Remember when I was testing the bounce-back program on my test system? I set up the program to bounce back hundreds of messages at a time. That was OK, since my test system that received the bounce-back packets just discarded them as fast as they came in.
After I finished testing the system, I made a copy of all the programs. And I modified the copy of the bounce-back program to bounce back a smaller number of packets back to the source. That was the program that would be automatically installed on all the systems.
Except the script program, the one that did all the installations of the bounce-back programs, copied the wrong bounce-back program. It copied the test one. The one with a simple variable for the number of packets to clone and bounce back. The one that had a variable value of 1024, not a much smaller number like it was supposed to.
The number that caused the Net to crash. The cause of the Digital Choke.
All those extra packets I put into the Net overloaded the whole system, the public and private Nets. The bounce-back packets just sort of multiplied exponentially, causing massive delays of data, and some systems just shut down. And that's not including the packets that were deleted.
A lot of systems shut down. And that was the cause of the ultimate Problem.
There were a bunch of "delay/copy packet" programs in routers on the Net. I had traced them to the FBI, which seemed to be where most of the packet copies were going. And I tracked lots of other packets going back to other law enforcement agencies around the world. The infected routers were everywhere, in the public and private Nets.
And I figured out the 'fix'. I got into a bunch of systems, installed my programs so that I had 'root' access, and then (later) installed the bounce-back program. It was supposed to bounce back smaller numbers of packets back to the sources.
But it got out of control.
Remember I told you about the study about how it would only take a four percent router crash to shut down the Net? Well, I think that by the time all of the routers that I infected started crashing, that percentage went up to over 33%. And with the Net being such a major and dominant part of the world economy, that 33% crash just choked the Net. And shut it down. That 'digital choke' wasn't temporary, either. As you know. It killed the Net. And all the business and infrastructure and everything connected to the Net. Which was just about everything. The destruction of whole areas of cities. Panic and disease. Infrastructure breakdown. Loss of life.
And that's why I am sitting here in a cabin outside of Foresthill, hiding out.