The Zenith Angle - Bruce Sterling [7]
The Dot-Commie’s sleek face took on a gloomy look of serious adult concern. “Van has done us a big favor here, Tom. With this traceroute map, we can secure our infrastructure, plug our leaks, and eliminate a host of wasteful redundancies.”
“What exactly is he trying to sell us?”
“Van’s got nothing to do with selling. His R&D lab at Mondiale has a twenty-million-dollar budget and they let him do whatever he wants. He invented this! Tom, this is a unique competitive advantage for our outfit.”
DeFanti set the laptop aside. “Okay, so give me the deliverable. What specific action are you recommending?”
“Okay then!” The Dot-Commie straightened alertly. “Cleaning up our own house, that comes first. That’s a major capital expenditure, I admit that. But we have to do that, because living that loose is risky and just bad for business.
“Once we clean up and button ourselves down with a decent security policy, then we’ve got the whip hand over all those old-school hacker slobs. We can make real money there. We’ll make our money by revealing this bad news to all these other people who were once linked to us. Their networks are buck-naked. We know that, and they don’t know that yet. How much is that worth, Tom? You tell me.”
DeFanti grunted. “That won’t make us popular.”
“I’m figuring this turns into a nice little sideline business all along our supply chain. Every outfit that you ever M&A’d or divested since the birth of the Internet. Every address squatter, every Internet freeloader . . . They’ve gotta pay us. That’s only right. And, Tom, it’s incredible how much just plain junk we’re still running. Computers that we own and operate that nobody ever looks at. We plugged ’em in long ago and we forgot ’em. We need to yank them out of the garages and just dump them. The software they are running is years old and it’s never been patched. They’re very dangerous.”
“Without this Vandeveer guy, this so-called threat wouldn’t even exist.”
“Obscurity is never security, Tom.”
“It sure as hell is if no one ever looks.”
“Machines will look. In cyberspace, everything looks. They’ll program some net-bots to look. It’s just a matter of time, that’s all. We’re stuck now between the old crappy Internet anarchy model, and a serious, big-time commercial industry. The only responsible course is to take appropriate steps. Before it comes apart on us, right at the seams.”
DeFanti sighed. “Have you budgeted this?”
“No. I didn’t. I really wanted to. I e-mailed our CIO. With a screaming yellow zonker red alert. The CIO told me to grow up and come back in ten years. That attitude won’t do, Tom. That guy’s due for retirement right now. Not ten years from now.”
DeFanti struggled to remember the name of the Chief Information Officer. He knew the guy’s face. He had a thick brown beard and he wore bad waistcoats that his wife stitched for him. DeFanti had rescued him from the financial wreckage of a dying mainframe company, and he was very loyal. He was seasoned, reliable, and lacking in ambition, everything the Dot-Commie was not. Small wonder the kid wanted his scalp.
“So what do I do for another CIO? Are you telling me you want that job?”
“Of course I don’t want that job. But I’ll tell you another thing, Tom. Van’s connection map here is already out-of-date. Because my own network people have already cleaned house on my holding company, my Bangalore suppliers, those Chinese rocket people, and all of my e-commerce interests. Those are just baby companies, obviously. They’re fresh start-ups and they don’t have your legacy problems. But I don’t want ’em stuck in that briar patch with all those open back doors and those misconfigured routers. That is just unacceptable.”
“What is it you really want from me, kid? You want me to fire my CIO? That makes you happy?”
“No, Tom. That’s not enough. You’ve got to fire the CIO, and the system administrators, and the whole crowd of good-old-boys who make such a habit of ignoring