Bad Data, Internet Breaches, Blacklisted IPs

In 1989, I read Neuromancer for the first time. The thing that fascinated me the most was not the concept of “cyberspace” that Gibson introduced. Rather it was the physical description of virtual data. The oft-quoted line is:

“The matrix has its roots in primitive arcade games. … Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts. … A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.”

What was this graphic representation of data that struck me at first and has stuck with be ever since. I could only imagine what this could be. This concept of physicalizing virtual data later led to my Data Crystals project. Thank you, Mr. Gibson.

In Neuromancer, the protagonist Case is a freelance “hacker”. The book was published well-before Anonymous, back in the days when KILOBAUD was the equivalent of Spectre for the BBS world.

At the time, I thought that there would be no way that corporations would put their data in a central place that anyone with a computer and a dial-up connection (and, later T1, DSL, etc) could access. This would be incredibly stupid.

And then, the Internet happened, albeit more slowly than people remember. Now hacking and data breaches are commonplace.

My “Bad Data” series — waterjet etchings of ‘bad’ datasets onto aluminum honeycomb panels — capture two aspects of internet hacking: Internet data breaches and Blacklisted IPs.

In these examples, ‘bad’ has a two-layered meaning. The abrogations of accepted treatises of Internet behavior is widely considered a legal, though always not a moral crime. The data is also ‘bad’ in the sense that it is incomplete. Data breaches are usually not advertised by the entities that get breached. That would be poor publicity.

For the Bad Data series, I worked with no necessarily the data wanted, but rather the data that I could get. From Information Is Beautiful, I found this dataset of Internet data breaches.

What did I discover? …that Washington DC is the leader of breached information. I suspect it’s mostly because the U.S. government is the biggest target rather than lax government security. The runner-up is New York City, the center of American finance. Other notable cities are San Francisco, Tehran and Seoul. San Francisco makes sense — the city is home to many internet companies. And Tehran, which is the target of Western internet attacks, government or otherwise. But Seoul? They claim to be targeted by North Korea. However, as we have found out, with the Sony Pictures Entertainment Hack, North Korea is an easy scapegoat.

BAD DATA: INTERNET DATA BREACHES (BELOW)

Conversely, there are many lists of banned IPs. The one I worked with is the Suricata SSL Blacklist. This may not be the best source, as there are thousands of IP Blacklists, but it is one that is publicly available and reasonably complete. As I’ve learned, you have to work with the data you can get, not necessarily the data you want.

I ran these two etched panels both through an anodization process, which further created a filmy residue on the surface. I’m especially pleased with how the Banned IPs panel came out.

Bad Data: BLACKLISTED IPs (below)