Malicious Cryptography: Exposing Cryptovirology

Chapter 1

Through Hacker's Eyes

There is no way to describe the feeling of approaching a computer system to download the data that your Trojan horse has been collecting for days. Your heart begins to race. You look over your shoulder out of instinct and start to have major second thoughts about proceeding. The computer terminal is unoccupied and sits directly in front of you.

Questions plague your thoughts: How many people are capable of finding the cleverly hidden Trojan? More importantly, does anyone in this room know it is there? You ease yourself down into the chair. Glancing to your right you see a student stare at his calculator with a perplexed look on his face. To your left a girl is laughing on her cell phone. If you could shrink yourself into nothing and crawl through the cracks in the machine you would gladly do so. But you are physical and there is nothing you can do about that now. The coast is clear. You reach for your floppy and insert it into the drive. Sheens of sweat glaze over your palms. Why? Because after all, you are returning to the scene of a crime.

Your crime.

Deep down, you rationalize your actions. There is no blood involved, no money is being stolen, and in the end no real harm is being done. . . or is there? The floppy drive begins to spin. In moments it will be over. In moments all of the login/password pairs will be on the disk and you will be hightailing ...