Hey Friends!

I was recently watching a historical documentary about computer security in the late 80’s, the subject of the film was an eleven year old kid who’s virus crashed 1507 machines in a single day (including Wall Street trading systems), and the toll it took on his life afterwards.

I found the documentary absolutely riveting and thought I’d explore the topic in our favorite language.

Hence, Annelid, an Elixir experiment in “evasive, self-healing infrastructure”.

Patient zero is a local Elixir node, it infects the rest of the cluster simply by connecting to it.

It’s designed to keep a low profile while maintaining a presence on every node in the cluster. If an operator manages to kill it, it restarts. If a node is restarted, another node in the cluster re-infects it. As far as I can tell, the only way to properly stop it is to halt the entire cluster.

It doesn’t come with a payload, obviously.

We’re all pretty aware that disterl ports should be firewalled off, cookies shouldn’t be exposed publicly, and eval is a horrible thing, so this isn’t a real security concern in my mind. It’s just a fun toy solely for the amusement of folks on the forum to play with. That being said, please keep it far away from production infrastructure.