"There's this movie, called Wargames. In it, there's this old school hacker who nearly destroys the world by making a computer play a nuclear war simulator with real missiles. This hacker had a computer which he's programmed to dial every number in his city, searching for other computers to hack. The idea was called "Wardialing", after the movies name, and was used by hackers in the real world, in just the same way.

"I had this friend who packed himself off to war with the marines in Iraq to pay for college. In highschool he was a real wizard with tech stuff, and so while other soldiers were packing porno mags and chocolate in their packs, he brought computers and radios and far-out gadgets. He came onto this idea once while he was over there, and a bunch of guys had been blown to bits by a roadside bomb. He made friends with this bomb disposal guy, and found out that a shitload of these bombs were triggered by mobile phones. So he got one of these bomb triggers, and deconstructed it. He wanted to know how they work. What he figured out was that the ringing speaker was wired to the relay, and the relay triggered the bomb, so that when an incoming call was detected, an electrical signal was sent to the speaker, but diverted to the relay, and set off the bomb.

"My friend didn't leave it at that though, he did some experimenting. It turned out, that the sound did not come out of the speaker until about five milliseconds after the electrical signal began. But those five milliseconds were enough to trigger the bomb. It also turned out that mobile phones, the ones used in the bombs at least, were more or less sold sequentially according to the phone number. So he went and bought one, and he took it to his computer, and he wrote some software on it. Then he talked some guys from the corps of signals into lending him some radio equipment. Really powerful, military grade equipment, the kind that could jam enemy radio communications, and even signals in the civilian band. Like mobile phones. But jamming is just sending a stronger signal than what the target equipment can send itself. So instead, he got this jamming radio to send out organized little packets, just like cell phone towers get. The packet was just the first part of an electronic 'handshake' signal, it imitated the tower, calling out to a specific phone, and saying 'Hey, there's a call coming in for you!" and each packet lasted five milliseconds.

"My friend turned this transmitter on, using the program he wrote for it, and using the existing cell towers to repeat his signal across the entire country, dialed every mobile phone number that had been sold in Iraq in the previous six months. However, it only dialed them for the five millisecond duration of the handshake packet. After that, the tower worked out that this was not a legitimate call, from a nonexistent number and carrier, and disconnected it. So rather than every phone owner in Iraq getting a mysteriously short missed call from my friend, they didn't even know their phone had received this handshake packet Except for a few of them. Over the next few hours, reports came in of explosions all across the country, occurring at exactly the same time. No American casualties, but the bombs went off in very peculiar places. Cellars, secluded houses, farm properties, and shops. What was more peculiar, was that more than half of them had been flagged by the military intelligence presence in the country as potentially suspicuous.

"His next step was to program in the times of the next few patrols from his company, into the software, so that five minutes before, and every five minutes during the patrol, his transmitter dialed all the new numbers. A lot of bombs went off, but not one of them near an American patrol. For the two weeks he kept his transmitter operating, not one marine from his company was killed from a roadside bomb. That is what he called Wardialing."