Trapdoors and logic bombs

Taking a break to set my fear aside while reading this NYT review of former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke’s new book, I was reminded of how much I enjoy the language of hacking:

North Korea is suspected of being behind the cyberattacks of July 2009 that took down the Web servers of the Treasury, Secret Service, Federal Trade Commission and Transportation Department and is thought to have placed “trapdoors” — code that allows hackers future access to a network — on computer networks on at least two continents.

Trapdoors are just one device that rival nation states and cyberterrorists can use. There are also “logic bombs” (code that can set off malicious functions when triggered), Distributed Denial of Service (D.D.O.S.) attacks (in which a site or server is flooded with more requests for data than it can process), and foreign-manufactured software and hardware that might have been tampered with before being shipped to the States.

For more — including rock phish, flip buttons, and of course, Trojan horses — consult Wikipedia’s “malware” category page.