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Cyberwar!

Back home in San Francisco, a temptation was waiting for Max, written in computer code.

bcopy(fname, anbuf, alen = (char *)*cpp - fname);

It was one line of nine thousand comprising the Berkeley Internet Name Domain, an ancient girder in the Internet's infrastructure, as important as any router or fiber-optic cable. Developed in the early 1980s with a grant from the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), BIND implemented the scalable Domain Name System, a kind of distributed telephone directory that translates strings like Yahoo.com, which humans understand, into the numeric addresses the network comprehends. Without BIND, or one of the competing programs that followed, we'd be getting our online news from 157.166.226.25 instead of CNN.com and visiting 74.125.67.100 to perform a Google search.

BIND was one of the innovations that made the explosive growth of the Internet possible—it replaced a crude mechanism that couldn't have expanded with the Net. But in the 1990s, it was also one of the legacy programs that were shaping up as the modern Internet's biggest security problem. The code was a product of a simpler time, when the network was cloistered and threats were few. Now hackers were plumbing its depths and coming back with a seemingly endless supply of security holes.