https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/11/04/a-cybersecurity-firms-sharp-rise-and-stunning-collapse
By Raffi Khatchadourian
The New Yorker
October 28, 2019
I. THE FOOTBALL
Before Robert Boback got into the field of cybersecurity, he was a practicing
chiropractor in the town of Sewickley, Pennsylvania, twelve miles northwest of
Pittsburgh. He was also selling used cars on eBay and flipping houses purchased
at police auctions. The decision to branch out into computers came in 2003,
after he watched a “60 Minutes” report by Lesley Stahl about pirated movies.
For years, while digital piracy was devastating the music industry, Hollywood
had largely been spared; limitations on bandwidth curtailed the online trade in
movies. But this was changing, Stahl noted: “The people running America’s movie
studios know that if they don’t do something, fast, they could be in the same
boat as the record companies.”
Boback was thirty-two years old, with a Norman Rockwell haircut and a quick,
smooth, entrepreneurial manner. Growing up amid the collapsing steel industry,
he had dreamed of making it big, hanging posters of high-priced cars—a
Lamborghini, a Porsche—on his bedroom wall and telling himself that they would
one day be his. After high school, he trained to be a commercial pilot,
imagining a secure, even glamorous, life style—but then the airline industry
began laying off pilots, and he switched to chiropractic, inspired by a
well-off practitioner his family knew.
Watching “60 Minutes,” Boback saw a remarkable new business angle. Here was a
multibillion-dollar industry with a near-existential problem and no clear
solution. He did not know it then, but, as he turned the opportunity over in
his mind, he was setting in motion a sequence of events that would earn him
millions of dollars, friendships with business élites, prime-time media
attention, and respect in Congress. It would also place him at the center of
one of the strangest stories in the brief history of cybersecurity; he would be
mired in lawsuits, countersuits, and counter-countersuits, which would gather
into a vortex of litigation so ominous that one friend compared it to the
Bermuda Triangle. He would be accused of fraud, of extortion, and of
manipulating the federal government into harming companies that did not do
business with him. Congress would investigate him. So would the F.B.I.
But as Boback was watching “60 Minutes” all he saw was a horizon of
possibility. Stahl pointed out that pirated music and movies were spreading
primarily on peer-to-peer networks—an obscure precinct of the Internet that was
sometimes called the Deep Web. The networks were made up of hundreds of
thousands of decentralized connections, in which one computer was linked to no
more than five others, and then through those five computers to many more,
expanding exponentially like the branches of a large tree. These connections
were invisible to search engines like Google. Even the software that allowed
users to browse them had only a limited field of vision—glimpsing just random
fragments of the tree at a time. Boback wondered if it was possible to design a
system that could scan the whole tree at once, then block people from sharing
files on it. Certainly, this capability would be worth a lot.
[...]
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