Love Bug 'accidental' claims suspect

A Filipino computer student has admitted that he may have been behind the spread of the infamous Love Bug virus that hit businesses across the globe last week.

In a bizarre twist of events, 23-year-old Onel de Guzman, who had gone underground for several days, appeared at a news conference sporting a pair of dark glasses.

According to widespread reports, Guzman sidestepped questions about whether or not he wrote the ILOVEYOU virus, and claimed he was unsure whether he had released it onto the internet. He also said he felt "nothing" about the effects of the virus.

Asked whether he might have accidentally released the virus, Guzman said that it was "possible".

Earlier this year, Guzman, a former student at Manila's AMA Computer College, completed a thesis which outlined how a virus similar to the Love Bug could be used to steal internet passwords. The school rejected the work as unethical before Guzman dropped out.

Philippine investigators are confident that the source of the virus is an apartment owned by Guzman's sister Irene, and both are due to appear before magistrates today. Reonel Ramones, the woman's boyfriend, was arrested last Monday following a raid on their home.

Questioned as to whether Guzman was behind the virus, his lawyer reportedly said: "We can go as far as saying that he did prepare the thesis proposal but ... the knowledge of its contents was not limited to Onel [de Guzman]".

Suspicions about the perpetrator of the virus have now shifted to Michael Buen, another AMA college student and a close friend of Guzman's.

According to reports, both are members of an underground computer group called GRAMMERSoft - a name that appears in the computer code of the Love Bug virus.

Graham Cluely, a spokesman at Sophos, said the anti-virus vendor will pass evidence to the Philippine authorities that Buen had previously written a virus called WM97/Michael-B. One of the effects of this Microsoft Word macro virus is to attempt to print Buen's CV.

The print-out ends with the threat: "Warning: If I don't get a stable job by the end of the month I will release a third virus that will remove all folders in the Primary Hard Disk ..."

Cluely believed the virus creators were motivated by ego. "They may have wanted to steal some passwords and it's likely that they have been much more successful than they ever imagined," he said, adding that they were clearly malicious because the virus overwrote multimedia files.