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Sockets de Troie Author Repents?
Saturday, 20 February 1999
Last December, my experience with an exchange of
email with Carl-Fredrik Neikter, the creator of NetBus, demonstrated what I had naturally suspected; that this
programmer of a widely-abused trojan was not truly personally
concerned about the incalculable damage his work had facilitated.
Technically clever, remote-admin trojans have proliferated and have become the cause of intrusions into privacy and loss of data and peace of mind on an unprecedented scale over the past year or so. The authors of some of these rather admirable (but diabolical) tools have gained considerable notoriety.
One such author, known to me only by his pseudonym of JC`zic, created the French-language trojan Sockets de Troie, which like NetBus, pre-dated the better-known Back Orifice.
Today I happened upon his website while in search of related information, and was surprised to see it greatly changed. The trojan itself is no longer in evidence, and an apologetic message accompanies an offering of "information and protections" which apparently serve as countermeasures against the trojan.
As a daily witness to the ravages of these tools in the hands of tens of thousands of irresponsible mental midgets planetwide, I am reluctant to grant their creators much credit for anything but a measure of technical skill. So I am admittedly surprised by the tone JC`zic has adopted.
With some effort (I don't speak French), I translated JC`zic's essay, and I present it here in English with its links intact. It would appear he is sincere in his distaste for others' abuse.
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