Icebreakers are programs/viruses, usually illegal, that are designed to automatically neutralize the ICE defenses within the matrix.
The first icebreakers were the Mole generation of computer viruses developed by the USA government; the Mole IX virus, with a protytpe cyberspace deck where used in the Screaming Fist operation of The War against the Kirensk computer nexus. This heralded the beginning of the Icebreaker technology.
Function[]
Some "icebreakers" are designed to automatically strobe and shift on the "surface" of an ICE (even with real-time coding minor adjustments) while the user follows it. As the icebreaker affects and dissolves the surface of an ICE, translucent planes of color shuffle. Sometimes the image of an ICE dissolving is like "a tape of a prefab building" in reverse and high-speed.
An icebreaker also can fake itself to be recognized as legitimate data in order to make the "gates" of an ICE wall to open. Some subprograms of the icebreaker might "peel off" as it moves away to stay with the gate in order to fend of the true legitimate data when it arrives.
When an intrusion operation is completed, more sophisticated icebreakers can "reknit" the dissolved ICE on their way out and fill up holes so as to cover their tracks.
Glitch systems[]
Glitch systems are codes that form part of an icebreaker. They are cybernetic virus analogs, constantly self-replicating and mutating in unison, subverting and absorbing the ICE. The glitch systems of the Russian program have the form of light, translucent razors spinning out of their source tumbling away and infecting the fabric of an ICE, melting and dissolving it. Such systems can gobble distress calls of an attacked system.
Slow virus[]
Slow viruses are a more advanced type of icebreaker. Ideas about a slow virus existed since the time of Dixie Flatline, but it was matured by the chinese in the form of the Kuang Eleven.
Although traditional viruses are "bore and inject", a slow virus slowly interfaces with an ICE, and the rate is adapted so that the ICE doesn't detect the intrusion. The face of the Kuang logics "sleazes up" to the target ICE and mutates accordingly to simulate its fabric, allowing the user to lock on invisible; the main programs can cut in, circling around the logics in the ICE, before there is any detection.