In 2004, emin guen sirer figured out how to hijack the FBI's Web site. The problem wasn't with the Feds; it was with the structure of the Internet itself. Anytime you type an address like "www.fbi.gov" into your browser, your request feeds through several servers that act as the phone booths of the Internet. Sirer realized that many of these directories were insecure and that a hacker could easily reroute all traffic meant for the FBI to a malicious doppelganger site. "No one even knew this problem was there," says Ken Bir-man, Sirers colleague at Cornell. "Gun showed it was there, and he showed how to fix it."
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