Patrick Ahlbrecht wrote in a message to David Chord:
[Trojans]
[Please note that I am against the destruction of most peoples data. There 
are a few cases where I can happily accept data being destroyed, eg kiddy 
porn or one or two certain people (only one comes to mind at the moment)]
DC>Hows about something like one I picked up and used for a while before
DC>figuring it out? It was this nice little undelete directory. Unlike
DC>MS-DOS's undelete, it had a text-GUI and also undeleted
DC>directories. But on
DC>occaision, things went missing and were to corrupted to undelete. I
 PA> Well, that I would put under "destroing data" along with "format
 PA> C:". It's both the same only on a different level of damage ;).
Well, physical damage maybe. But how about the sheer frustration of trying to 
restore data? Sure, if a drive's formatted all data is probably lost, but at 
lest you *know* it's gone and don't waste time and whetever else trying to 
restore it. If it's only partially gone (but the drive would require a 
format, but you don't want to) it's so much more painfull. (That's why I'll 
never release anything like that, I've been through it myself. Well, ok, 
maybe *one* person would get something like that if I could, but it'd be 
kinda obvious as the program would be set up to  make sure it was that 
persons system).
DC>Or hows about another suspected trojan/virus activity on my DOS system -
DC>redirecting mail for one user to another user, or something that causes
DC>minor errors/changes to the way DOS works. Whereas a format and re-install
DC>me be the best, easiest way to do something, most people will try to
DC>salvage data. I spent 12 hours one day at a friends place trying to
DC>recover a slowly corrupting disk, reboot to clean floppy, FDISK and 
DC>format HDD's, and re-install from scratch was the only way to fix 
DC>things - no virus scanner would pick anything up either..
 PA> But against this consider the fun of able to intercept email or
 PA> accessing any ftp server on the internet for free. This I would
 PA> consider to be real damage. 
You don't need Virii to do that, you just need to have a system like Xtra in 
NZ, which is notorius for massive security holes that you could drive an 
oil-tanker through sideways.
 PA> Just making a system stop working is (IMO) childs play. Too 
 PA> simple, too senseless, too obvisous.
Exactly. If you're gonna do it, do it in a way that causes pain.
DC>Hmm, something that randomly changes a character in a .CFG file, or
DC>detects and alters whole path lines in a .cfg file - now that would 
DC>be cruel!
 PA> It would be cruel, but would it also be fun (or even best profit
 PA> ;>) ? I mean if you do this to a "friend" of yours you would
 PA> probaply not get any kind of feedback, right ? But a trojan on any
 PA> kind of big server which doesn't do much more than opnening a
 PA> backdoor to the system for you ... can be quite satisfieng wouldn't
 PA> you agree (as well as it is satisfieng for a virus author to hear
 PA> in the News how widespread his virus is by now).
:-) I wouldn't find any satisfaction in that personally. I tend to be 
mindfull of innocent people who get hurt by my actions. But if I have a 
target..
Now, if only there was a way to ignore Write protection on IBM floppies. 
Imagine getting something *nasty* into someone's clean boot disk :-) 
Cya..
Dave
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