Female virus writer meets her match

Gigabyte, the female virus writer who made headlines after the release of her .Net-infecting Sharp virus in March, has teamed up with a notorious website defacer.

But website administrators can relax, this time it's for love, not cyber war.

A report in cyber culture magazine Wired tells how the hacker and virus writer became a match made in cyber space.

According to the magazine, Gigabyte and Nostalg1c have only been an item for around a month, but both reckon that their love of malicious code and exploit techniques gives them a strong bond.

The pair seem intent on staying on the right side of the tracks. Eighteen-year-old Gigabyte, a member of the Metaphase virus writing group, claims her creations are purely proof of concept code and not meant to be released into the wild.

The creation of the Sharp virus, which was only the second of its kind to target the .Net platform, is evidence of this.

Twenty-year-old Nostalg1c, however, has been on the wrong side of the law in the past. A founder member of the Global Hell and Team Spl0it defacement crews, Nostalg1c and his buddies were the scourge of webmasters around the globe in 1999 and 2000. But seeing his partners in crime - Mosthated and F0bic - getting caught by the Feds has turned him away from the defacement lifestyle.

While Nostalg1c has kept a fairly low profile outside of Global Hell and Team Spl0it because of his ties to the groups, Gigabyte has been catapulted into the limelight not because of her skills as a virus writer, but because of her gender. The guestbook on her website is busting with proposals from potential suitors along with flames from anti virus advocates condemning her activities.

Although both live in Belgium, it is unlikely that they will end up at the same university, possibly causing a few breaths of relief - Nostalg1c has been quoted as saying the pair form a "deadly combination".

Apparently they have better things to do than cause havoc on the net.