After 33 years, Bernardo Quintero decided it was time to find the person who changed his life — the anonymous programmer who created a computer virus that had infected his university decades earlier.

Rather than amateurs working out of their parents' basement, malware creators are often part of an underworld of criminal gang, or working directly for a foreign government or intelligence agency.

Computer virus, according to Lexico, is "a piece of code which is capable of copying itself and typically has a detrimental ...