Identity
The identity of the person behind the pseudonym has never been ascertained. However, a lot can be inferred via various details of the viruses. Additionally, Dark Avenger was the subject of an interview conducted by Sarah Gordon which contains revealing information. Some of Dark Avenger's contemporaries, mainly Vesselin Bontchev, have also shed light on his potential identity.
If Dark Avenger is to be tied with a certain name, there are two major candidates. One is Vesselin Bontchev himself, who may have deceptively posed as "Dark Avenger" for the sake of self-promotion. The other is Todor Todorov. Todor Todorov was a student of the Bulgarian National School of Mathematics who took particular interest in programming viruses during his school days, and even hosted his own BBS for the purpose of sharing them. Anton Ivanov, a schoolmate and friend of Todorov's, has ambiguously hinted at the possibility of Todorov being Dark Avenger.
Dark Avenger may have been a fan of heavy metal music. The string Eddie lives...somewhere in time, which the virus outputs, draws attention. Eddie the Head is the name of the mascot of the heavy metal band Iron Maiden. Additionally, Somewhere in Time is the name of the band's sixth album. Furthermore, in his interview with Sarah Gordon, Dark Avenger states that he named himself after "an old song"; Manowar (also a heavy metal band) have a song called Dark Avenger, on their debut album.
Read more about this topic: Dark Avenger
Famous quotes containing the word identity:
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—Arlie Hochschild (20th century)
“Unlike Boswell, whose Journals record a long and unrewarded search for a self, Johnson possessed a formidable one. His life in London—he arrived twenty-five years earlier than Boswell—turned out to be a long defense of the values of Augustan humanism against the pressures of other possibilities. In contrast to Boswell, Johnson possesses an identity not because he has gone in search of one, but because of his allegiance to a set of assumptions that he regards as objectively true.”
—Jeffrey Hart (b. 1930)
“Adultery is the vice of equivocation.
It is not marriage but a mockery of it, a merging that mixes love and dread together like jackstraws. There is no understanding of contentment in adultery.... You belong to each other in what together you’ve made of a third identity that almost immediately cancels your own. There is a law in art that proves it. Two colors are proven complimentary only when forming that most desolate of all colors—neutral gray.”
—Alexander Theroux (b. 1940)