Time-bomb

As the name suggests, a piece of hidden program code designed to run at some time in the future, causing damage to, or loss of, the computer system. Time bombs are less sophisticated than Logic Bombs, being concerned only with the system date, rather than some specific event. Unless the date is changed, or the code removed, the Bomb will go off on a specific date, come what may.

A partial defence against such code is frequent backup of data. There is little to be gained by increasing the frequency of applications backup since the coded will be contained within these copies as well. Data from mission critical application should be backed up daily, if not actually mirrored in real time.