Clinton Haines

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Clinton 'Clint' Haines (born 10 April 1976 - died 10 April 1997 in St Lucia, Queensland, Australia) was an Australian computer hacker. He was also known as Harry McBungus, TaLoN and Terminator-Z.

He attended Ipswich Grammar School and showed exceptional computer skills. He wrote his first computer virus in assembly language using the a86 compiler in the early 1990s and went on to write several more.

He wrote the viruses No Frills, X-Fungus/PuKE, Dudley, Daemaen and 1984 (after reading the book 1984 by George Orwell). No Frills infected the Australian Tax Office and shut down their computers for two days. A copy of the No Frills virus made its way to the network of Brisbane Grammar School and infected the school's entire PC network. As the virus corrupted executables containing internal overlays, large applications were rendered inoperable. This was an unintentional feature of this virus. His virus has also infected the computers of Telstra (then called Australian Telecom) and Suncorp. The 'PuKE' virus was a play on 'NuKE', the name of a North American virus writing syndicate which Haines had a falling out with. He was investigated by the Australian Federal Police in the months after the infection of the Australian Tax Office who Haines commented as being clueless as to the workings of his software. He also made the front page of the Courier-Mail in a full page story titled "I shut down the Tax Office", featuring a large picture of Haines pulling his goate with a cheeky grin. The Dudley virus was a varient of the No Frills code with the text [Oi Dudley!][PuKE] in reference to a friend of Clinton, Mathew Davis who had moved to Canada.

After leaving Ipswich Grammar School, he lost interest in coding and went on to study microbiology at the University of Queensland. He was one of the pioneers in computer hacking and virus-writing in the early 1990s, creating executable based file viruses when bootblock viruses were the norm, and using self-encrypting and polymorphic code to disguise the virus's true nature.

He died from a heroin overdose in 1997, on his twenty-first birthday at a friends house in St Lucia, Brisbane. A computer virus was written in his honour (RIP Terminator-Z by VLAD), and distributed through BBS systems. The virus pays acknowledgement to Haines by placing a message on an infected user's screen. This virus is sometimes referred to as W95/Memorial.