…okay, yeah. I’ll try and break it down.
Think of it like the Postal Service…
You want to send a parcel to somebody, right? What do you do? You wrap it up, write their address on it and give it to the mail man. He hands it off to a whole network of other people and in a couple of days it arrives at your friends house.
Does that make sense?
So, sending a file from one computer to another is no different. You wrap the data up in a packet, write an address on it and send it out across the network. Computer addresses look different, but the idea’s basically the same. Instead of mail men in vans we have switches, routers and miles and miles of cables, it’s all done automatically, but you get the idea, right?
That’s the standard case, but things started to get weird.
I mean, things got impossible levels of weird! There’s absolutely no explanation for what we were seeing.
Remember Vladimir Levin’s hack where he stole $10million from Citibank in ’94?
Or the release of the hacker application AOHell in the same year?
What about Nick Leeson trading futures at Barings Bank in ’95?
Even the Kushiro earthquake back in ’93!
What did they all have in common?
At each significant event on the network we saw a concentration of these weird data packets in the local internet switches!
Sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself, let’s go back to the postal service.
You’re sending another package to your friend. What happens if you forget to write an address on it? If the mail man can’t get it back to you it probably just sits in the mail room gathering dust.
We were seeing data packets flowing through the network. Far too many of them to be noise or radio interference. And all of these packets, the one thing they had in common, was the lack of a destination address.
They were essentially floating around the network with nowhere to go, but at the same time all moving in the same direction.
In our postal analogy, that’s like your package arriving at your friend’s house because the package somehow knew where it was meant to go, and it got there by itself!
From a purely engineering point of view what I’ve just told you is impossible. The logic in the switches should reject any badly formed packets, but I swear it was like these had a mind of their own.
We couldn’t trace where they were coming from, and we couldn’t tell where they were going until enough of them congregated together on some random server somewhere. No amount of anti-virus software was enough and no firewall seemed able to stop them.
…and wherever that happened some real world event wasn’t far behind.
Anyway, two weeks later I find myself sitting in the basement at the pentagon. That’s where I met Darren…