'Sure. On my way.'
Great, he thought as he pulled on some clothes. The first step toward stopping it is figuring out what it's gonna do.
He hurried out into the cold, grabbed a coffee from a cart on Amsterdam, and hopped into a cab for Munir's. On the way to Turtle Bay he called Veilleur.
'Yes, I'm fine, Jack. Thanks for your concern. I met two fellows who gave me a ride home. In fact they're here right now. I'm making them breakfast. Care to join us?'
'Gotta see Munir. He might have figured out something on the virus.'
'Interesting. Keep me informed.'
Met two guys… brought them home… making them breakfast? Was Veilleur losing a few marbles?
At the Habib apartment, Munir pressed a finger to his lips as he opened the door.
'Barbara and Robby are still asleep.'
He led Jack to his study with the multiple computers and monitors, then began tapping on one of the keyboards.
'I've isolated the stolen game code in the virus.'
'So they're going to make everyone play World of Warcraft? Or maybe World of Jihadcraft?'
He said it facetiously but the humor-scant and dubious, he'd admit-was lost on Munir.
'I told you, I do not believe followers of Islam would countenance what was done to me. It must be someone else.'
Might as well tell him.
'It is. The Septimus Order is behind it.'
He frowned. 'Septimus Order… I've heard of them. Aren't they like the Elks or the Moose Lodge? Or Masons?'
'They love you to think that.'
The frown edged into a faint smile. 'Are you going to tell me that they're a globe-spanning secret society like the Illuminati, plotting to take over the world?'
'If only.'
Munir stared at him. 'You're serious.'
'Deadly-as in Russ, as in Valez. As you said: Well organized, well financed.'
Munir sat silent for a while, then, 'I dismissed you when you said they wanted to bring down the Internet. I thought they wanted to use it for their own purposes, control it rather than destroy it. Mainly because I didn't think it possible to bring down the Internet. Now…'
This was what Jack had come for.
'Now what?'
He shrugged. 'If the botnet created by Jihad four/twenty is anywhere near as extensive as theorized, I think they can do it. As a matter of fact, I'm sure they can do it.'
Jack had suspected this had been the purpose of the virus all along, but to hear it confirmed by a man whose stolen code had been spliced into it… chilling.
'How?'
'I've been baffled from the start as to how an online gaming enhancement program could be of use to hackers. Then I realized they'd utilized only my video transfer protocol and scrapped the rest.'
'I'm not sure what that means.'
'I developed a way of rapidly transferring video between a player's computer and an online game server. It uses a lot of bandwidth while running, but the beauty of it is it doesn't run for long. Russ loved it, called it the 'primo feature' of the package. Thinking about it now, I'm sure that was what he must have talked about to his fellow hackers. The wrong person overheard, and now… he's dead and my family's life is changed forever.'
Jack saw Munir's throat work as he blinked a few times. He gave him a moment. Jack felt bad about Russ too. A sweet, harmless guy.
'Okay,' he said finally, 'how does this bring down the Internet?'
Munir cleared his throat. 'By overloading it. I'm not saying this is what the virus intends, but considering that it's created a billion-unit botnet that has high-bandwidth video transfer capability, that capability could be used to send video back and forth between all the computers on the botnet.'
'I can see how that would jam up the computers, but how would that affect the Internet?'
'Imagine all the computers in the botnet simultaneously spewing tons of network traffic. Imagine computers all across the world overloading their ISPs. Not only is each ISP inundated with network traffic, but they keep trying to communicate with servers and Web sites across the world, over and over again, all at the same time. They have tremendous capacity, but they have their limits. Eventually, the whole Net grinds to a halt. Look what happened when Michael Jackson died. There were so many posts and searches about him that Google and Twitter slowed to a crawl. And those were just text, which is nothing compared to video. Even so, they thought they were under a DDoS attack.'
'That denial of service you told me about?'
'Yes. A distributed denial of service attack. That's when hackers stream enormous amounts of data from a botnet at a specific target in an attempt to crash its servers.'
'Why?'
'Because they can, I suppose. It's happened to the social networking sites numerous times; back in 2008 a group called 'Anonymous' crashed the Scientology site with a DDoS. If you overload a Web site with too much traffic, eventually it cannot keep up. All the users' connections to the site time out, and the site appears dead. This Jihad botnet could use my protocol to inundate servers all over the world.'
'You're sure?'
'I'm positive. Since the nineties, experts have worried about demand for bandwidth exceeding the Internet's capacity. Video transfer demands large amounts and the explosion of video on the Internet has generated no little anxiety. It's enough of a concern to cause ISPs like AT amp;T and others to talk about charging extra for high- bandwidth users. So far, the Internet has always been able to expand its capacity to meet growing demand, but I don't think it's prepared for what Jihad four/twenty can throw at it.'
Jack was having a hard time wrapping his mind around this.
'You're talking about using something like YouTube to crash the Internet?'
'I'm talking about bigger, longer, fatter videos than the clips on YouTube. What happens if you miss an episode of your favorite TV show? Used to be you'd have to wait for a rerun. No more. You simply go online and watch it. The days of the movie DVD are numbered. Online film rental services no longer have to ship you a disk, they simply download the film to your computer, or cell phone or iPod. That uses bandwidth-lots of it. Imagine a billion or more devices uploading and downloading video back and forth to each other, over and over.'
There had to be more to it than that.
'That will crash the Internet?'
'If the Jihad botnet encompasses a billion computers-and I believe it has more-that will do it. But I have examined the code and I believe they may have more specific targets-like the root name servers.'
'The what?'
'They're the heart of the Web. When you type in 'microsoft.com' or 'twitter.com,' those texts need to be translated into numerical IP addresses that computers can read. Knock out those specific servers and the Internet becomes terminally dyslexic. Back in oh-seven a botnet in Southeast Asia mounted a DoS attack on the name servers and managed to damage two. The Jihad botnet is incalculably bigger. It could succeed.'
'But using video… it's so… simple, so obvious. Why hasn't some nut tried this before?'
'It only seems simple and obvious when someone points it out, but the execution is anything but. It took a cadre of expert hackers working in concert to come up with a virus that could slip past the best firewalls and create a botnet of sufficient size to make this feasible. And it took a new approach to video transfer-mine, unfortunately-to make it work.'
'I'd have thought some terrorists-'
'Terrorists love the Internet. They can't communicate without it.'
'Could this have been done without you?'
Munir nodded. 'I think so. But the extra bandwidth my protocol demands makes it irresistible. That was why
