With that, Spike Webb was gone. He sent himself through a series of locations, pausing at a couple to peruse some newsgroup traffic. Military current events, global political news, survivalist discussions, etc. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary from these topics. Then on to the Pentagon systems. Security there is first rate and so Spike started out accessing information as an ordinary citizen in order to get a feel for the areas he wished to investigate in depth. He went through the files of the Army's Counter-Terrorism Group and the Air Forces' Telecommunication's Monitoring Lab. Nothing from either. A national military emergency was not seeming likely.

He crossed over to the Justice Department and decided to pick up the trail where it was left off by Tom Barnett... Fred Lindquest. His e-mail should hold more information than he was willing to give out. In Lindquest's deleted mail archive Spike found the following message:

Date: 27 February 1995
From: Jstone (FBI EDI Fraud)
To: Flindque
Subject: Internet probe pattern

Fred: Our guys are worried. They followed up on the probe pattern reported by NCSC last week. It looks like a systematic attempt to map traffic flow on the Internet. The probe narrowed its focus to the highest traffic nodes within about fifteen minutes. It seemed to behave like a neural net learning algorithm. By getting simple ping response times to various combination locations, the tightest spots on the net just start jumping out after a few million data points were gathered.

Like I said, our guys are worried. Strategy Operations puts the highest likelihood on terrorist preparation for some type of attack to take the Internet out of service nationally or globally. They seem to think explosives would work quite nicely. Many of the locations linking the Internet together are college campuses where security can be pretty low compared to military or industrial sites.

We advise an action to coordinate field agent checks on these types of facilities. We don't know what to tell you to look for, but we need to start somewhere.

We will continue to try to isolate the source for the probe pattern and we'll keep you informed. The boys downstairs are expecting it to take weeks to unravel unless we get lucky. I guess they're all going to have to cancel their geek-fest trip to Comdex.

Great, thought Spike. The EDI Fraud Unit is investigating? Some bunch of bank transaction regulators is trying to do Internet traffic analysis. Worse yet, it's not live traffic they're working on it's some section of skimpy NCSC records from the middle of the event. Spike thought about returning to MicroLabs to fill in Nancy, but he just didn't want to lose the time. Besides, it was obvious what to do next. He needed to get a copy of the probe trace files from the EDI Fraud Unit's system. It would look like one of thousands at NCSC but it should stand out in the middle of a bunch of X.12 EDI layout files at the FBI's office.



ISYS Idea System, Inc. designed and implemented the Spike Webb (tm) site, including all content and artwork.

Copyright © 1995 ISYS Idea Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in
any form or medium without express written permission of ISYS Idea Systems, Inc. is prohibited.
Spike Webb and the Spike Webb logo are trademarks of ISYS Idea Systems, Inc.