Could Zwandas show up in your company’s microcomputer—not just mainframes? Perhaps. It’s no less likely than the micro case mentioned earlier in which the bookkeeper was paying bogus bills from his relatives’ firms.
Of course, in the case of a micro, the trouble probably will be not in the way the program is written but in how it’s set. Most micros, after all, use off-the-shelf software.
Superzapping
It’s named after the “superzap” program used on some large IBM computers.
“Superzap” is known among the pros as a break-glass program, the kind you use in emergencies to change or divulge the computer’s contents. It can bypass all security controls. You can also think of superzapping another way. The computer is a high-rise building, and this program is a master key to all the apartments or offices inside. Pity the building manager if a thief can counterfeit the key.
Donn Parker, the source of those comparisons, says a New Jersey bank lost $128,000 to superzaps.
The crook was none other than the bank’s manager of computer operations. He first superzapped legitimately to change errors in accounts as his superiors asked. The main program wasn’t working—hence, the superzapping. The bank was upgrading its computer system, the glitches kept piling up, and the operations manager zapped again and again, discovering the joys of ignoring the normal controls. The usual electronic logs and journals just didn’t show his actions.
So, he decided, why not zap away[away] the barriers to shifting the money to the accounts of three friends?
The bank learned of the crime only after a customer saw that his own money wasn’t adding up right.
Superzaps like this, of course, are simply special breeds of Trojan horses, just as the salami tricks can be. Like the horses, the zaps aren’t so much a micro crime now. They’re more of a mini and mainframe one, but watch out for the future when garden-variety crooks are more learned and micros are more like the bigger computers.