Christopher Pile
"The Black Baron", the first person in Britain jailed for writing and spreading computer viruses.
Writing as the Black Baron, Christopher Pile of Plymouth produced the Pathogen and Queeg viruses and, more importantly, SMEG – the Simulated Metamorphic Encryption enGine. SMEG was a polymorphic engine that wrapped the virus body in a freshly generated decryption routine on every infection, leaving signature-based scanners with no fixed byte sequence to look for. He spread his work via bulletin boards, hidden inside innocent-looking programs.
In November 1995 he pleaded guilty to eleven charges under the Computer Misuse Act 1990 and was sentenced to 18 months. The Act had mostly been used against intruders; Pile's case showed it also covered someone who merely wrote the code and let other people run it.