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Zone Labs: Anatomy of a Coverup

How angels stay clean and scandals stay silent.

Part Fourteen - Michelle Leaves Town

Michelle then told Rick and Tom she would be leaving town 'for a few days'. She was in fact gone already on 11 November, sent a brief message to Gregor Freund on 12 November while away from home, sent a brief message to Tom ten days later, asking innocently 'I'm back - has anything happened?' and since then dropped completely out of sight. A frequent contributor to Wired, she has not been seen there either.

In the meantime Tom and then Radsoft continued the correspondence with Gregor Freund.

Gregor's initial explanation for the 'glitch' in Zone Alarm, as expressed to Tom, was that Zone Alarm was missing something on the bindings to the adapter and that was why the programs were getting through the Internet Lock. Freund intimated that he had seen something bind, unbind, and then bind again - and this had fooled Zone Alarm. Freund's contention was at the same time that aside from this little 'bug', Zone Alarm was a fully capable, low-level (packet level) firewall capable of blocking all traffic if it wanted to.

After a few days of silence from Freund's end, Radsoft now sent an almost identical letter to Freund, and Freund's reply was almost the same as well. However the wording was slightly different. In this new explanation, Freund was claiming that Zone Alarm was broken by bad garbage collection and the fact that the Hackbuster/Radsoft programs were loading, unloading, and then reloading the adapter device again.

This rang true: The 'Italian' packet capture code did in fact test all adapters first before offering them to the user for selection, after which one adapter would be loaded again. Rick immediately contacted Liston: Perhaps Freund was telling the truth after all?

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