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APPROACHING ZERO

‘Sort of. But I’ve made it better than that. I’ve planted computer bombs in some of the 5ESSs – time bombs – they’re going to fuck up your switches. The game is to see if you can find them before they go off. And all I’m going to tell you about the date is that they’re set to blow on a national holiday. They could be anywhere in the country – it’s sort of a competition, a security test, it’ll give you something interesting to do for a change. You know what I mean?’

The line went dead. Of all the hacker calls Robert had received – most a mix of braggadocio and hubris – this was one of the few he would think of as threatening.

The threat was the bomb – a piece of computer programming, probably only a short program, that would be hidden among the thousands of instructions on any 5ESS switch, anywhere in the country. A computer bomb is a one-shot explosion. It could throw a switch into an endless loop, or it could overload the system – or, indeed, it could create havoc by releasing a self-replicating program like a worm, which would move through the network, knocking out switch after switch.

In a nightmare scenario the country could effectively be closed down for days, leaving its citizens with no means of communication and cut off from the emergency fire, police and ambulance services. The cost in terms of lives would be unthinkable and the revenue losses would be incalculable: crime would soar, fires would spread unchecked and businesses could be forced to shut down, at least temporarily.

Robert couldn’t know where the bombs had been hidden; nor did he know how many there were, or what they would do when they went off. All he knew was that they had been set to explode on a national holiday – and five days later it would be the Fourth of July, Independence Day, one of the biggest public holidays of them all.

He reported the call to his superiors at Indiana Bell and, in detail, to Bellcore (Bell Communication Research), which co-ordinates network security. Given the imminence of the Fourth of July, Bellcore had little choice but to take the threat seriously. The company organized an alert, assembling a security task force consisting of forty-two full-time employees. They would work twenty-four hours a day in two twelve-hour shifts examining the 5ESSs, checking through each

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