Re: Setting the record straight

From: Brian Jones (balif@seka.nacs.net)
Date: 01/06/97


On Mon, 6 Jan 1997 raven@fred.net wrote:

> Now after giving him another try my other coder found a virus that was implanted
> to crash and destroy the mud. I don't know who put it in but it is out now.

	Such a block of code would better described as a Backdoor, Trojan,
or both. :)

	Now a good virus would be one that would be very well embeded in
the source to make itself hard to find and flow with all of the PULSE's.
Like cleverly assign a variable to a filename, say the pfile in one place.
Then open the variable filename in pulse mobile. The when a zone reset, if
the file is open in the begining, write a couple random characters at
random spots, then in the login procedure, if the file is open and the
characters have been written close the file. Some interesting things to do
would be 

1: Corrupt a small segment of the player file
2: Give a random character who is a pkiller god stats or an item.
3: Turn a random person into lvl_god, esp a person who is evil and pkills
4: Randomly crash the mud
5: Remove a tilde or some other critical character from a .mob .wld file
   so it must be manually scanned and fixed.
6: Turn the login banner into something obscene
7: Have all mobs in the game hit for 1000 damage during one combat round
   (I'm sure that would suprise a few players)

	All this could be triggered by watching for a string entered
either in the game, in the login prompt, a connection from a specific
site.. The features would activate themselves by adding one byte to say
the Liscense aggrement doc. Think how much of a headache you could cause
the imm's by them having to trace through the entire source to find your
cryptic hidden commands. One block of code to do something evil would be
easy to detect. 

	(exits with evil thoughs in his head)

 -----
 ________________________________________________________________
.--Balif@Nacs.Net - LaME Magazine http://www.nacs.net/~balif/lame.
|--Loozers Achieving Mindboggling Eleetness (whurrrrrrrd)--------|
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