Using her laptop, an infamous hacker named “Filomilator” has inserted a virus into a massive company’s network whose campus spreads for miles. The virus is supposed to move from one computer to another using their IPs by copying and deleting its previous version while collecting vital information from every single computer in the company, ultimately returning back to the hacker. The hacker is faced with the following two problems:
• The virus can never re-enter a computer it stole info from, as the firewall will catch up on the hack.
• She needs the virus to return to her ASAP but has no idea about the distances between the computers.
She thought about using an untraceable probing script which could ping all the computers from all the computers, but the hacker is struggling to come up with an idea about how to find an approximate solution to her virus path optimization problem.
(The network’s ping utility is used to a) test the reachability of a host on an Internet Protocol network and b) measure the round-trip time for messages sent from the originating host to a destination computer that are echoed back to the source.)
