kinda weird if we hadn't produced any new viruses considering all the new members we managed to drag into the inner circle. (IR (tm)). About the new members by the way: Conzouler contributed to IR#6 with his Bluenine virus (reality.014), but wasn't an official IR-member until the 14th of January, 1995. Conzouler was the first guy in Immortal Riot I hadn't met in person (and to this day, still haven't), but I asked him to join because I find him to be a "truly amazing guy". Not just thinking about viruses and programming in general, but pretty much about everything. In late March I asked Red-A if he was interested in joining as well since IR wasn't a "close and private" group anymore (due to the fact Conzouler joined) and I thought he was a cool person. He said he was interested and joined on the 30th of March. Cool. Red-A is the infamous writer of the "Scitzo" virus - included without his persmission (or knowledge) as the virus-spotlight in IR#6. Red-A also wrote the Manzon virus which like Scitzo has replicated quite well around the world. The last report I heard concerning a Manzon infection was from a guy in Poland (Helios Creed) who got all his computers infected with this "naughty, hard to remove-virus". It was all by coincidence I found out Poland was "under siege"... I was chatting with this humble person on a friend's bbs which I hadn't visited for over a year. Helios Creed and his board "Panteon" (+48-61-52681) eventually ended up as an IR-dist site which makes an interesting end to this chapter. To add here is that Red-A is not only an excellent programmer but also an idealist with a lot of radical political thoughts which sometimes seem to come from my very own brain. I love discussing things with this guy. Some weeks after Red-A joined, Blonde joined as a viruswriter. The story why Blonde started out with viruses is that he got wiped out by a virus of mine (bad-attitude) and wanted to know how to protect himself from these naughty-programs that "seduce data and corrupt programs on your computer". As for the moment Blonde is an excellent viruswriter and has written a lot of advanced, yet clear code. Ok. That's pretty much it about the new members but how about the old ones? Raver hasn't been in front of his computer for about 1« years with the exception when he wrote (Digital) Pollution & Death. Metal Militia is your average slacker who thinks he does a lot when infact he hasn't done shit in ages. Then how about me? Well... I'm just a guy with a few too many problems who is way too stupid to solve them before I end up in even bigger problems thus leaving me and my life in complete chaos with no time left to think about the most trivial things in life. Hope that was a confusing and unlogical answer since that would describe my situation quite well. . . I just don't know. Anyhow I mentioned above that we had released a lot of new viruses in the wild. Well, by definition, _we_ didn't release them but our non-official spreader did. So - thereby, I dedicate this chapter to him (Billy The Kid) whose contributions to our group always will be remembered. Manzon replicated really well and has been reported to us very frequently. It is a polymorphic tsr com/exe infector. Despite the fact that it has alright polymorphism there have been (atleast) four specially designed removers for it. The funny thing concerning this virus is that it was first distributed in a file called "petra-rm.zip". Petra.1308 was a virus I had written motivated by hate. When Petra-rm.com was executed it would search for all COM files in the tree thus infecting all files scanned (closed), 'ala DAV. The package with Petra-rm actually worked alright and it was a blast to analyze and critizise a virus I had written myself. Then, a new version of Digital Death which I fixed infected a school's network and all computer-classes were cancelled for about a week. Eventually S&S, Sweden helped them in removing it. This little incident resulted in S&S Sweden (Q-A informatik) splitting up, which resulted in Mikael Winterkvist selling F-Prot. Atleast this is what I think, due to the fact they discovored swedish viruses out there in the wild.. everywhere! Then Billy The Kid gave me a request to code a virus which one could notice when the payload activated, but not detect it before that time. Said and done, he got his full stealth with a black-to-white-pop-begin-all-over-fading virus. The monitors were going crazy and were classified as "bad" from their sysadm. They were isolated and replaced. A guy in BTK's class asked: "Can't this be the result of a virus running amok on our computers?" to which the sysadm replied: "No virus makes the screen fade... they can't destroy hardware, you know". What a jerk-off. Soon enough RatMan coded a remover for the Manzon virus described above and we recieved the file and spread out a variant of Carpe_Diem_II in the remover thus infecting all files scanned (3eh infections roqs!) which I had written. It included a text-string saying "Fuck you Ratman!". A virus-war in Sweden had begun. That is, IR against everyone. Our version of Ratman's remover was the one which was disted due to the fact that BTK uploaded it to atleast 20 eleet boards in Sweden. Anyhow - then a TSR blocker for (a virus they called), Carpe Diem_II appeared and the virus war continued.... While writing this I just disassembled the tsr-blocker described above and realized we have nothing to fear from those suckers. I'm also as for now trying to get in contact with all IR-members so we can finally get IR#7 out. This isn't the easiest task in life since everyone seems to be out of the country. Well, We're not dead, just insanely confused. Hang on and IR#7 will be out when we cleared some things up ;-). "The one who waits...." - The Unforgiven, Immortal Riot, 1995.