Subject: "The Tojo Virus" by Randall

From: [email-masked] (Rob Slade)
Date: Mon, 7 Nov 1994 18:51:01 GMT

"The Tojo Virus", Randall, 1991, 0-8217-3436-9, U$4.95/C$5.95

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.

%A   Randall, John D. 
%T   The Tojo Virus
%I   Zebra Books
%C   New York
%D   1991
%G   0-8217-3436-9
%O   USD4.95/CAD5.95

copyright Robert M. Slade, 1994   BKTOJOVR.RVW  940817
 
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