 Although there are references and message threads about CyberAIDS appearing on Usenet as early as 1985 and 1986, CyberAIDS seems to have attained critical mass in 1987 when it finally spread out of the pirate underground, where the payload was originally attached to cracked software, and hit the mainstream networks of the time and began affecting legitimate users.Festering Hate was the last iteration of the CyberAIDS code-base and seems to have bridged the virus from underground pirate BBS systems to the mainstream, by way of a shareware telecommunications application called Zlink.In fact, the original impression was that Zlink itself was nothing but a Trojan horse that delivered a viral payload.