The creators of the Magic virus were deploying the virus from a free website. So everything was going according to plan when, late last month, hackers took Sen's eda2 code and used it to demand money from unsuspecting victims with a virus called 'Magic.'īut this time, his attempt to break his own code fell flat. When hackers had attempted to use Hidden Tear after Sen released it last August, he successfully swooped in and saved the day. Sen's idea was to leave an exploitable bug in the code of the virus, wait for hackers to use it instead of other available options, and then decrypt victims' files via the so-called “backdoor' that he left in the code. When Turkish computer programmer and Istanbul Bilgi University student Utku Sen created an open-source computer virus called “eda2,” he didn't intend for it to hurt anyone.Įda2, like Sen's previously published ' Hidden Tear,' was created with the intention of tricking amateur hackers (or “script kiddies”) into using it.īoth eda2 and Hidden Tear are a type of malware known as 'ransomware' which encrypts a victim's files, leaving them inaccessible unless the victim pays for the decryption key.

Magic desktop virus