Operation: WORM BOX

Operation: WORM BOX was an extensive Office of Naval Intelligence counterintelligence operation carried out in tandem with the Cole Protocol, with the primary goals of obfuscating the true size and extent of the Human Sphere to the Covenant as well as misdirecting them away from human colonies.

The earliest WORM BOX protocols were implemented shortly after the Cole Protocol proper. Rather than merely wiping out a ship's navigation data in the event of nearby Covenant presence, the viral scavengers involved with the protocol would fill the navigation computer with entire sectors' worth of fabricated colonies. These sites were designed to be believable and based around real stars, just not ones actually settled by humans, and there were thousands of them scattered across a kilolightyear radius from Sol. The forged data in any given ship's nav computers was designed in such a way as to never give the full picture, but always suggested a human sphere of influence much larger than in reality. Petabytes of AI-forged historical data, news, pictures and footage, and other artifacts related to these decoy colonies were also planted to sell the story, along with cryptic, sometimes mutually contradictory references to a greater human presence further inward along the Orion Arm as well as the implication of a considerably longer starfaring history than a mere two centuries. A few actual lesser colonies were at times included as a deliberate, calculated sacrifice to throw the Covenant off (most of these being colonies with a notable insurrectionist presence). All active human nav computers were to be filled with this diversionary data; a vast operation took place across the Outer Colonies to cover the local networks and ships. Empty ships with their computers and nav logs full of the decoy data were left on the Covenant's path for the express purpose of being boarded and having their databanks scavenged.

Coupled with the Cole Protocol, WORM BOX was one of the main reasons for the prolongation of the war. It caused considerable trouble for the Covenant; resources were spent on wild goose chases painstakingly sweeping empty systems, as the Covenant could never know which leads were real and which ones weren't. Additionally, decoy signal sources were planted on uninhabited bodies in many of the systems via probes, prompting more thorough investigations and taking up more of the Covenant's time searching each system. The Covenant did, however, establish forward operating bases in a number of the decoy systems, and even discovered Forerunner relics in a handful of them. To this day, no ex-Covenant know the full extent of the human sphere. Then again, not all humans do either: with virtually all star charts having been replaced, most of the relevant individuals dead, and new unsanctioned colonies springing up over the years, it is increasingly difficult to build an exhaustive picture of humanity's interstellar dominion.