Speaker: Imagine a town built around a single, deep well.
Speaker: Every morning, the people in this town walk to the well.
Speaker: They lower their buckets.
Speaker: They draw the water.
Speaker: They take it home.
Speaker: They drink it.
Speaker: They give it to their children.
Speaker: They don't test it.
Speaker: They don't question it.
Speaker: They just trust it because the water has always been clean.
Speaker: But what if one night someone crept to the well and poured poison into the dark water below?
Speaker: The next morning the water looks the same.
Speaker: It smells the same.
Speaker: The bucket feels just as heavy in your hand.
Speaker: But everyone who draws from the well is compromised.
Speaker: And no one knows until it's too late.
Speaker: Every website is just a string of numbers.
Speaker: Human beings can't remember strings of numbers.
Speaker: So decades ago, engineers built a directory.
Speaker: You type a name, gives you an address.
Speaker: That directory is called DNS.
Speaker: It stands for Domain Name System.
Speaker: It is the well that we all draw from.
Speaker: Until a 29-year-old named Dan Kaminsky realized that the well had no lid.
Speaker: I'm Daina Bouquin, and this is Lore in the Machine.
Speaker: Dan was the kind of person who broke things just to see how they worked.
Speaker: When he was 11 years old growing up in San Francisco, his mother got a phone call.
Speaker: It was a security administrator for the United States Military.
Speaker: Her son, the administrator, explained had just hacked into their network.
Speaker: And they were going to cut off the family's internet access.
Speaker: Now his mother didn't panic.
Speaker: She told the government that she would take out an ad in the San Francisco Chronicle to announce that an 11-year-old had defeated the military's computer security.
Speaker: So they negotiated a three-day internet timeout for the boy instead.
Speaker: Then Dan grew up.
Speaker: He became a professional security researcher.
Speaker: And in 2008, he was looking at the internet's directory.
Speaker: He noticed something that made his stomach drop.
Speaker: Not a simple bug, a structural weakness baked into the very foundation of the internet, a vulnerability that would allow an attacker to quietly slip false information into the central directory, to rewrite the map of the web, to redirect your email, bypass your passwords.
Speaker: So that when you typed in the name of your bank, the well would send you somewhere else entirely.
Speaker: We call this type of attack cache poisoning.
Speaker: It's a security vulnerability where attackers can insert fraudulent entries into a cache, causing the system to return incorrect and malicious data.
Speaker: What Dan Kaminsky found was a specific type of cache poisoning that we now call DNS poisoning or DNS spoofing.
Speaker: When Dan brought this to one of the original architects of the system, the response was chilling.
Speaker: Everything in the digital universe was going to have to get patched.
Speaker: The loneliness of knowing a secret that enormous.
Speaker: You are holding a match, standing in a room, drenched in gasoline, and you cannot tell anyone why you're afraid to move.
Speaker: Dan couldn't go public.
Speaker: If he did, the bad guys would figure it out before the good guys could fix it.
Speaker: Instead, he convened a secret meeting.
Speaker: Picture a windowless conference room at Microsoft headquarters, 16 people sitting around a table, executives and engineers from the biggest tech companies on earth, fierce competitors who had no reason to trust each other.
Speaker: And Dan Kaminsky, the kid who once got a three-day time out from the military, walks to the front of the room.
Speaker: He opens his laptop.
Speaker: He connects it to a projector.
Speaker: And in about 10 seconds, he breaks the internet.
Speaker: He compromises a server running the software that controls 80% of global web traffic.
Speaker: He looks at the people in the room and tells them he is giving a presentation at a hacker convention in August.
Speaker: They have until then to fix it.
Speaker: And the crazy thing is they did.
Speaker: Competitors worked in absolute secrecy to build a synchronized global patch.
Speaker: On July 8, 2008, the patch went out.
Speaker: The well was locked down.
Speaker: The world had no idea it was ever in danger. A few weeks later, Dan gave his presentation at Black Hat.
Speaker: He wore a sharp suit.
Speaker: And as someone who always wore sandals, he had promised his mother he'd wear closed-toed shoes.
Speaker: He wore roller skates.
Speaker: A reporter asked him later why he didn't use the flaw to steal millions of dollars.
Speaker: Dan said it would have been morally wrong.
Speaker: And besides, he said, he didn't want his mother to have to visit him in prison.
Speaker: His mom, Trudy, was a legend in her own right.
Speaker: She would show up to these hacker conventions carrying homemade cookies.
Speaker: Dan Kaminsky passed away in 2021 at the age of 42 from diabetic ketoacidosis.
Speaker: When the tributes poured in, people didn't just talk about the time he saved the digital universe.
Speaker: They talked about his staggering empathy.
Speaker: He bought plane tickets for heartbroken friends.
Speaker: He built apps for the color blind.
Speaker: He used to say that the internet was never designed for any of this, just to move pictures of cats.
Speaker: Nobody planned for humanity to drop trillions of dollars into it, but we did.
Speaker: And when people asked what we were supposed to do about that terrible reality, his answer was simple.
Speaker: Some of us got to go out and fix it.
Speaker: Dan didn't just prevent an attack.
Speaker: He forced the architects of the web to build a heavy cryptographic lid for the well.
Speaker: A lock, so vital, that's securing it would eventually require an elaborate physical ritual.
Speaker: But that's a story for another day.
Speaker: Sometimes soon, you will open your browser.
Speaker: You will drop your bucket into the deep, dark water of the internet.
Speaker: And it will be clean.
Speaker: I'm Daina Bouquin, and this is Lore in the Machine.