"Let's put it this way," said Marv. "In the last 14 years, of the viruses that have been confirmed, the longest gestation period, from release to detonation . . .was eight months. And that one was discovered a couple of weeks after they were re- leased. What Foster counted on was the fact that if software behaved normally, it wouldn't be suspect. And if it became popular, it was automatically above suspicion. He was right."
"I've heard that every computer is infected?"
"At the minimum, yes." Jacobs turned the pages of his dossier. "To continue, one of Foster's most important tools was the con- struction of road maps."
"Road maps?" questioned Phil.
"Connections, how it all ties together. How MILNET ties to INTERNET to DARPANET to DockMaster, then to the Universities." Marv wove a complex picture of how millions of computers are all interconnected. "Foster knew what he was doing. He called this group Mappers. The maps included the private nets, CompuServe, The Source, Gemini, Prodigy . . .BBS's to Tymenet . . .the lists go on forever. The road maps, according to Foster, were very detailed. The kind of computer, the operating system, what kind of security if any. They apparently raked through the hacker bulletin boards and complied massive lists of passwords for computers . . ."
"Including ours?" asked Quinton Chambers.
"Quite definitely. They kept files on the back doors, the trap doors and the system holes so they could enter computers unde- tected, or infect the files or erase them . . .take a look at Social Security and the IRS. Martin?"
Treasury Secretary Royce nodded in strong agreement. "We got hit but good. We still have no idea how many hundreds of thousands of tax records are gone forever, if they were ever there. So far it's been kept under wraps, but I don't know how long that can continue. The CDN has been nothing but trouble. We're actually worse off with it than without it."
"How can one person do all of that?" Chambers had little knowl- edge of computers, but he was getting a pretty good feel for the potential political fallout.
"One person! Ha!" exclaimed Jacobs. "Look at Page 16." He pointed at his copy of the Secret documents. "According to Foster he told Homosoto he needed hundreds of full time mappers to draw an accurate and worthwhile picture of the communications and networks in the U.S.."