"The phone number embedded in the detonation page was apparently the home number of John Maxfield (also known as "Cable Pair") a well-known FBI informant and private investigator of the era, whose specialty was computer crime and hackers.Unlike the few Apple viruses that had come before, such as the Elk Cloner virus, that were essentially annoying but did no damage, the Festering Hate series of viruses was extremely destructive, spreading to all system files it could find on the host computer (hard drive, floppy and system memory) and then destroying everything when it could no longer find any uninfected files.