Counting from Zero

Praise for
Counting from Zero

“Credible and believable, this story is told by a subject matter expert. I could not wait to find out what happened next.”

 
-
Vint Cerf
, Internet pioneer

“The threat to the Internet from worms, viruses, botnets, and zombie computers is real, and growing.
Counting from Zero
is a great way to come up to speed on the alarming state of affairs, and Johnston draws you in with his story and believable cast of characters.”

 
-
Phil Zimmermann
, creator of Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) the most widely used email encryption program

“
Counting from Zero
brings
Dashiell
Hammett and Raymond Chandler into the computer age.”

 
-
Diana Lutz

Prologue.

The exploit code compiled for the final time; it was ready to be tested.

The young man loaded the software on his computer, randomly selected a target,
then
hit send.
 
He sat back to watch the results.

A world away, a single packet arrived quietly from the Internet on an unfiltered port.
 
It utilized a rarely used protocol, and seemed an innocuous request.
 
At the end of the request, however, was something else entirely: a carefully crafted and formatted message that would result in the automatic execution of the code that followed.

No one was using the computer – it was simply turned on and connected to the network.
 
A mail program and a browser were running, but no one was looking at them.
 
The screen had turned off to save power.
 
Suddenly, a new process started up on the computer, the result of the single packet that had arrived.
 
A binary file began downloading; when it completed, a new program began executing.

Just as a traveler to a new country looks around and explores the new place, the program began exploring.
 
It inventoried the computer’s capabilities, which were meager.
 
The low gigahertz processor was quite a few years old.
 
It was running a common closed-source commercial operating system.
 
It had just enough memory.
 
It had a small hard drive, but there was plenty of space for the download that the program initiated.

When the download had completed, the real work began.
 
The second program went through the computer records and erased all signs of the recent activity.
 
It sent back a report to the source.
 
It set itself up to automatically and invisibly run every time the computer was turned on.
 
Its entire existence would be hidden from view.

The man had been distracted by messaging on his mobile
, and did not notice the first report that was sent back.
 
He began looking through the details to see what had happened.

The first ‘zombie’ was not a great catch.
 
It did not seem to contain any particularly valuable information, or belong to anyone important.
 
Its capabilities were minimal at best – seemingly hardly worth the effort of compromising it.
 
It was probably just sitting in someone’s living room or bedroom.
 
But it was now completely under his control!

Noting a number of others in the records, he felt some satisfaction from the success.
 
He knew there were only a handful of people in the world who had the expertise even to detect the exploit, let alone defend against it.

He read the summary statistics to check the extent of the spread and nearly fell off his chair.

The code had already compromised 123,412 such computers, from all over the world – in just one hour!
 
He did a little math and was amazed at the result.
 
The things that could be done with this many computers around the world,
all acting
in unison…

Deciding to make a change to the code, he added one more thing.
 
A spam email appeared on his screen; he glanced at it, deleting it without a second thought.
 
He added his alias to the code: nØviz.

Part I

 
Chapter Ø.

One month later...

Mick O'Malley
– is feeling even more at home in Nihon than previous visits.
 
(Ø comments)

Speed is relative, and Internet speed particularly so, mused Mick O’Malley as he traveled at 2Ø3 km/h, and accessed the Internet at 4 Mb/s.
 
This speed was slow for an airplane, but very fast for a vehicle on the road, although Mick had gone faster on one of his Ducati motorcycles.
 
It was also fast for a train, unless it was the Shinkansen bullet train, which Mick was currently riding out of Tokyo.
 
He knew the train was just getting going, and it would soon be traveling much faster.

Mick finished writing a blog entry; it uploaded in a fraction of a second to his server.
 
The speed was slow for a hard-wired local area network, but fast for a wireless mobile network.
 
For Mick, it was just normal, as he was used to having high-speed wireless Internet on his travels around the world.
 
He couldn’t imagine life without his pentaband mobile computing device.

Mick’s musing was about to veer off into the technical distinction between
throughput
versus goodput when he was distracted by a tingling sensation just behind his right ear; it was his wireless implanted speaker/microphone alerting him.
 
A grad student friend at a university had given Mick the opportunity to try out this experimental subcutaneous technology, and Mick had jumped at it.
 
The audio quality was excellent, and not having to worry about wires was heaven.
 
It was a purely passive device, powered by his mobile only when needed.
 
He could even use voice commands to place and answer calls using the implant, but the range was limited.
 
Since the implant, he had never missed a call.

The alert from his social network told Mick that his friend Lars had arrived in Hiroshima and was enjoying an unidentifiable breakfast, except for the steamed rice.
 
Mick recalled some of his own mystery meals he had enjoyed on previous visits to Nihon.
 
Lars had posted his GPS track from the previous day that showed a top speed of 3Ø1 km/h on the train and dared anyone else to better it.
 
Mick frowned looking at the mobile – his top speed was still only 279 km/h.

Outside the window, the countryside continued to zip by at a phenomenal speed.

Mick smiled to himself, looking forward to the exciting week ahead.
 
He was on his way to an Internet security conference in Hiroshima; his best friends from all over the world were converging there.

Mick was considered a security ‘guru’ although he despised the term.
 
He didn’t argue with the knowledge part.
 
Despite his twenty-four years, there were few that knew more about computer and Internet security than he, but enlightenment?

The train rounded a corner, and Mick was surprised not to feel the expected g-forces on his body.
 
He surmised that the track must be banked, and he did a quick Internet
search which
confirmed that the track was banked at ten degrees.
 
Mick’s mobile was incredibly powerful, with more raw computational and networking power than most desktops.
 
His desktop computer back in his apartment in the East Village in New York City was in another category entirely.
 
It was so blazingly fast he had designed a custom liquid cooling system for his CPU – even a wind tunnel fan wouldn’t be able to dissipate enough heat to prevent the multi-core processor from fusing into a smoky lump of silicon.
 
Mick relaxed and looked out the window, enjoying the high-tech ride.

Just outside of Kyoto, the “New Track Hope”, as “Shinkansen Nozomi” roughly translates, hit a top speed of 29Ø km/h, then 298 near Kobe.
 
Passing another train barely made an additional sound or caused the train to shudder.
 
The over 5ØØ km/h relative velocity was impressive.

Definitely the Formula 1 of trains!

He wondered how they maintained such speeds through all the tunnels that kept making his GPS lose contact with the satellites.

Just a few minutes before slowing down into Hiroshima Station, Mick’s GPS registered a maximum speed of 299 km/h.
 
While disappointed not to have eclipsed Lars’ number, Mick considered alternative possibilities and made a mental note to check the calibration of Lars’ device to ensure its accuracy.

The train station in Hiroshima was filled with the usual chaos and cacophony that Mick loved.
 
He relished the challenge of navigating public transport in a country where he couldn’t speak the language or even read the signs.
 
Today he looked forward to figuring out the Hiroshima streetcar system.

Mick was making his way to the station exit when he stopped in surprise, spotting an older man sitting at a table slurping ramen.

Is that you Gunter?

Gunter Schafer had been Mick’s friend for nearly five years now, and had helped establish him in business as an independent consultant after a disastrously brief stint with a startup company.
 
Gunter also managed to get Mick invited to international conferences such as the one this week.
 
These conferences were the perfect platform for Mick to make his case for better Internet and computer security.
 
In his opinion, the entire industry had its head in the sand (and perhaps somewhere else, too) – seemingly no one had any idea what was out there and the types of sophisticated attacks spawning from the evolving alliance of techies and organized crime.