Comment # 42 on bug 1028575 from Mircea Kitsune

After another two weeks of absence, the issue was apparently reimplemented on
top of Kernel 4.11.3 + Mesa 17.1.1 + Plasma 5.10.0, likely sometime during the
last few days. The behavior is once again identical, with alt-tab switching or
desktop effects causing everything but the mouse pointer to freeze then after
10 seconds the monitor shuts down. Other unrelated GPU crashes (such as those
caused by some games) behave by the classic model, where the entire system
simple freezes in place at once... that's a very different result from this
freeze, and likely confirms this is a different type of crash.

At this point I have almost no doubt this is an attack that's being
deliberately programmed, and manually reimplemented on top of new drivers once
it gets fixed. The cycle seems to be that a kernel or driver update resolves
the issue, then the creators of the crash require about two weeks to patch it
and reimplement the exact same functionality. This is the 4th time the story
repeats.

I tried steering away from this possibility until I was sure, as I didn't want
it triggering any unnecessary arguments... if this is an attack then
investigating it as such might help in finding its source more quickly. There's
simply no way something this precise could happen by itself for nearly half an
year, always coming back with the exact same effects after a period of
absence... all despite radical changes to nearly every driver and system
component, which would have no doubt altered the behavior of the initial
problem in some form. Therefore I hope everyone can see why I'm now going with
this theory and greatly considering the option of malicious intent.

I have no idea how the virus (?) could be updated on my computer, as it's
likely not through the package update system directly. However I suspect it's
using a constant series of vulnerabilities in one or more system components,
which should be fixed by the developers if they exist. I would appreciate any
ideas on both how the malicious code might be inserted into the computer, as
well as finding the vulnerability within radeon / Mesa / X11 / etc that it
exploits. Please let me know what your thoughts are!