Shareware Documentation: Vesselin Bontchev

Vesselin Bontchev was born on 05 December, 1960 in Varna, Bulgaria. He graduated from the Technical University of Sofia in 1985 with an M.Sc. in computer science. After his graduation, worked one year for the Technical University of Sofia, Laboratory for Microprocessors and Microcomputers. During the period 1987-1990 worked as a research associate for the Institute of Industrial Cybernetics and Robotics at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, building expert systems.

In 1988 he became interested in computer viruses and soon afterwards his freeware anti-virus programs were the most popular in Bulgaria. In 1990 he became the director of the Laboratory of Computer Virology at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences - a laboratory created mainly due to his efforts. Since 1991 he has been working on his Ph.D. thesis at the Virus Test Center in the University of Hamburg, Germany.

He is the Bulgarian representative in IFIP's TC-11 (Computer Security). He is also a founding member of CARO (the Computer Anti-virus Researchers' Organization), a founding member of VSI (the Virus Security Institute), and a member of EICAR (the European Institute for Computer Anti-virus Research).

His main fields of interest include computer viruses, computer security, integrity and data protection, encryption, number theory. He is not married, and he likes cats and dogs.

He has authored numerous articles about computer viruses and computers in general in the Bulgarian computer-related magazine "Komputar za vas" ("Computer for you"). He is an active participant of the electronic forum Virus-L/comp.virus, which is dedicated to discussions about computer viruses. He is author of several papers in English, most of which can be obtained via anonymous ftp from ftp.informatik.uni-hamburg.de, in the directory /pub/virus/texts/viruses. These papers include:

• "The Bulgarian and Soviet Virus Factories", Proc. 1st Int. Virus Bull. Conf., 1991, pp. 11-25.
• "Possible Attacks Against Integrity Programs and How to Prevent Them", Proc. 2nd Int. Virus Bull. Conf., 1992, pp. 131-141.
• "MtE Detection Tests", Virus News Int., January 1993, pp. 26-34.
• "Analysis and Maintnance of a Clean Virus Library", Proc. 3rd Int. Virus Bull. Conf., 1993, pp. 77-89.
• "Future Trends in Virus Writing", 4th Int. Virus Bull. Conf., 1994, pp. 65-82.
• "Are 'Good' Computer Viruses Still a Bad Idea?", Proc. EICAR'94 Conf., pp. 25-47.

Mr. Bontchev's address at Frisk Software is [email protected]