Imagine for a moment the mere oppurtunity to know your fate, receive a billion dollars or cause whomever you admire most to fall deeply in love with you and never deceive your wicked ways. We have all had the creative concepts of such aforementioned theories, however, would you be willing to sacrifice, say your soul? As much as I would enjoy conjuring up a method for benefiting everyone’s personal life from extracting the slight spirit that drives their homo sapien bodies.. I can’t.

However, Mike Bond and George Danezis from Cambridge University have created a wonderful paper on the theory of forming a pact with the devil. The concept is simple, the benefits, possibly enormous, however, the sacrifice is unimagineable for someone such as myself. If I were asked to trade 10% of my overall CPU cycles and processing power to receive $40.00/hour, I would say yes. But this is just a little wicked. The theory is that individuals will sacrifice their own secrets and personal data for the oppurtunity to read and analyze someone elses.

We study malware propagation strategies which exploit not the incompetence or naivety of users, but instead their own greed, malice and short-sightedness. We demonstrate that interactive propagation strategies, for example bribery and blackmail of computer users, are effective mechanisms for malware to survive and entrench, and present an example employing these techniques. We argue that in terms of propagation, there exists a continuum between legitimate applications and pure malware, rather than a quantised scale.

What if you received an email from a co-worker that contained a virus, email coming from JoAnn. The virus immediately informed you, “If you open me and allow me to spread throughout your contacts, I will give you unlimited access for three days to JoAnn’s computer and one other infected associate of your choice.” Would you take the offer? This is the principle behind “Pact with Satan.” A virus that propogates, not automatically through email address contact books, but via the greed of other individuals wanting to know what they shouldn’t about other people.