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Doomsday Scenario

I always wondered what would happen if someone who really knew what they were doing created a cross platform polymorphic virus (admittedly not easy to do) that was fairly benign, except it very gradually corrupted data. Just in minor ways. A character substitution here and there, change random digits in phone numbers, addresses, ssn's, account numbers. Maybe not the immediate data, but documents and data that hadn't been accessed in a while. So it might not be noticed right away and if it was random enough could be dismissed as a system problem. The current batch of viri tend to make a lot of noise when infecting systems. So let's say this one was more stealthy and didn't generate a lot of network noise on particular ports (ala Blaster) and didn't blast mass emailings. Just here and there. No back doors, no keyboard loggers, no running home to momma server. The user never even knows it's there.

Backing up corrupt data would only compound the problem. And if it could go undetected long enough it could undermine data integrity. All the hardware and off-site backup in the world isn't going to mean anything if you can't trust the numbers. It would be chaos.

Just a thought.

Posted by: Chad_z   Posted on: 01/28/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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