"Lazarevich, Alexander - The Worm - part 1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lazarevich Alexander)

years he had been hacking away at it on his small PC with a
mere 128 KB of random-access memory, assembling on this drop
of a memory the program that was destined to conquer the
oceans of memory contained in the huge supercomputers of the
entire world. He put the phone receiver on the modem and
typed: 'PRNCDKNS'. The old floppy disk drive screaked and
slowly began reading. Soon the acoustic modem started its
squeak and twitter: the worm, still residing in the home
computer, began its attempts to fit a key to the electronic
lock of his first victim. For a start, John set the worm up
with a phone list of a dozen of poorly guarded databanks.
Quite sufficient for an initial setup, and in the future,
when the worm exhausted the list, it would have to provide
for itself by intercepting phone calls to other users.

The twitter abruptly stopped - the worm had failed to
pass through the security barriers. The sound resumed in
half a second - the worm went on to the next phone number in
the list - and, suddenly, there was a new silence. "Failure
again?" John's heart sank, but at that very moment he heard
a renewed screaking of the drive. That could mean only one
thing: the worm's "head" had passed the security, and now,
operating from the remote end of the line, it was
downloading its "tail" from John's diskette. For another ten
seconds the red light on the drive was on and one could hear
the muted clicks of the heads moving. Then the drive went
dead, but the modem twittered on for two more seconds. And
then there was total silence. The worm was gone.

The very thought of what was to happen next gave John
the creeps. Somewhere over there, on the other end of the
line, the computers with enormous memories and huge storage
devices were installed. The cables and satellite channels of
unbelievable throughput link them with other giant computers
all over the world. Taken all together, they make up an
information space, almost as infinite as the universe, and
as dangerous as jungle. From now on his worm was to live in
this jungle. He would be the big game for anti-virus
programs and he would have to fight through the multiple
security barriers that divide this space up.

In order to survive, it would have to actively breed,
filling up all the free memory in the infiltrated computer
with copies of itself, just as many other worms do. The
novelty introduced by John Hacker was that most of these
copies were not to be quite identical to the original one.
Each copy would be a somewhat random variation on the
previous one and some of them might prove to be fitter for
survival in the 'computer jungle' than others. It would be
these specimens that would worm their way into new data