The College Student Who Defeated the World’s Biggest Cyberweapon
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
When a big cybersecurity threat emerges, the people in charge of taking it down are the engineers and network operators who keep the internet running.
I think of them as wizards, the wizards of the internet.
That's our colleague Bob McMillan, who covers cybersecurity. And he says that over the last year, the wizards of the internet faced something at a scale they had never encountered before. It was called KimWolf.
Kim Wolf. Kim Wolf. A fast-growing botnet called Kim Wolf.
One of the most extreme botnet operations ever observed.
What makes Kim Wolf different is how it spreads.
Quietly hijacking nearly 2 million Android devices across the globe. The scale alone is staggering.
What the internet wizards saw was a somewhat familiar threat, a network of bots engaging in distributed denial of service attacks.
So DDoS attacks are basically when you get a bunch of computers and they flood another computer with just like junk data, like, hey, could you send me this webpage? And that junk data eventually slows down the computer to the point where it doesn't work. They sort of flood the zone with internet traffic and then the target doesn't work anymore.
But Kim Wolf's attacks were strange because they were coming from millions of devices, products connected to the internet like phones, cameras, and TV boxes. In effect, Kim Wolf seemed to be turning those everyday devices into a massive cyber weapon, the biggest one ever seen.
The concern here was that they could knock out the internet. That was the concern, like the internet could get wiped out with this phenomenon. The message was, be afraid. Be very afraid.
The wizards of the internet faced a lot of unknowns about who was behind Kim Wolf and how they were able to infiltrate so many devices around the world. But in order to actually take Kim Wolf down, the wizards needed help from an unlikely ally.
So my name is Ben. I'm currently studying computer science over in upstate New York at Rochester Institute of Technology.
Benjamin Brundage is a 22-year-old college senior. Over the course of a few months, Ben would come to play a critical role in figuring out how to stop Kim Wolf. And he did it all from his dorm room. Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Jessica Mendoza. It's Friday, May 1st.
Coming up on the show, the college student who took on the world's biggest cyber weapon.
Years before Kim Wolf was discovered, Benjamin Brundage lived the typical life of a high school student.
How did Kim Wolf become one of the biggest cyber threats?
How would your friends describe you?
I think it probably ranges, but I think maybe hardworking, passionate, sometimes lazy too, I guess. A mix of things for sure.
Who isn't? When we spoke, Ben was in a white T-shirt, which set off his bright red hair. He grew up in Washington State. His parents work in tech, but as a kid, he never caught the bug for computers. Instead, Ben preferred hiking and skiing rather than staring at screens. But that changed when Ben was 16 years old in 2020.
You know, I was playing a lot of online video games for like way too long, especially during like COVID. And I started to kind of find like Minecraft super interesting.
Minecraft. The open world game where players use pixelated blocks to build whatever they want, mine in caves, and yes, fight exploding enemies called creepers. But what Ben found most interesting was the code behind the game.
You can build stuff in Minecraft with this programming language and add on functionality that you normally wouldn't get. And so to me, that was like super cool and kind of drove, I think, a lot of that initial interest where, you know, I'd stay up super late, like watching Java tutorials. How do you build a Minecraft mod?
Ben discovered godlike powers in Minecraft, using code to create entirely new plants and creatures.
And so it was kind of like, I think to me, like largely like, wow, like, you know, there's so much imagination that I can kind of just put it into this real world. It's a really, I don't know how to describe the feeling, but really rewarding feeling where you can take your ideas and you can, you know, see them in fruition.
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