Response is from the Crypt Newsletter.

http://www.soci.niu.edu/~crypt/other/blitz.htm

>  "In a significant Internet breakthrough that could enhance electronic
> commerce and protect sensitive corporate and government data, computer
> scientists have developed a new virus that automatically launches a
> lethal counter offensive against hackers."

Written in the pseudo-authoritative tone that's become the watermark of
corporate exaggeration, the above blurb came in over the electronic
transom via the Business Newswire on May 6.

It makes the assumption that most Americans -- including magazine
editors -- are certified ninnies fresh from the Roman province of
Paphlagonia, where the populace gained the reputation of extreme
stupidity, ready to swallow even the grossest delusion.

The Business Newswire press release breathlessly continued, ". . . a
growing echelon of chief technology officers are likening the stealthy,
anti-hacker virus to the digital equivalent of Star Wars technology:
once a computer server detects an attack on its security it launches a
killer virus that knocks out the computer on the other end by destroying
both software and hardware." 

The miraculous software is called a "Blitzkrieg server."

Alert readers of Crypt Newsletter will note the conflation of two myths
in the sales pitch: The computer virus that destroys hardware and . . .
Star Wars, which existed only on paper.

The Business Newswire release injected a good amount of phlogiston into
the mix, attributing quotes to an editor named Clarence A. Robinson of
Signal magazine, who stated for the hype machine, "This has profound
implications for the Internet . . . [Many are] worried a hacker will
someday succeed in stealing or destroying sensitive data . . . missile
silo locations, that kind of stuff. But this new nonlinear algorithm
means a successful penetration could be a hacker's worst nightmare."

However, the real gems are found in the May issue of Signal magazine,
AFCEA's journal for information systems workers.

In an article on the "Blitzkrieg server," Robinson combines ferociously
impenetrable techno-gobble, a loaded wheelbarrow of anonymous sources
and a doomsday conspiracy of unnamed Japanese and American hackers
thwarted by "Blitzkrieg."

". . . the Blitzkrieg server is a self-programmed, fault-immune,
ubiquitous virus-like system," he writes.

Developed by a Santa Fe, New Mexico, scientist named Larry Wood,
Blitzkrieg is a product of the (and Crypt Newsletter is not making this
up) Network Waffen Und Munistionsfabriken [sic] Group.

Robinson quotes an unnamed (of course, it always must be this way) CIA
"information security specialist" who said the Blitzkrieg server's
"digital life form" was "potentially more dangerous than nuclear
weapons." Another yahoo, this one a "law enforcement agent" of equally
nebulous origin, is called upon to state for the record that
"[Blitzkrieg]" is a computer virus with an attitude."

Scientist Wood is credited with forming an "advanced machine
intelligence information warfare group" used to solve "intractable"
information warfare problems at DoD.

For Signal, Wood claimed that Blitzkrieg had been responsible for
determining "Japanese nationals," in cooperation with the "2600
international hacker group," were about to attack U.S. corporations and
state government offices in California.

Blitzkrieg thwarted the Japanese attack after "thousands" of Americans
and "hundreds" of corporations were affected.

The State Department declined to file a protest or notify the media, the
Signal article indicates.

And now, lest your attention be wandering, comes the really good part.

Apparently, the "Blitzkrieg server" is powered by "self-programmed
adaptive automatacapsids--variable length string transformation rules."

"When examined on an individual basis, no automatacapsid in and of
itself has any meaning," said Wood for Signal. "The automatacapsid only
has value in the context of the distributed Blitzkrieg server network
collective . . . the adaptive automatacapsids, like fragments of a
living virus without a host cell, transform one another and data, and
they spontaneously generate or regenerate new automatacapsids to meet
every conceivable complex data analysis need."

Hold it. Just a little further. Crypt Newsletter is not done yet.

Wood goes on to say to Signal that his "automatacapsids" make the
"Blitzkrieg server" invincible. And they are dependent on another Wood
discovery -- the "unified general equation of motion -- or UGEM."

Readers are informed the Wood Unified General Equation of Motion has
something to do with the control of complexity and all organization in
nature. So Blitzkrieg, the scientist claimed in Signal, is "the first
true virus-like collective digital life form."

All of this material is, of course, hooked to a sales pitch by a company
called The FutureVision Group.

Ultimately, all the fantastic lore is aimed at getting the interested
investor or potential buyer to a high tech conference in Washington,
D.C., in June in which the "Blitzkrieg server" will be used to "simulate
a computer attack that disables a defense agency by making it impossible
to launch any missiles."


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Notes: For those readers with an excessively dry sense of humor Crypt
Newsletter suggests much of this particular story seems accidentally
cloned from "Killswitch," an episode of The X-Files that aired earlier
this television season. In "Killswitch," a group of computer scientists,
one from Santa Fe, created the first digital life form -- a series of
"concatenated automata viruses." Scully and Mulder, along with the
bumbling editors of Lone Gunman magazine, tracked the intelligent
software to a crumbling trailer filled with computer hardware parked in
the woods near Fairfax, Virginia. The original Business Newswire from
May 6 was datelined -- Fairfax.