Spike connected a MicroLabs' web browser and used it to access Lexicon's home page. He quickly pulled down copies of everything that looked relevant: Financial reports for investors, executive profiles, Lexicon product line descriptions, telephone numbers, and even the "positions available" listings.

Lexicon Industries looked like it had seen better times a few years earlier. Lexicon's primary product line of x-terminals had dropped off in volume by 60 percent. They were losing market share fast. Staffing cutbacks had kept the firm afloat but no new product introductions were coming on-line to take the place of the lost cash cow. Exciting press releases seemed to have slowed down shortly after a large capital infusion had occurred two years ago.

The executive profiles indicated that Lexicon's founder, John Lexicon, was still the company's one-man, driving source of energy. His bold biographical sketch boasted of sporting hobbies and detailed the high risk ventures which led him to the top of his own company.

Spike turned his attention to the probe result data file. Without all the message tracking garbage and the decoy content of the trace file, the probe's results looked much more impressive. It had isolated the 10 percent of Internet pass-through nodes that relay a total of 50 percent of all network traffic. It then crisscrossed these nodes with point to point pings assessing the node's sensitivity to traffic volumes. More than half of the nodes were shown to slow their reactions when volumes increased by only 15 percent above baseline for the probe's time period. The probe then rank ordered the nodes by their sensitivity values and reported these data back to "Ranger 6" at Lexicon Industries.

A very creative probe design and very interesting data that it returned. But the value to a terrorist sabotage effort remained questionable. One of the very nice things about a network of computers is that many paths can be used to reach the same final destination and no one system really represents a single point of failure. Even cutting the Internet at a hundred sites would not stop data from moving among the remaining tens of thousands. It sure would mess up those hundred sites for a while but the remainder of the network would continue to operate. Besides that, it would be impossible to organize the simultaneous destruction of a hundred different facilities throughout the country. So what good was it to Lexicon Industries to have identified these nodes? More investigation of "Ranger 6" was going to be required.



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