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so what did you find?” Frydman asked.
    “A rogue piece of code on all the PCs in my division. It’s called Becky22. It doesn’t seem malicious. Once a user stops working for more than five minutes, the program starts utilizing one hundred percent of the PCs CPU.” He paused for effect. “When the user returns to his workstation, Becky22 goes into the background and uses no resources.”
    Frydman opened a window on his PC and scanned the active applications. At the bottom of the list, using no CPU or memory, a program called Becky22 was sitting dormant.
    “Yes, I’ve got it too. What does it do?” Frydman asked.
    “I have no idea sir. I’ve contacted our antivirus vendor to build us a removal tool. They’ll probably be able to shed some more light on the payload and functioning of the virus.”
    “OK, I need the info ASAP,” Frydman said.
    “Yes, sir,” Glist answered and hung up.
    “Becky22, we meet again,” Frydman whispered.

     

The following morning Eric Glist knocked on Frydman’s door. He entered, greeted Frydman, and slapped a wad of papers on Frydman’s desk. He was a short, spectacled guy, somewhat overweight. He had grown his beard in a short goatee, the way the hacker types usually did. Frydman was surprised that the man wasn’t sporting a ponytail at the back of his balding head.
    Frydman pulled the papers closer. “Your findings?” he asked.
    “Yes, sir.”  
    Frydman waved him to a chair. “Summarize it.”
    Glist sat, took a pen from his breast pocket, and started clicking.
    “I’m not sure where to start.” He shot Frydman a perplexed look. “It isn’t a virus in the true sense of the word; it doesn’t cause any damage, per se. I would call it a considerate rogue application.”
    Frydman nodded.
    “It doesn’t interfere with your work, and it limits its data usage to five megs per day, as long as you don’t interfere with it.” Glist clicked his pen as he spoke.
    “Please stop that,” Frydman said with a scowl. “So what does it do?”  
    Glist shrugged. “It searches. The variables are encoded. I managed to get the hexadecimal values, but I haven’t transcribed them yet.”
    “Give them to me,” Frydman said and opened his laptop. He opened a hex transcription application and looked up. “Go.”  
    Glist read random alphanumeric combinations. Frydman nodded. He continued and read out several more strings of characters.
    “Perreira,” Frydman read out. “Next one.”
    Glist read out the next sequence of strings.
    “OK, that one I’ve heard of. It says Callahan.” His fingers rattled over his keyboard. He searched the staff database and came up with six hits. His chair creaked as he leaned back. “I remember him, he was a senior field agent who had turned against us.” He folded his hands over his stomach “A Mossad agent, Bruce Bryden, terminated him.”
    “Well, those were the variables that pop up the most. I found some variances on these names as well,” Glist said.
    “So where is it searching?” Frydman asked.
    Glist pursed his lips. “Here it gets interesting. On each and every port available on all communications protocols.”
    “English, Glist.”
    Glist looked up and smiled an apology. “Oh, sorry. It looks everywhere on a PC or server. It uses all the languages and software the machine has available. Internet, email, all the software on the PC,” he said scratching his chin. “This includes software controlling closed-circuit TV cameras, databases, anything you can think of, sir.”
    “And where does it save the results?” Frydman asked.
    “Everywhere.” Glist grinned. “It uses meager amounts of storage space on every system it is installed on and disperses the information over the entire range of systems.”
    Frydman nodded. “What is the infection ratio?”
    “A guess?”
    Frydman nodded again.
    “Forty million. Give or take.”
    Frydman frowned. “Anything else?”
    “Yes, it’s polymorphic.”
    “What makes you think