8 hours first conversation with Chris
When Ben Brundage first connected with Lumen engineer Chris Formosa, they chatted for 8 hours straight passing notes back and forth about IP Idea.
Snapshot · The Journal.
The College Student Who Defeated the World’s Biggest Cyberweapon
Explore episode
May 1, 2026
Where this was said
KimWolf's Scale: The Biggest Botnet Ever Seen
At 22:32 · chapter starts 21:00
The thing Ben had stumbled into wasn't just a botnet — it was KimWolf, the most extreme botnet operation ever observed [1] — Jessica Mendoza "One attack = entire Germany+Spain+UK: One KimWolf DDoS attack was so large it was as if everyone in Germany, Spain, and the UK had visited …" 20:15 . A single attack had traffic equivalent to every person in Germany, Spain, and the United Kingdom hitting the same website at the exact same second. Cybersecurity professionals had been tracking it for months. Chris Formosa, an engineer at the networking company Lumen, had been focusing his research on IP Idea specifically, watching the botnet grow at an unchecked pace. But the central mystery remained unsolved: nobody knew how KimWolf was getting its victims. The worry was that the network had millions of IP addresses and no one checking what was happening on it — a situation ripe for catastrophic abuse.
Big Pipes: The Secret Cybersecurity Working Group
Big Pipes is an elite cybersecurity working group of engineers from major internet companies who quietly defend the internet's infrastructure. When they recruited Ben Brundage for their weekly calls, they got something the wizards lacked: a Discord-native who could talk to hackers using cat memes.
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