No, Russ had not been involved. But for some reason, he had been murdered.
His cell rang and he recognized Ron's voice.
'That was fast.'
'Told ya. Piece o' cake…'
17
Munir took Russ's death pretty hard.
Jack had figured he would. They'd been friends, working together on a freelance project. And the way Russ had gone to bat for Munir when he was in trouble said a lot about how close they were.
So that was one of the reasons Jack had come over for a face-to-face. The other was his naivete about the world of computer viruses. He figured he'd understand better in person.
So the two of them sat in Munir's computer room. Jack watched him rub his teary eyes and struggle to get a grip. Finally he did.
'Do you really think it was an accident?' he said.
'Not saying it's impossible, but my gut says no.'
'That leaves murder.'
Jack nodded. 'Yes, it does.'
'If that is so, then it makes it more important than ever to find out who's behind this virus. Because if we find them, we find the people behind Valez and the ones who murdered Russ.'
Jack had already come to that conclusion-and knew the answer-but how had Munir arrived at the same place?
'What makes you say that?'
'On Tuesday morning Valez sent me an email. Just opening it allowed a virus into my system. That isn't supposed to happen. Email programs were vulnerable to that back in the day, but the glitch was fixed. Nowadays no program allows an email to execute code just by being read or previewed. Usually you have to click on a link or do something to allow the virus in. But this one has some new workaround.' He gave Jack a quizzical look. 'Low- level binary data bursts on open ports, maybe?'
'You're asking me?'
'Sorry. Whatever they're doing, the upshot is the hijacking of your system.'
'Like hijacking a car?'
'Exactly. It takes over the driver's seat. And what this one does is invade your email address books, cull all the addresses, and then send a blank email to everyone on your lists.'
Jack nodded. 'I got one this morning from an old friend.'
'And you opened it?'
'Well, yeah.'
'Of course you did. It's only natural. You recognize the sender so you open it. But each email the virus sends out contains a copy of itself. That email from your old friend's infected system infected your system as well, then emailed itself to everyone in your address book.'
'Not many.'
'It doesn't matter. Every computer you infected went on and sent infected mail to every computer in its address book, and then each of those did the same, and on and on. It's a geometric progression with an unfixed, ever expanding ratio. It must be creating a tidal wave of email around the globe.'
Tidal wave… tidal waves destroy things.
'Around the globe? Wouldn't that take a while?'
Munir shook his head. 'Not at all. A geometric progression can do astounding numbers in almost no time. There's an old story about a king paying a dowry for his daughter. The prince asked simply that he place a single grain of rice on one square of a chessboard, two grains on the next, four on the third, eight on the fourth, and so on, doubling on each square up to the final, sixty-fourth square.'
'I can see how that might involve a lot of rice.'
'A 'lot'? Try a little over one-point-eight times ten to the nineteenth power. That's eighteen quadrillion grains of rice. A quadrillion is a billion billions. The entire world produces only a fraction of that in a year.'
Jack nodded. Impressive.
'So this virus-'
'If each infected computer infects just two new computers every minute-and we know it infects many times more because of all the email addresses people store-it will pass the two-billion mark in just over half an hour- thirty-two minutes, to be exact.'
'And how many computers in the world?'
'We hit the billion mark in 2008. We may be nearing a billion and a half now. Of course, it can only infect those computers that open email. But how many computers don't have email? And it would have to wait through a twenty-four-hour cycle for people around the world to wake up and check their email. So, in a single day it's conceivable that it could have infected a billion computers-and that's a conservative estimate.'
A billion?
'Could this bring down the Internet?'
He saw the Lady's imaginary mountain lake, its water spilling downhill through the damaged wall… saw its feeder tributary from the Internet choking off… the lake drying up… the Lady disappearing…
Munir shook his head. 'Not even close. It's a spam tsunami, but the Internet can easily absorb it.'
That was a relief, but then…
'What's the point?'
'Sometimes it's prankish maliciousness, simply to cause trouble. Other times there's a definite purpose-like creating a botnet. That's what I think we have here.'
'Means nothing to me.'
'All right. Let's see. My computer is now what can be called a zombie or a slave or a robot-it's under someone else's control. So is yours. So is everyone in our address books who opened email from us. If you link up all our zombie machines, you've got a robot network, or botnet, that you can force into coordinated efforts. A botnet can be used to assault another system with what's known as a DDoS attack-a distributed denial of service. It uses all the computers in its network to target a system and overwhelm it with a barrage of traffic and shut it down.'
'So this virus is creating a global botnet.'
Munir nodded. 'I'm sure it already has, one that's still growing. I'm also sure that governments are already aware of it and looking for a way to stop it. Unfortunately, it's way too soon for the antiviral companies to have a fix.'
'Then somebody needs to get the word out not to open any email with a blank subject line, especially if it's from someone they know.'
Munir shook his head. 'Too late for that.'
Jack swallowed. 'Could this bring down the Internet?'
'No. The Internet's too big, too resilient. Besides, bringing down the Internet is the last thing hackers want. That's where they live. It would be like burning down their own home.'
'A psycho might burn down his own home.'
'Yes, but this isn't one psycho. This is a well-organized, well-funded group. Trust me, they want to use the Internet, bend it to their will, not bring it down.'
Well, Jack thought, he's right about the well-organized and well-funded part, but dead wrong about its purpose.
'But they stole the code you were using for that Magog game.'
'The MMO game.'
'Whatever.' These acronyms were going to drive him nuts. 'What's that got to do with this email virus?'
'I found a piece of my code in the virus. It's something I wrote for the gaming program to accelerate upload and download of video. It triples, quadruples video transfer speed, depending on your bandwidth.'
