Greetings to my fellow Travellers...
I've been watching and waiting for an opening that I thought I might
be able to put in a useful two cents worth, and here's something I
think I may be able to contribute to.
On Wednesday, Sept 25, Scott Kellogg wrote:
> I may be no computer whiz but I don't think a virus can get to a computer
> that is shut down! Presumably the Imerials would have reserve computers on
> line in case someone did get through with a virus.
Well, no. A virus can't infiltrate a powered down computer. But, it can
infiltrate the common storage facilities that your three onboard ship's
computers share, for instance.
Onboard a ship, you will have information which has to be available to
all systems, a data bank, if you will. Sure, you encounter a virus that
you picked up over a bad Holocrystal of the V7043.6 Space Invaders. It
happens. But the big problem is that the first thing on that devious little
virus's mind is to get itself onto that computer's main storage. Once
there, it's gonna replicate.
Then, of course, any well written virus is gonna write itself into the
boot sector of your main storage. Great. Now let's run with this, shall we.
Maira, your model 9 shipboard computer has been monitoring networking
communications between two rival faction ships. And they know that you
know that they're communicating. You're model 9 is dumping all data
to main storage. Perfect. So they send out a virus affectionately
nicknamed "Lost". Their computers have a routine running that spots
the virus 'cause they know all about this tactic. Your computer has
now stored a malignant little piece of code that when read, maybe
through a common memory sweep, has a code in it that causes the
computer to execute it as a background process. Once that's done,
'Lost' runs around your directory structure looking for your navigation
programs and corrupts them real good so that they work, but all wrong.
So, now your running through the universe without a clue as to where`
you are. By the time you realize, your lost.
Now, your Science officer gets an inkling that you've been
sabotaged, so he runs a listing of processes. Only 24,456 copies of
job 'Lost' running concurrently. So, he shuts down Maira and brings
up Migs, your second model 9. Of course, Migs has to be booted, and
in the process comes across that copy of Lost in the boot sector. Not
to mention, that if they do manage to remove the virus from the boot
sector, its all over common storage anyway. And what of your Nav
programs? They're screwed also.
Can you say Crash and Burn? Yep. Well, actually, if you boot from a
protected backup copy of your operating system, you may get Maira up and
running, but the moment that you access common storage, with all your
shipboard information on it, you come across the virus again. Hope you
got a vaccine program handy. Or, do you want to just WIPE common storage
completely and rebuild from protected backups (That'll probably take you
about two days. Nasty!!). So, sorry Scott. Not quite as simple as all that.
Now, the scenario I ran above is possible today. In say another 5000 years,
imagine the horrible little routines they'll be writing.
Ciao,
Anthony Neal
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Anthony Neal |"Lets bring up the cargo manifest. 2300 laser
[email removed] | pistols, 1600 laser rifles, 1 ATV, 67 suits of
Memorial University Of | combat armor and... What the hell are
Newfoundland | 'tribbles'?"
- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------