Because it was written in Carnivia’s site-specific programming language, any information that might have enabled him to trace its creator was encrypted. There was one part, though, that was in clear text. When he’d designed the encryption, Daniele had deliberately excluded numerals. In any code, numbers written as numerals were easy to crack, since there was no disguising that they continued to behave according to the immutable rules of mathematics. For that reason, most cryptographic systems required the sender to write out numbers as words: five, twenty-five and so on. Deep within the Carnivia worm was the number 10-12-1437. In some way, he believed, this had to be significant. The Stuxnet worm, for example, had contained the number 06-24-2012. It was part of an instruction to the virus to start deleting itself on the twenty-fourth of June, 2012. It seemed likely to Daniele that 10-12-1437 was also part of an instruction – in this case, for the virus to activate. But even though it wasn’t encoded, the hacker had somehow managed to disguise it.
