Quick Facts
Biography
Bernd Fix (born 19 March 1962 in Wittingen, Lower Saxony) is a German hacker and computer security expert.
Biography
After final secondary-school examination from Gymnasium Hankensbüttel in 1981, Bernd Fix studied Astrophysics and Philosophy at the universities of Göttingen and Heidelberg. He received his diplom for a work in the field of theoretical astrophysics in 1989.
From 1987 to 1989 Fix was one of the spokespersons for the Chaos Computer Club and author for the "Hacker Bible 2".
After the death of his friend Wau Holland (co-founder of the Chaos Computer Club) in 2001 Fix helped to establish the Wau Holland Foundation and serves as a founding member of the Board of Directors ever since.
From 1998 Fix was living and working in Switzerland; he moved to Berlin in 2014.
According to an interview from 2011, he got fired from his job at SIX Financial Information because of the foundation's support for Wikileaks.
Work
In 1986 Fix joined the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) in Hamburg and started to work on computer security issues, focussing on computer virus research. He published a first demo virus (Rushhour) in autumn 1986 in the Datenschleuder #17, the hacker magazine edited by the CCC. He also contributed results of his research to the book "Computer Viruses" by Ralf Burger.
In 1987 he devised a method to neutralize the Vienna Virus; this event marks the first documented antivirus software ever written.
Fix is also the author of several research viruses; among them the VP370 virus for IBM mainframe computers. The VP370 source code was allegedly stolen by the Bundesnachrichtendienst (Federal Intelligence Service in Germany) in 1988 to be used in attacks against East Block and NATO mainframe computer systems in the so-called "Project Rahab".