Setting: A balcony overlooking turquoise waves. Steel drum music drifts from somewhere below. Will Smith, in a linen shirt, puckers his lips, and leans toward an iPad propped up between two mojitos.

Data is the walking archive who remembers every poker night. ChatGPT is the bartender who makes a brilliant cocktail and forgets the recipe as soon as the guest leaves.

On a chilly morning in October 2016, engineers at Dyn, a little-known company in New Hampshire, watched helplessly as their dashboards bled red. Across the United States, people were hammering the refresh button on Twitter, Netflix, and PayPal. Nothing loaded. Nothing worked...

Most of the time, the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) works so seamlessly that we hardly notice its existence. But what if a malicious actor could quietly rewrite the maps, rerouting entire highways of traffic through their own toll booths, checkpoints, or even dead ends?

The new frontier of espionage is no longer a matter of clandestine meetings or dead drops; it is measured in packets of data slipping unnoticed across global networks.