“Cause of death?” the young female asked.
“Water in the lungs” Bille replied, “indicate drowning, but they’re running a tox screen to see if anything else was in there, there are some scuff marks that could either be caused when he fell, or maybe defensive wounds, but we can’t be sure!”
“So we might not have a murder then?’ the middle-aged cop sounded deflated, “Just a drunk who got too near the river!”
“What we have” Billie cut in, “is a body is suspicious circumstances, in the river whom no one can identify, and being right outside parliament, it’s got everyone crapping their pants with the possible implications, by the way, the only thing in the pockets was a set of what could either be a rosary, or prayer beads, we’re not sure what, now, I want answers as to whom this boy is, and I want them ASAP am I making myself clear” her voice had risen considerably as she gave the little ‘pep talk’ “Now, I’ve got a list of all the delivery vans in the area at the time, Phil” she looked at the middle aged cop, “You get the delivery vans, and their ‘wonderful’ drivers” she made the inverted comma sign as she said the last part, “Chase ‘em down, get their dash-cams and any give you any crap, slap ‘em with the ‘prevention of terrorism’ act and ask ‘em how long they want in a remand centre!” she turned to the rest of the team, “Liz” the young female looked up, “you get the westside of the river, take Jimmy and cover every business within sight of the area, use a few ‘uniform’ if you have to, but get it done, I’ll be doing the same with the other side, you two” she looked at the two youngest cops on the team “You’re with me”
No one had any illusions, it was going to be like looking for the proverbial 'needle in a haystack’ but with one big difference, they didn't know which needle, or haystack for that matter.
And the people who did know were keeping very quiet!
London is one of the financial centres of the planet, if not THE centre. Every Bank, every financial institution has an office there, linked to the rest of the globe, the decisions are taken there affect every human alive, and they're done by computer!
Granted, they're monitored by humans, but it's often humans who have no idea how that computer does what it does, no idea whether the keys they're tapping are being monitored, and what happens when someone feeds something nasty into the system. When that happens, things can go haywire, and the hard part is, that those same computers don’t just monitor the financial system, they monitor everything.
Chapter 8
“Hey, you might not want to answer that, it’s only the boss” the strange voice started saying, Sam stopped and gave the stupidest look imaginable, “what the hell is that?” she almost started laughing.
Hene looked sheepish as he reached in for his phone, “My ringtone for the boss” he mumbled, “Got it from an app on the phone”
“Then for heaven’s sake” Sam began, she was still chuckling, only to be cut off by her phone ringing, she went to answer hers as well, but Hene had already swiped the ‘answer button’ “Don’t let her hear it”
“By now” a voice came on the line as soon as he answered, “they should have gone through to the departures gate, am I correct?” He’d recognised the voice straight away, it was Mildred, he took the phone down from his ear and tapped the ‘speaker’ icon, Sam was slightly bemused, but listened in. “Sam there too?”
“Yes” Sam replied, “on both counts”
“Good” Mildred came back, “that way I don’t have to repeat myself, listen up, I’ve got some instructions for you two, get down to the Airport Hilton, go to the front desk and ask for the keys to rooms 207 and 208, Hene you get 207, Sam, you get the other one, as soon as you’ve got the keys, just hit redial last number on your phone, we’ll talk then.”
St Bartholomew's Hospital London.
“Hi I’m up on the cancer ward, and I’m wondering what’s happened to the medication we ordered for our patients last night, they should have been here this morning, any ideas what’s happened to them? ” The nurse spoke into the phone, he was pretty frustrated, but there wasn’t any use taking it out on the computer people, they were just ‘small cogs in a big wheel’ but still, it was damned annoying when things fouled up, ‘probably delivered them to the wrong sodding ward’ he thought, but didn’t dare say it.
“Check your delivery schedule” the female voice on the other end of the line replied curtly, she’d been replying to questions from all over the hospital for the last half hour, they were trying frantically to find out what the hell was wrong with the system, but not telling anyone, admitting a fault was serious business, and likely to get you fired in the very next breath!
“I tried that” The nurse came back, he reached for the instant coffee that he’d made before making the call, previous experience told him talking to the computer or ‘I.T.’ department was a very long and frustrating process, long because they never said anything that others understood, and frustrating because of the time it for them to work out they weren’t talking to people who understood ‘computerese’. “But the damned thing won’t even pull up the screen!”
“You are logged in aren’t you?”
“We left the machine logged on last night, no idea what the night shift did though!” he replied, “I can’t even tell what’s open and what’s not”
“What message have you got, on the screen?” she asked.
“It says” he squinted, the writing was really small, “YOU HAVE BEEN LOCKED OUT, ACCESS WILL BE RESTORED WHEN YOU PAY A SMALL FEE OF TEN POUNDS STERLING TO MY ACCOUNT, YOU WILL BE NOTIFIED SHORTLY OF THE DETAILS!”
“Thank you for the information sir” she cut him off, “We’ll get you back online as soon as we can” she cut the line, ‘damn, that’s another department infected’ she thought as she typed out an email, one marked urgent to the headquarters of the national health service, it simply said, “St Barts, virus on the system, seems to be some form of ransomware, so far unable to locate the source.”
Viruses, (or virii as it should be, as the word is of Latin origin) always go for the contact list in any computer system, as soon as they’ve got that, if you’re connected to the internet, it doesn’t matter if you send any emails out, it sends out an email, and a hundred others just got infected.
Within minutes the whole system for the National health service was on the brink of collapsing, every computer in every hospital, not just in London, but the whole United Kingdom, and not just the little things with screens and keyboards, but every machine that used software and connected to other machines through the ‘information highway’ was shutting down, and there was nothing the techies could do about it!
Everything from the mobile laptops the doctors and nurses were using to the heart monitors and even the MRI scanners were going ‘offline’ and no way of getting them back at the moment, they were helpless and defenseless. Tere wasn’t even any way of knowing if they had the files backed up even when the got the system back ‘up and running’, this was going to be a damn long day.
Not long after that, other computers started to go down. First it was the Fire Brigade,, their computers in the control centres were supposed to be the ‘latest and greatest’ but they went down, the same message displaying on each one, “Give us ten pounds Sterling within twenty-four hours, or lose your files!’
Want to make a lot of money quick, then hack the Banks, and lock them out, they’ll pay up pretty fast. But hack their health system and you bring the country to its knees within less time than it takes to say “Help” and this one was spreading like an out of control wildfire, every time an email was sent from an infected computer the virus found the path and jumped, most of them didn’t have firewalls, and those that did hadn’t kept them up to date, then again with the speed they appear, very few had the time or the money to keep up with them, but there are a few that do keep ‘up with the Joneses’ They were the government’s ‘last line of defence’
When the virus got as far as the Ministry of Defence and
the Civil Aviation Authority, that’s when both MI5 and MI6 got a rude call.
“Find and kill this bloody thing” the minister had screamed down the phone at them, “I don’t care how!”
The young officer on the desk was stunned as the phone crashed down at the other end, ‘Did he just break the thing’ he thought as he punched the numbers. Their cyber-crime division would go into overdrive with this one, it was going to be a very long night!
Paul Johnson or PJ wasn’t anything special, in fact, most people wouldn’t even give him a second glance in the street, and the few that did would recognise immediately, he was a total nerd, and pretty proud of the fact.
Nearly thirty, still living at home with mum and dad, never had a girlfriend, (never likely to either he’d add in sad admission). He wasn’t the best with people, found them too illogical, but put him in front of a keyboard, and that was a different story.
“Shit” he spoke softly as his avatar ‘bought the dust’ again, it was the third time on that level, he just wasn’t able to get past the gremlin that came out of nowhere, or it felt that way, every time it came out from different places and he just wasn’t quick enough reaching for ‘Excalibur the legendary sword of King Arthur, it had magical properties, and the game gave it the power to kill gremlins, but you had to be quick to use it.
The second screen was flashing a warning, the computer had picked up an intruder, or someone wanting to get into his hard drive, the firewall was holding them off, but it still sent him a warning, kind of like an alert a sentry would send out when someone approached a unit's position, he’d called the software ‘Sentinel’ as it sounded a pretty cool name, and was close to what the software did.
“We’ll get back to you” was the reaction he got when he tried to sell the software to NASA, and to a few other places, right now he had a job, not really a job as such, but a contract to help a few places with their internet security, especially with protection against viruses, or other bugs, even anti-spyware that lets people know when others are watching the ‘keystrokes’ they’re making, he still dreamed of ‘hitting the big time’ with the software, but that didn’t pay any bills, for that he did the ‘consulting’ though at times it felt like ‘insulting’ as the pay was so low.
Computer hackers aren’t always bad. Some of them actually try to ‘hack’ the systems to show where the weak points are so that the companies can fix them, but they don’t just use the virus, they’ve got a few other tools as well.
There’s the ‘bug’. Not strictly a virus as such, see the virus is like a virus in a human or animal. A virus needs software to attach to! In animals they attach to our DNA and alter the structure of our cells, the computer virus does the same, but the ‘bug’ doesn’t! It doesn’t need any software to be running, it just gets in there, does the job and keeps on doing it until you kill the bug!
Then there’s spyware, or ‘bots’ as they’re called, they just sit in the background, watching every stroke you make, and whenever the ‘master’ calls, they upload all the information they have about you, including all your Bank account details, everything! Doesn’t matter that you didn’t store the password on your machine, if you went into the Bank account, it records your keystrokes, and sends them! With them, nothing is safe.
But the good guys, they have their own weapons, ‘bots’ that sit in the background and watch for any ‘nasties’ trying to get in, that’s when places like Google send you the message ‘Someone tried to access your account,’ when you try to get onto your own sites from different machines, the ‘bots’ in the background, ‘big brother watching over you’ and it’s not all bad.
That’s what Paul had running, it came up with the message as his second screen froze, something was trying to get into his system, but the firewall had stopped it, ‘Unauthorised attempt at access, DO WE ALLOW?’
“Hell no” he whispered frowning, damn, he was pissed at losing to the gremlin, getting to the next level, hell, he’d been working on getting to that stage for over an hour, and lost, he wasn’t happy, “Sod off” he shouted as he hit the ‘Deny’ button, the message came straight back, he hit it again, it came back again, “what the?” he hit the button a second time, the screen cleared and he began the level again, the message came back, before anything happened, this was getting annoying, “Will you sod off” he spoke again as he hit the button, within seconds the message was back.
This time he stopped and looked at the message, the ‘bot’ had identified a piece of software that didn’t belong to the programme he was running, he clicked on the icon for the ‘bot’. It brought up a screen with code written on it, one line was highlighted in red, a message at the side simply said, this was updated two minutes ago, it doesn’t belong in the programme!
“What the?” he whispered as he looked at the code, something just wasn’t right, yeah, it was ‘ransomware’ that he could see from the programming, but the thing looked so simple, he reached for his phone, changed his mind and went for the skype icon.
“Jezza” he almost shouted as soon as the other guy came on the line. “You saw this, on the net?”
“Paul” the geek on the other end came back came back, “What you on about?” he was slightly younger than Paul, though with the amount of time they both spent in front of the screen, they both looked square-eyed and anaemic, the total opposite of the muscled tanned avatar he used.
“On the net” he cut back in, “The virus”
“What the hell would I want to look for a bloody virus for?” the other guy was laughing, “why?”
“Man, it’s grinding everything to a halt!” he carried on, almost as if he hadn’t been interrupted, “It’s bloody awesome, but so bloody simple”
“What you mean, I’m just turning my machine on,” there was a pause, “Oh shit, look at that, what the hell?” he stopped for a moment, then came back, “Paul, you saw this? It’s crippling the net, it’s taken down the whole NHS! Jeez, every hospital in London, nothing working, and the Civil Aviation, Shit, that means every airport in the UK, and it’s still spreading!” he was looking at the screen, “You see how many aircraft are in the air and can’t land?”
“Yeah” Paul couldn’t help himself, he didn’t see any of that, all he ‘saw’ was the code, he totally missed the fear, the stunned silence told it all, but Paul was missing it all, then again, the programmer in him was seeing something else. “Jezza” he came back, “There’s a kill code here!”
His screen came alive again, someone else was trying to contact him, another hacker, they called themselves ‘white hats’ because they only ever used their hacking skills for ‘good’ or what they deemed as ‘good’, they were all coming alive to the problem.
“You guys following the news?” the new person, a middle-aged lady hacker, went by the ‘handle’ of ‘Mata Hari’ asked.
“Yeah, Mate” Paul replied, “I’m just filling Jezza in on the situation, man this is spreading fast!”
“Yeah” she replied, “and it’s got people really rattled, so far they’re only asking for ten quid off each of them!” she stopped for a moment, “It says there’s two hundred aircraft can’t land as their landing systems aren’t working at most airports, and the ones that have manual systems can’t take the bigger planes!”
“Yeah, that’s for now, but next week they’ll be back for fifty!” Jezza replied, he missed the panic in her voice, they knew that was the truth how these extortion rackets worked, the hacker, or ‘black hat’ gets your info, and they never really let go of it, they’ll be back for more, but Paul wasn’t really listening.
“I can kill it!” he blurted out.
“What?”
“There’s a kill code” he came back, “How much you think they’ll pay me for it?”
“Why” what the hell you on about?”
“I’ve found the code that’ll stop the damn thing, how much do you think people will pay for it?”
“They said ten pounds!” Jezza had found some informatio
n about it, “Better yet, you want to make a name for yourself?”
“Hell yeah!” Paul screamed back, all he could think of was what it would do for his career if it got out he’d been the one to ‘kill’ the virus.
“Then just kill it” Jezza replied, “and put it out on either Facebook or YouTube. A quick video, or a facebook post!” he stopped for a minute, his face clouded over as if he had some form of premonition, “then again, you got to think, who’s behind this?”
“Probably some idiot who wants to be a black hat” Paul was laughing, clearly unimpressed, then again he usually was with even the best software, this wasn’t much different, “time I taught them a lesson”
“Might not be” Jezza replied, “might be a prelude to something more sinister”
He really didn’t give a damn, he’d made the decision, so he hit the key, and the virus faded from the screen, and disaster was averted, or was it?
Chapter 9
“So ladies and gentlemen” the speaker looked around the room, starting from right to left, slowly making eye contact with every person in the room, “it appears that the virus, has run its course then?” it was a question more than a statement, but then again, very few disagree with a prime minister, even when they’re only asking questions. “Does that mean these people were just after the money?”
Was it possible that this was just a simple ‘heist’? No one in the room really thought that, but everyone valued their jobs and positions too much to argue. Disagreeing with a Prime Minister is the fastest way to end a political career, and no one wanted that, not when they were thinking of their present position as just a stepping stone, kind of like the kids game of snakes and ladders, if the ladder was climbing then this was a huge snake that could get you to the bottom almost instantly.
Scorpion's Vengeance Page 4