The Turning Worm

The problem with keeping up against viruses is, of course, that they mutate rapidly. Often faster and through wilder vectors than what your defense suite's designed to cope with.

We've dealt with variants of the APEX malware before. While potent when it slips by, it has certain limitations in its search logic -- a tendency to eat itself, is how our data techs described it.

It has since gotten leaner. More efficient. A black-market database leak, courtesy of a digital artist with a poor sense of information security, has somehow combined itself with a latent APEX strain's residual code in a quantum trader's transactions-tracking server.

Worse: it's learned digestion and processing. It has gotten significantly better at reformatting the data it devours into extensions of its processing patterns -- though, of course, its primary symptom is still simple and thorough destruction.

The wreckages it's made of our confidentiality systems have already caused significant setbacks to our internal and public relations.