Malware history was: Spectre & Meltdown

[Charles Anthony]

On Tue, Jan 16, 2018 at 4:27 PM, Sam O'nella via cctalk <
cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:

> Enjoying the virus/malware history as its always interesting to see what
> people thought. Tricks, boredom, etc cause interesting results.
> For punch cards i thought someone was going to mention punching all the
> holes and jamming the reader. I'm not sure if thats real but heard some
> folks had to check their opcodes or it could potentially lead to that or
> flimsy card integrity if not.
> Did anyone here ever see animal or other shared system malware? Animal was
> just a nondestructive trojan (other than potential to take up disk space)
> but interesting that someone would run a program that appeared unexpected
> in their home folder.
> -------- Original message --------
> (I'm unaware of any punch-card attacks, but trojans were possible when
> people used prior subroutines)
>

For CDC 6000 SCOPE, the second card in the job deck was
'ACCOUNT,name,password' (or something like that; it was a long time ago).
In a corner of the keypunch room was a large card recycling bin right next
to a card sorter. One would set the card sorter to pull out cards that had
an 'A' in column one, and shovel cards out of the bin into card sorter and
end up with a tidy pile of user accounts and passwords, Or so I've heard.

-- Charles