A Curious Code
02 Jun 2021Iridium Nova
During the arduous process of attempting to get my ship functional again, I came across something rather interesting: a partially-deleted file. It seems the virus, which I nicknamed "Hunter" was attempting to remove all copies of this file, across the network. It had started to delete the file when, strangely enough, another virus triggered a system failure and caused a total crash of my CobraOS. At the time, I had no idea what had happened. As you can imagine, I was pretty busy hurling some of my best obscenities at my console during this process. However, it seems the second virus may have actually provided me with a bit of an opportunity. Fortunately, my ship had been landed on a planet at the time since I figured that was safer than trying to wrestle with the bounty networks while flying. If it hadn't been landed, I might have had to execute an emergency lithobraking. Take it from me, those are never fun.Anyway, when I finally managed to get the systems to reboot, I had to do it in factory reset mode, which effectively wiped all OS data from the system, including the infected system files, and restored the OS from factory backup. Irritated at the minor loss of some personal data (which I could easily redownload off the GalNet once my network connections were restored), I was at least now able to use the system without the viruses interfering. That was when I began this investigation, alongside fighting with the ever elusive GalNet servers to redownload my flight clearance so the damn ship will let me actually fly it.
Anyway, back to the interesting bit. When the factory reboot quarantined the remaining viruses, it provided a report to me - that's standard functionality. That was when I noticed the odd timing of this mysterious second virus, which I have nicknamed "Interloper". It appeared that Interloper, which had been piggybacked on Hunter, did exactly what it was supposed to do - it prevented Hunter from erasing this mystery file (even if it had to crash my system to do it). But why? The answer may lie in the file itself (makes sense anyway), but I won't be able to find out until my data recovery system is able to restore whatever's left of it. In the meantime, I did some poking around at the viruses, since I had time between server shenanigans. Now, typically viruses will mask their access tracebacks with spoofed data, making it impossible to figure out where they came from. Attempting to track them with this data will lead in a pointless loop, because the data's fake. That was certainly the case with Hunter, but not with Interloper. Interloper's traceback points clearly to a server with the designation "Hypnos16_Ariel". Whoever created this virus wanted to be found. But a mysterious server designation is just one piece of a puzzle. I'm going to need to do some more digging...
Once I get spaceborne again.