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Spike saw that the source tracing problem was going to be huge if all potential nodes had to be resolved down to the one responsible location. This is what the FBI was going to have to do in order to obtain any search warrants or wire tap authorizations. Fortunately, Spike didn't have that problem. If he could reduce the possibilities to a hundred or so he could then systematically search each site's system for evidence of the probe's data feedback. Spike set to work on some statistical analyses of the options while Nancy finished the disk drive hardware upgrade. Thousands of decoy sites had been included by the probe's creators. Most of these however, were not getting sufficient volumes of probe response messages to be able to put anything back together. As soon as the disk space became available, Spike began processing the data. Four hours later he had a list of sites that got the entire set of response packets; 253 in all. More than he hoped for, but this was all the help he was going to get from the trace file without days and days of combination generating and tracking. He'd just have to look through the 253 until he found the one that accepted receipt of the probe results. A tedious process, but at least it was finite. By ten o'clock Monday night Spike was ready to begin his investigation of the potential probe response sites. After another round of warnings from Nancy, he set out on the night's journey. "Don't wait up," was the last thing he said to her before departing.
Spike had organized his list alphabetically and started at the top. He had no way to prioritize the sites based on his analysis. Each was as likely as the others. He tried not to think about what could be done if he made it through the whole list with no results. His review of each system was pretty straight-forward. After getting past the security system, he would enter the specific target node whose address had come off the probe trace file. There he would perform a pattern search through any files marked as updated since the date and time of the probe event. Admittedly, the file dates could be easily adjusted in order to hide them from such a search, but Spike reasoned that the probe's creators expected no one would ever get this close to them. After all, the decoy scheme was a pretty good one. The FBI wasn't going to get this close.
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