Melissa, Anna Kournikova, ILOVEYOU, MyDoom, Happy99, Sadmind, Code Red, Nimda, Blaster, Sobig, Koobface, Bohmini, Conficker, Zlob - the list goes on.
Their names are legion - and totally ridiculous of course (apart from poor Anna, who could make a tidy living from the lecture circuit on the subject of 'Be Careful What You Wish For'). And they have created more damage, cost, frayed nerves, and possibly strained marital relations than all the world's hucksters, fraudsters, snake-oil salesmen and Ponzi conmen put together.
Computer viruses were conceived with good intentions - in this case by a mathematical genius of Einsteinian proportions called John von Neumann who, in an idle moment with a pencil and some graph paper, designed an idea for a 'universal constructor', which, with some posthumous elaboration, evolved into 'The Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata'.
That is precisely what computer viruses are: codes taking up room in a computer's memory that seek to replicate themselves endlessly.
Von Neumann had great things in mind. This, he believed, was the way to overcome barriers to intensive mining of the asteroid belt.
Lesser minds were not so far-sighted, and names such as 'Creeper' and 'Wabbit' for early self-replication projects in the 1970s signposted the way ahead .
