Scientists, be on guard … ET might be a malicious hacker
By ET
Long time no posts. Here is something fun and new:
Scientists, be on guard … ET might be a malicious hacker
In the next issue of the journal Acta Astronautica, Richard Carrigan, a particle physicist at the US Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois suggests that SETI@Home’s data may contain virus and cause problems for people running the SETI@Home client.
This is interesting, but I guess Mr. Carrigan does not know too much about the architecture of modern computers. To cause a serious problem for people (or steal information from these computers, as implied in the article), the aliens really need to be very good at programming for Microsoft Windows, and know a lot about the underlying hardware running the OS. Back in the early 1990’s, I got my first computer, and I spent a lot of time cracking DOS programs. The tools I used are PCTOOLS (I guess it was produced by a competitor of NortonTools), and SoftICE. I use these tools to reverse engineer programs and I literally collected samples of virus programs, and learns a lot about hacking and propogating programs among computers. 
I learned assembly language to write small programs and these techniques all paid off later when I wanted to
- decrypt some encoded files
- localize English version softwares to Chinese versions
- find a quick cheat to finish some very hard computer games
- recovering lost data from a hard drive failure
- …
Oops, off topic again. Back to the article, if the aliens have a way to sneak code into these signals and contaminate the SETI clients, and then sends information back to the space in some way, they do not really need to take the trouble in the first place. Why not just intercept the information transmitted on earth directly?
