@Ed, other than that, though, are there any issues?

Seriously, your note reminded me of those virus scare SPAMs that we used to get 
back in the nineties: "Bill Gates says this is the worst virus ever. It will 
totally destroy your hard drive ..."

Charles


-----Original Message-----
From: IBM Mainframe Assembler List [mailto:[email protected]] On 
Behalf Of Ed Jaffe
Sent: Saturday, October 30, 2021 12:29 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: A question about an Authorizing PC Service Routine

On 10/30/2021 11:50 AM, Charles Mills wrote:
> The general term for this sort of thing is "magic PC routine."
>
> If you have one installed then your system is potentially toast.

Unless the system runs under z/VM, a "magic" SVC or PC on any system 
(even a sandbox) is a Trojan Horse some bad actor can use to destroy all 
of your backups, wipe out Track Zero on every single DASD volume you own 
-- including those are offline/undefined to the current system and in 
use by other, more important systems such as "production" sharing the 
same DASD arrays, and then crash all connected systems so they'll never 
come back up again.

Various software vendors provide tooling that can detect this sort of 
thing. For example, IBM's Authorized Code Scanner:

https://www.ibm.com/common/ssi/cgi-bin/ssialias?infotype=AN&subtype=CA&htmlfid=897/ENUS220-225&appname=USN

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