Mark Bowden (Black Hawk Down) examines the infamous Conficker worm — the enemy within — and notes just how much damage such malware could potentially cause:
Rodney Joffe heads the cabal that has been battling Conficker. He is a burly, garrulous South African–born American who serves as senior vice president and chief technologist for Neustar, a company that provides trunk-line service for competing cell-phone companies around the world. Joffe’s interest in stopping the worm did not stem just from his outrage and sense of justice. His concern for Neustar’s operation is professional, and illustrative.
The company runs a huge local-number-portability database. Almost every phone call in North America, before it’s completed, must ask Neustar where to go. Back in the old days, when the phone company was a monopoly, telecommunications were relatively simple. You could figure out where a phone call was going, right down to the building where the target phone would ring, just by looking at the number. Today we have competing telephone companies, and cell phones, and a person’s telephone number is no longer necessarily tied to a geographic location. In this more complex world, someone needs to keep track of every single phone number, and know where to route calls so they end up in the right place. Neustar performs this service for telephone calls, and is one of many registries that oversee high-level Internet domains. It is, in Joffe’s words, “the map.”
“If I disappear, there’s no map,” he says. “So if you take us down, whole countries can actually disappear from the grid. They’re connected, but no one can find their way there, because the map’s disappeared.”
A botnet like Conficker could theoretically be used to shut down Neustar’s system. So Joffe helped form the Conficker Cabal. He scoffed when he read in late 2009 that the Obama administration’s Department of Homeland Security planned to hire “a thousand” computer-security experts over the next three years. “There aren’t more than a few hundred people in the world who understand this stuff.”