fuzzing, back-doors, or rootkits - and to develop new, more intricate ways to steal a machine’s mind. This race for mastery is a sprint, one that heads ever deeper into the depths of a vulnerable system. The closer you are to the very core of a computer program or a network, the more control you have. Real mastery of the heart of a system would be like having a spy win the Presidency, turning the whole US government into a “Weird Machine”. That prize of immediate, high-level and totally “trusted” access remains the Warez Dude gold standard. 18 The most dangerous - and therefore the most alluringly valuable - of these sorts of attacks, are known as “zero-day” exploits. The danger they represent only becomes apparent at some awful instant, “Day Zero”, when they are revealed to have been running wild inside some hapless network or machine. That first moment in the knowledge of the bug is like day zero in a cancer diagnosis, and it begins an immediate race to find and deliver a cure. Such completely unknown, secret vulnerabilities are fissures in the walls of computers that their manufacturers, system engineers, and security experts usually don’t realize are there. The dream of hackers and spies and greedy Warez Dudes is a version of this trick called an “Advanced Persistent Threat” — hidden, back-door access to a machine that endures even for years, through upgrades and security checks and system cleanups, all the while forcing the now-weird computer to do things its user won’t even be aware of: Send a copy of every keystroke to another machine, for instance, or serve as a robotic launching pad for attacks on other machines. All while acting like a perfectly normal machine. The best of the zero day exploits are based not on the idea of sneaking malicious software onto machines so much as on taking existing, trusted code and finding tiny holes that can be blasted into giant, insecure data tunnels. These tools for manipulation are digital opiates, in a sense, for connect