The Ice Box
                               
                                                                
                                                                
>>>[Hoi chummers, hate to be the bearer of bad news, but a bud of
mine got herself toasted last week.  It seems that something
hunted her down and fried her deck.  I thought it was a corp
decker, but when I went after it, I found it wasn't a persona I
was fighting, but rather a construct.

I neutralized the fragger, and picked it apart.  Really
fascinating stuff, but scary.  The author is very egotistical,
and there's traces of the guy's ID throughout the construct.
This ain't ICe, but rather is a smart-frame with movement
abilities, sensors, a self-encryption and mutation ability, a
masking program, defensive and attack capabilities, and a
tracking program.

The tracking program is similar to the trace and report, but
instead it acts like a bloodhound, leading the construct after
the target.

Every decker leaves little footprints, no matter how good he or
she truly is.  These are code fragments that are left after the
decker passes through a node.  They are parts of the persona
chips, whose code is partially placed within the node to
facilitate ease of execution.  The fragments are very minute, and
it is next to impossible to find them, unless you know exactly
were to look.  Apparently, this program does.  Taken singularly,
they are meaningless, but enough of them allow you to begin to
put together a 'picture' of who they belong to.  This is similar
to the techniques used by anti-viral programs of the last
century.  The chance for error is fairly high, about 35-45%, but
even still, it makes one think about covering ones tracks.

The author was some deckhead who lived near Detroit, some old
fragger.  He called it the Ulciscor Strain, which is supposed to
be some form of Latin, meaning revenge or something like that.  I
destroyed the source code, but I couldn't find the backups.  I
can only hope that the fire destroyed them.]<<<
                                  - Epilogue (22:42:49/12-04-52)
                               
                               
                    The Ulciscor Strain
                               
                   Paul Devisser <[p--vi--e] at [twilight.kwnet.on.ca]>
                                Copyright (C) 1992 Paul Devisser
                                            All rights reserved.
                                                                
Note that all articles, unless otherwise specified, are
Copyrighted, with the copyright owned by the respective author.
Paul included his notice in the article, and so I've reproduced
it here. But this in no way indicates that articles without such
a notice are not copyrighted.

                                                                
                                                                
A viral construct much like a smart-frame, with the ability to
move about in the matrix.  It has attack (6), shield (4),
capabilities.  It also can lock-on to a matrix trail, and follow
it until it encounters the cause of the trail.

The ability to track a target is not new.  Trace-and-Report
programs and the variations do it all the time, but they have the
original personas to work with.  This virus is imprinted with a
recording of the persona of the intended target.  It uses this
recording to search the matrix, looking for data trails that bear
a similar imprint.  This is currently beyond what most
corporations are capable of producing, and unless a corp gets
wind of this, it will be a several  years before this becomes
more then an isolated incident.

After finding its target, it will then attack until it destroys
the target, or is defeated.  Before it engages, it will send a
transmission which is encrypted, to a predesignated point.  The
message contains information concerning the constructs current
location, and the fact that it has found its target.  If it
survives it sends another message, in the same manner, that it
has succeeded, and returns to a predesignated point to await
further instructions.

The virus locks on to the BOD persona of the target if
attacking a decker.  Data has a BOD of 1.  The target can resist
by using the EVASION persona.  Again, data has an EVASION of 1.

If the virus follows the trail to a point where the decker left
the matrix, the construct will mark the place, and will continue
to search for a new trail.  If the trail leads into a construct
that the virus cannot follow, search around to try to find a new
trail, and failing that will actually attempt to enter the
construct to find the target.  If it encounters resistance that
it must fight, it will withdraw.

When the virus locks onto a trail, it begins sending updates
back to its origin.  The route by which these are relayed is
complex and very difficult to trace.  In addition, the encryption
scheme is unbreakable without access to a mainframe.