BKTOJOVR.RVW 940817 "The Tojo Virus", Randall, 1991, 0-8217-3436-9, U$4.95/C$5.95 %A John D. Randall %C 475 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10016 %D 1991 %G 0-8217-3436-9 %I Zebra Books, Kensington Publishing Corp. %O U$4.95/C$5.95 %T "The Tojo Virus" Score one for internal evidence! All the way through this book, I was muttering that the author knew a *lot* about IBM the corporation, IBM sales, IBM demos and PROFS screens. (He hasn't had any better luck than I have with getting typesetters to do screen shots properly, but ...) Lo and behold, the author's note at the end says that he is a former IBM salescritter and manager. In other words, he's a "suit", and wouldn't know technology, high *or* low, if it bit him in the leg. What we have, here, is possibly the precursor to "Terminal Compromise". Published a year before, the plot centres around a diabolical Japanese scheme to refight Pearl Harbour--only on an electronic battlefield. The Yellow Peril set out to insert a virus into the computers of the mighty IGC corporation and bring it to its knees. (Anyone who does not recognize IGC as IBM simply doesn't know what's happening in the computer world.) The author, in his end note, makes a lot of silly suggestions about computer security which basically reduce to the idea that personal computer users will have to adopt the "mainframe mentality". Obviously, this guy is too heavily propagandized to recover. The bad guys set up a blackmail sting costing them (ultimately) four million dollars just to get one password. (Anyone for a little social engineering?) The blackmail operation serves primarily to introduce (the book's term, here) a "high priced slut" who provides wild and steamy sex scenes. Fortunately (or unfortunately), depending upon your taste (or lack thereof), the author has as little imagination in pornography as in technology: most of the sex scenes have little more description than "then wild sex takes place". (This female character, though unsure of what a "file" or a "disk" is, provides vital plot direction by minutely dissecting the technical security weaknesses in the original plan.) The plan is to introduce a virus into the (mainframe) email system. I think. (There is an awful lot of extraneous detail.) The email, whether read or not, will encrypt PC hard disks on a given date. (The bad guys somehow think this is safe because it doesn't do anything illegal.) Once the virus hits, no one can access anything, because everyone uses PCs as terminals. Encrypted PCs can't be booted from floppies. The deadly message contained screens full of ones and zeros--obviously "Assembly language" written by REXX hackers! (REXX, boys and girls, is an interpreted language.) While all of this is going on, a single PC with a dialer program is managing to tie up the entire phone system of huge corporate offices. I am not making this up. (Randall is.) He even gets a standard IBM joke wrong, misquoting "This page intentionally left blank." Ragged plot, inconsistent characters, enough tech to fool those who know even less than Randall. copyright Robert M. Slade, 1994 BKTOJOVR.RVW 940817 ====================== DECUS Canada Communications, Desktop, Education and Security group newsletters Editor and/or reviewer ROBERTS@decus.ca, RSlade@sfu.ca, Rob Slade at 1:153/733 Author "Robert Slade's Guide to Computer Viruses" (Oct. '94) Springer-Verlag