"Clancy, Tom - Net Force 06 - Cybernation" - читать интересную книгу автора (Clancy Tom)


29
CYBERNATION


e's hair to grow back. Then he sent the slave to his w__, who shaved his head again. Slave didn't even know llAhat it said. Even if he could read, he wouldn't be able see it."
"Clever. But kind of a slow process," Fernandez said. jplow long it take for the hair to grow back enough to *" >ver it? Five, six weeks?"
"Those were the good old days. Um. Anyway, you can tffio much the same with electronic pictures. They are made pi> of pixels, millions of mem in some cases, and some jfiren't as important as others. Without getting too technifial, you can take a standard RGB-that's red, green, I blue-image and, with a little manipulation, hide all kinds of information bits in it without affecting what a human eye can see. If you run it through the right program, the bidden stuff shows up.
"So, you send an e-mail addressed to your mother with a picture of your beautiful two-year-old boy, and right 'there in the middle of his face can be the specs for how to build a nuclear bomb." k "Great," Fernandez said. s "Welcome to the future, Lieutenant. u "See, if somebody sends a big bunch of encrypted ma- Sterial and we happen to spot it, we might get suspicious. UpSverybody is watching me net these days, and a lot of e'iifttoail gets scanned by one agency or another. Even if we ||<6an't break the code, it might alert us enough to track ||f jdown who sent it and received it, maybe pay them a little ?њvisit to see what they look like. But a picture of a little kid sent to his grandma? Who'd suspect that?"
"Some paranoid Net Force op who couldn't find anything else?" Fernandez said.
| "Right. And if you really want to make our jobs hard, % not only do you hide the sucker in the middle of some- :v where nobody is gonna look, you also encrypt it, which ||-is double protection. Use a one-time-only code, and by Ijjfehe time anybody might be able to break it, whatever you Ipvere talking about is ancient history."

30
NET FORCE


"All of which is fascinating but not helping us find the bad guys," Michaels said. "All right, let's break this up. We'll meet again in the morning, call if you get anything useful before then."
Jay nodded.

Jay watched the others leave, until only he and Fernandez were left in the conference room. He said, "So, you up to speed on all this, Julio?"
"Might as well have been speaking Swahili far as I'm concerned."
Jay laughed. "Maybe I can translate. How much do you know about the net and the web?"
Fernandez shrugged. "There's a difference between the net and the web? I dunno if you remember or not, but it took me six months to figure out where the on/off button was on my issue computer. I got a few things from Joanna since then, but I'm basically an analog kind of guy. I figure if God had wanted us to count higher than twenty, He'd have given us more fingers and toes."
"Okay, let me lay it out for you in base ten, Jay Gridley's quick and dirty history of computer communications."
"Fire away."
"Right. The original Internet was designed so it couldn't be taken out. It was decentralized, nodes and servers all over the place, so if one went down, information ftow could be rerouted. Think of it like a sixteen- lane superhighway. Block one lane, you just jump into another and keep going in the same direction. Only with the net, there are a whole bunch of superhighways going in all directions. Blow up a whole freeway, you just take an off-ramp to another one. Might have to get to San Francisco by way of Seattle and then Miami, talking a big loop, but you don't have to pull over and stop 'cause there ain't no more roads."
"Okay, I can follow that much."
"So, what this meant was, if the Soviet Union, who

31
CYBERNATION


our worst enemy in the bad old days, dropped a nuke a city, it didn't much matter in the grand cosmic me of things." 'Except to the people vaporized in the aforementioned
Fernandez said.
'We're talking bigger picture here, Julio. What I meant :,$fts, it wouldn't significantly disrupt the net elsewhere. pike those giant fungus-thingees that are spread out over thousand acres, but are still only one plant-cut a chunk
here or there, it doesn't matter. The beat goes on." "I got you, babe."
(;; "Funny. Thing is, as the world wide web came into t being and expanded, with everybody and his kid sister fH^ging on, a lot more information started going back and ; {Qfth, a whole lot more than the original guys ever figured |sfi!.This was set up pre-WWW, remember. Anyhow, jdong the way, things wound up getting more clumped ; together than the net founders intended. Everything started ['getting run by computers. In the beginning, when most ^everything in the phone company-and there was only s big phone company back then-was mechanical, you | couldn't really hack into much because there wasn't any- |i$kfflg much to hack into.
"Now, the phone companies are like everybody else, "? Slaves to the computer, and what one programmer can make, another one can screw up. Shut down any substantial amount of phone service to a big city, and that city . \:'is whacko. Sure, some of the big companies have land; |lbes to other cities that don't run through MCI, AT&T, Sprint, and so on, but the little guys who use dial-up or lt'|Ri or DSLs and such-and there are an awful lot of little Ipiuys-they're screwed, because no matter how good their HISP's securityware might be, bottom line is, you can't ?fi spike paper without a paper spike." ::\j: "No shirt, no shoes, no service?"
"Exactly. Even if the phones work, there are ways to bollix things. The web itself these days, there are a dozen main DNS servers, or name servers-these are the ones

32
NET FORCE


that map from domain names, like www-dotwhoever-dot- com, or dot-org, or dot-biz, or dot-whatever. Then the raw Internet Protocol addresses, those are the IP numbers, one- eight-four-dot-two-dot-three-dot-blah-blah-blah. They all have backups, of course, but there are ways to get into them electronically and rascal 'em. So that can mess things up real good by itself."
"Sounds just swell, Jay."
"Hey, we aren't even talking social engineering yet. Bribing a guy who's got the password is a real easy way to save yourself a lot of trouble.
"The big multinational corps all have their own servers, of course, and even if you manage to throw a monkey wrench into the big DNS guys, the pool of corp info and connections won't be affected right away-this gets kinda technical here, but let's just say it's kind of like shutting off a big power grid. Some houses will go dark, but a lot of folks have personal generators at home they can crank up, and they'll work fine until they run out of gas."
"I'm still with you."