Chris Pile (programmer)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Chris Pile, born 1969 in Warwickshire, England, was a programmer, notorious in late 1995 as "The Black Baron".

From the mid to late 1980s Pile was programming Z80 code for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. Much of his code was utilitarian in nature, and included the Dr Kode editor/assembler, the Ultra208 high-capacity disk formatter for the ZX Spectrum +3 and software to allow any ZX Spectrum equipped with a VTX5000 modem to access the many on-line Bulletin Board systems (BBS) which were popular at the time. Pile also had several utility programs published in the popular Your Sinclair magazine, these included an ultra high-speed circle routine, and a flood fill tool. Pile was also a semi-regular contributor to the game hacking pages within the magazine.

Around 1990 Pile turned his attention to the newly released SAM Coupé home computer. He produced two highly acclaimed pieces of software for this machine, namely: ProDOS (a CP/M implementation) and, late in the SAM Coupé's life, a very faithful port of the classic game Defender.

In mid-November 1995, he was imprisoned for 18 months after being convicted of writing two PC computer viruses known as SMEG.Pathogen and SMEG.Queeg and the virus polymorphic engine known as SMEG. The viruses and SMEG engine were written sometime between December 1993 and March 1994.

The SMEG engine was produced as an object file which non-programmers could download and trivially link into an existing virus which, in turn, would make the resulting virus polymorphic and much harder to detect using anti-virus software. SMEG was also the first polymorphic engine with the ability to generate random CALL's to randomly generated subroutines within its encryptors. This gave the generated polymorphic code a more realistic appearance. SMEG also used exclusively 8086 machine language instructions, which meant it ran cleanly on any 80x86 based PC.

The Queeg name, as well as some of the virus activation messages, are from the British TV show Red Dwarf.

Towards the late 1990s Pile spent some time as a commercial games programmer, working mainly on the Nintendo Game Boy, SEGA Game Gear and Master System consoles. In late 1997 Pile programmed a PC emulator for the arcade game Asteroids by Atari.

It is unknown if Pile continued to program software after 1999/2000 or, indeed, if he is still actively involved in programming or computers.

[edit] External links

• Article from Crypt Magazine on Pile, 1996
• A general description of the methods behind a polymorph engine, written by Pile under his Black Baron guise.
• Chris Piles' Asteroids emulator for PC's