Because many(NOT ALL)programmers like back doors and have no morals.
Also many people hire contract or mercenary programmers and they leave back doors and the folks that hire them don't know.
Knowledge is power and many people would use any "intelligence" they could gather this way, and some of them may just like surfing other people's hard drives.
I think many programmers are kids that never grow up. Your system, when back doored, becomes one more thing for their mental ego "empire".
And then there is Mr Gates, a whole different enchalada.
Look, older Mamba demo versions like a momba lite I had, well, if you clicked on the right screen, suddenly became partially functional without a serial number. And they were buggy. I found it by accident before buying my old copy of lite, So if you have a virtual environment where you can monitor variables, and unlimited low cost Chinese labor with time to play, you just found a back door from that bug. All you would then have to do is hack the declare statement for that variable to true or something like that.
Then once you have that, find a splash screen or some other consistant function and add a call to your virus code there.
I'm no windows programmer, I do not and would not have the tools and knowledge to do it, but I imagine it would be that simple.
remember many governments, including China, ordered microsoft to give them the source code to Windows, this means they know about any internal debugging tools or back doors, and you know that data had to leak.
There may even be multiple versions out there, some hacked, some viral, some combination of both.
You never can tell with programmers, what they will do.
For the record, I never told anybody before now about that little bug, and I registered two legit copies. Pretty much a waste of 175$ as light was not in the upgrade path
Steve
Last edited by mixedgas; 05-11-2009 at 06:10.
Qui habet Christos, habet Vitam!
I should have rented the space under my name for advertising.
When I still could have...