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declared that he could map the Internet just as well in a single day by building on the route-tracing programs that were a standard tool in the security industry. A friend bet Barrett $50 that he couldn’t do it. So while his leg healed, Barrett set out to win the bet, to establish a means for tracking the growth of the Internet, and to make a pretty picture.

    Barrett’s project won attention on technology websites, and thousands of readers volunteered spare processing power on their computers. After four days of full-time programming, Barrett got the rough outline of the Internet’s largest branches in less than a day, and he ran the program again and again to bring out more detail. The hobby lasted years, and the resulting full-color pictures were spectacular. Barrett called it the Opte project; in 2008, it would be accepted as a permanent exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

    Barrett returned to working part time and summers at Network Presence, where he earned $25 an hour and wore employee badge No. 3. The company’s clients included the Navy and the Defense Department, and there was one big perk: the use of a corporate apartment on the beach in Santa Monica, just south of the noisy roller coaster on the pier.

    In 2002, Network Presence got a call from the owner of Don Best Sports, the pioneering Las Vegas oddsmaker. “We’ve got a problem,” the man said, reluctant to give away much more over the phone. Once Barrett arrived on the scene, he understood why Don Best wanted things fixed as quietly as possible. A hacker had taken control of the company’s database of customers—1,647 names of hard-core gamblers and betting companies, along with their credit card numbers—and encrypted it. A follow-up email promised that Don Best could have its system back for $200,000. Fortunately, the company had a backup system, and it refused to pay. Days later, the hacker responded with a denial-of-service attack that took the company offline.

    It was Barrett’s first battle with a professional DDoS. There were no quick fixes. But Barrett guessed he could handle that amount of traffic with enough Web servers and hardware. Over the next four days, he worked frantically to build up a server farm so big that it wouldn’t have been out of place at a major Internet commerce company. It cost the oddsmaker the same $200,000 the hackers wanted, but it multiplied Don Best’s capacity a hundred times over, and it did the trick. Barrett concluded that DDoS attacks were something that could be managed.

    Back in Santa Monica, Barrett wondered how to trace the bad guys who had hit Don Best. The answer came unexpectedly. He had just finished a weekend surf session—a beautiful sunny day, with the weak waves typical for the summer season—and was walking back to his apartment. There were thousands of computers attacking us, he thought. One of them has to have some useful information on it. He started mulling over all the different kinds of software the drones must have had running. Then it hit him: at least some had to be using a basic piece of networking software called the Simple Network Management Protocol in a way that was visible to outsiders. After all, Windows 2000 machines kept SNMP open unless the buyer changed it. The main point of SNMP is to monitor what is happening on a group of connected machines, so that whoever is in charge can modify what they do. But it also keeps track of all Internet connections. If Barrett could get access to the SNMP running on a zombie that had bombarded Don Best and ask it the right questions, he should be able to see where the zombie had been getting its marching orders.

    Barrett quickened his step. Back at his apartment, he fired up his molasses-slow dial-up modem and launched a scanning tool. Then he unleashed it on the long list of Internet addresses that had been attacking Don Best. After a couple of hours, he found one with the right kind of SNMP He interrogated it, then