January 5, 2005

So how many target images have we actually passed off to the agency now? Jeremy asked Tyler. The two men were sitting with Neil at a small sandwich shop around the corner from their office. They had been working on finding suspect images for weeks, and he was beginning to feel as if there was simply no way they were going to stop this attack. He fought back the urge to say that the attack was likely not even going to happen, considering how long it had been now since Layla had first come to them.

We ve passed off about 1,500 images, total, Tyler answered. But that doesn t include any of the analysts who are still looking at the other Internet services, like the web. They ve passed off a large number of suspect files as well and aren t having any better luck.

The agency is probably inundated at this point, Neil countered, stuffing a potato chip in his mouth. We ve given them so much stuff to look at now. It might take a while for them to dig themselves back out.

We ve gotten some feedback on what we ve sent them so far, Tyler responded. Most of it is either child pornography or just trash. We re still getting a bunch of false positives. If someone would just create a good tool for detecting covert channels, they could make this a whole lot easier.

The worse part about all of this, Jeremy started, is that we just don t know...