Cyberwarfare

by Pendelton C. Wallace

  Mary Beth took notes in a spiral-bound pad.

  “He was furious last week. He came home from a meeting so happy. Then he got a phone call. After that, he was a monster.”

  “He beat you?”

  “No.” Tears formed in Jane’s eyes. “He told us how worthless we are. He never picks on my son, but he tears into my daughter, saying things I’d never imagine. He says that if I complain to anyone, he’ll kill me. And my daughter. He says it would be an honor killing.”

  Mary Beth took a deep swallow. “My husband beat me. I can imagine what it must be like, having him belittle you like that.”

  Jane’s head sank lower. “Sometimes I wish he would… Just to get it over with. It’s like the sword always hanging over my head.”

  Mary Beth took a breath. “How can we help you?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, I can’t.” Jane fidgeted with the piece of tissue in her hands. “We can’t leave. The children. They’re in school. They have friends, activities.” She shook her head. “No, he’s a good man. I mean, he provides for the family, takes care of us. He doesn’t drink or use drugs. He’s a leader in the mosque. If I left him, I’d be banished from the church. The kids would be in limbo.”

  “I see. He hasn’t struck you? The children? Ever?”

  “No. But I’m afraid he might.” Jane rubbed her hands together in her lap.

  “He hasn’t tried to choke you?”

  Jane shook her head. “I said no.”

  “He has threatened to kill you though?”

  “Yes.” Jane’s voice was so low that Mary Beth could hardly hear it. “And my daughter.”

  “Does he have a gun? Any weapons?” Mary Beth’s pulse pounded in her ears.

  “Heavens, no. He’s a peaceful man.’

  Mary Beth moved over to the other love seat and took Jane’s hands.

  “But …” Jane said. “He told me that if I ever try to leave him, he’ll kill us all.”

  ****

  That was one of the longest hours of my life, Mary Beth thought as Abiba led “Jane Williams” to the door. Mary Beth flopped into Cat’s swivel chair and thought back on her life.

  Rudy was like that. The nicest man in the world. Until he drank. She couldn’t count the number of times he beat her. She feared not just for her life, but for the kids’ lives as well.

  She met Catrina Flaherty at a self-defense class. Catrina somehow knew she was in trouble and took her aside. After several sessions of meeting for coffee or going to a movie together, Mary Beth finally opened up.

  Catrina rescued her – what they called an “extraction” in this office. She was so strong.

  Can I do it? What if the husband comes home? I’m not as big as Cat. I don’t have the self-defense skills she has.

  Mary Beth had a good sense of herself. She was a petite woman, not particularly physically gifted. With short brown hair and a trim figure, she felt like a soccer mom.

  How am I going to get Jane out of this? Can I do it? What would Cat do?

  Chapter 5

  “Ohhhh … Abiba yelped. “Mr. Ted … “

  In his tequila haze, it took Ted a moment to realize what was happening. He leapt from his chair, dropped his glass on the desk, and ran to see what the problem was.

  “Mr. Ted…” Abiba was out of her chair. “Look.”

  Ted squinted at the computer screen. “What the hell?” An animated cartoon of a crying baby splashed across the screen. Over and over the baby rocked in its cradle and made an annoying high-pitched wail. After each scream a pop-up box appeared demanding three hundred dollars in Bitcoin.

  Holy shit! It can’t be. The CryBaby virus. He heard crying from every computer in the office.

  “Ted, what’s happening?” A dozen voices called for his attention.

  His brain kicked into high gear. “Shut your computers off. Everybody! Now!”

  Ted sat in Abiba’s chair. He felt like a little kid whose feet didn’t reach the ground, he was at least six inches shorter than she.

  He did the math quickly in his head. Forty-two times three hundred. That’s, let’s see. Three times two… twelve thousand six hundred dollars. And we don’t have any guarantee that they’ll keep their word, and they’re free to do it again. “I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay a ransom.”

  The cacophony began to subside as, one by one, his staff shut down the power to their computers.

  He rubbed his head. What do I know about CryBaby? It spread all over the globe in just a couple a days. Millions of computers got infected. It shut down the British health care system. How in the hell did it get past our firewalls?

  He leapt up and ran towards the computer room.

  He looked through the thick glass walls that allowed people on the outside to see what was going on inside. Two rows of servers filled the room, while a countertop with pull-out keyboard trays ran along one wall. On shelves above the counter, flat-screen monitors blinked and flashed. Four workstations allowed operators to control all aspects of the network.

  He put his ID card up to the reader and waited for it to beep. Then he put his palm to the scanner to be verified. Next it asked him for a passcode, then the door beeped, and he opened it. He stepped up onto the raised floor of the man-trap in a tempered-glass room, eight-feet square. No one was in the computer room to buzz him through, so he reached for his smart phone and brought up the security app. With a few touches on the keypad, a loud buzzer sounded, and Ted pulled the door to the computer room open.

  The computer room was freezing. He heard the hollow ring of his footsteps as he dashed across the raised floor. Cool air flowed up through the perforations.

  He slid into the swivel chair in front of the master console and clicked away on the keyboard. Shut the whole fuckin’ things down. The control center menu came up on the screen in front of him.

  Ted considered himself an expert in computer security. So did a lot of other people. Since he came on board Flaherty & Associates, he’d built a substantial business protecting other companies’ data.

  How did this happen? How did the virus get into our network?

  Ted believed in the Boy Scout motto: “Be prepared.” He clicked on a red button marked “Emergency” in bold black letters on the console screen. He had long ago anticipated this kind of incident.

  A pop-up box asked him if he really wanted to disconnect from the Internet. He clicked on “Yes.”

  They were safe, for the moment. Without Internet access, nothing else could come in or get out. They already had the virus, but at least they wouldn’t spread it.

  His thoughts were interrupted by the sound of “La Cucaracha” on his cell phone.

  “Mr. Ted,” Abiba’s voice said. “I know you have a three o’clock, but I can’t remember who it’s with. What do you want me to do?”

  Ted pulled the phone from the holster on his belt. “Abiba, when they get here, whoever they are, explain that we have an emergency and that you’ll have to call them to reschedule. All of our computers are locked up and we can’t get to our calendars.”

  He paused to think. Are our clients safe? If this can hit us, it can hit them.

  “Get everyone on the phones. Have them use their cell phones, our land lines won’t work. Call all our clients. Tell them to shut down Internet access. We built secure firewalls for them, but if the virus can get to us, it can get to them. They should all have a red “Emergency” buttons on their network dashboard. They need to protect themselves from this virus.”

  The buzzer over the door sounded. Ted looked up at the monitor to see Marilyn Faulkner in the man-trap. He pushed the button on the desk and the inner lock clicked open.

  A petite woman with neatly trimmed gray hair, Marilyn had come to Catrina after a career in computer programming. Catrina helped her daughter with a messy divorce and Marilyn lent her somewhat out-of-date technical expertise where ever she could. She was smart, thorough, and easily accepted Ted when he came aboard.

  “What’s
going on, boss?” She practically ran across the room to Ted’s desk. “My beeper went off.”

  “We’ve got the CryBaby virus. I don’t know how it got here, but I’ve shut off all Internet access.”

  Marilyn sat in the chair next to Ted and turned the large flat-screen monitor so they could both see it. She brought up the Network Operating System window. “Looks bad, boss. Everyone has it.”

  Ted pushed back the lock of black hair that always seemed to fall into his left eye at moments like this. “I’ll check out backups. I want you to locate where the virus came from, how it got in.”

  They went to work.

  At about 10:00 pm, Abiba pushed the man-trap button. Ted buzzed her through. Her arms were full of take-out containers.

  “You two have been locked in here for hours. I thought you needed a dinner break.”

  Ted ground the heels of his hands into his eyes. “Abiba, what are you still doing here?” His stomach growled

  “If you’re here, I’m here,” she answered.

  “Don’t put that stuff down in here.” Ted turned towards Marilyn. “You hungry?”

  Marilyn leaned back in her chair and stretched her arms. “Mmmm hmmm.” She let out a deep breath. “Oh my, I had no idea it was so late. I better give Bill a call.”

  “Let’s move to the break room.” Ted stood from his chair and helped Abiba with some of the boxes. “What you got for us?”

  “The Kao Kao Barbeque. General Tsao’s, almond chicken, pork fried rice, chicken chow fun, and honey garlic shrimp. Oh, and of course, barbequed pork.”

  “Sounds wonderful.” Marilyn held the door open for the other two. Ted touched the screen of his phone and the outer door clicked open.

  ****

  Ted never figured out chop sticks. While Marilyn and Abiba deftly picked up pieces of chicken and lumps of rice, he used a fork.

  “I taught my kids to use chop sticks by picking up peanuts,” Marilyn said between bites.

  Ted’s cell phone buzzed. Who the hell? He looked at his phone. It was after mid-night.

  “Well, I’ll be damned.” He answered. “Bear, that you?” Bear had been Ted’s mentor at his first job out of college at YTS Security. They hadn’t kept in close contact in the years since Ted left YTS Security to work with Catrina.

  “That’s right Hero. I suspect I’m working on the same thing you are.”

  “So, you got it too.” Ted smiled and stuck his fork into the container of noodles. “We’re just taking a dinner break. You makin’ any progress?”

  He heard the sullenness in Bear’s voice. “Nothing. We’re rebuilding servers. We’ve got no idea how it got in.” Of course, sullenness was a daily habit of the stocky little man. “It’s everywhere.”

  “We’re lookin’ for computer zero. So far, we got nothin’. I’m strippin’ down and rebuildin’ the servers. We lost about half a day’s worth of data.”

  “You should keep up with the times, Hero.”

  Bear was the only one who still called him that. He hated it. He earned the nickname when he and Chris stopped a terrorist attack on a cruise ship on the Canada’s Inside Passage a decade earlier.

  “We’re doing hourly backups off our mirrored SAN network now,” Bear continued. “We never lose more than a few keystrokes.”

  “So you don’t know how it got into your system?”

  Ted heard Bear’s yawn on the other end of the line. “Don’t have a clue. As far as we can tell, it didn’t come in through email. We’re still tracking back all the websites anyone in the company visited, but so far haven’t found squat.”

  “Listen, Bear, if you come up with anything, let me know. You’ll have to call. I’ve shut down all external access to our systems.”

  “You, too? I doubt you’ll find it before I do, but there’s always a first time.”

  “Like the time I beat you in findin’ a way to hack into Justin’s personal files?” Ted grinned. “Poor, little ol’ me is always followin’ in your footsteps.”

  Ted turned the conversation back to business. “I haven’t tried to reverse engineer the code yet. It would help if we knew who wrote this thing. Whoever it was, they’re bordering on genius.”

  ****

  “Good evening. I’m Janet Petersen, welcome to News Front.” The theme song crescendoed and the camera panned out to show the anchor sitting behind her ebony desk. “Our story tonight: The CryBaby virus.”

  The entire Microsoft campus was in a hushed state. None of the usual bustle or people running around waving tablets at one another.

  “Shh …” Sam waved his arms at the room full of engineers. “Quiet, everybody, It’s on.” He pointed to the giant TV on the wall.

  “If you haven’t heard yet about the CryBaby virus, you’ve been living in a cave,” the blonde reporter said. “Hundreds of millions of computers world-wide running the Windows operating system have been infected. Billions of dollars in ransoms have been paid. I have special authorization to reveal that even this network paid the ransom so we could stay on the air.”

  A murmur filled the room.

  “We have reports that Microsoft is in full panic mode. They deal with viruses and other malware daily, but this is different. CryBaby is popping up all over the world. It started in Australia, but by the end of the day, Asia, Europe, the Americas, Hawaii, and the Pacific Islands were infected.”

  “Shit.” A young man dressed entirely in black with midnight-black hair and matching lip stick and mascara, shook his head. “That’s all we need. More pressure, more publicity.”

  “Shh … watch,” Sam responded.

  “The biggest crisis is currently in Great Britain,” Petersen went on, “where the medical systems have shut down. Hospitals can’t administer care and life-saving procedures were postponed. The British Minister of Health made the decision to pay the ransom to keep these vital systems on-line. We’ll have a full report on that in a minute.”

  “Come on, get to the root causes …” Sam whispered.

  “In Germany, the train system shut down.” Petersen spit the words out like machine gun fire. “In China, universities were hacked. There are reports of data held hostage in Australia, Turkey, India, Italy, Taiwan, the Philippines, Japan, Mexico, and more. Estimates of the economic impact are still being tabulated, but they could easily run into the tens of billions of dollars.” The images on the big TV screen followed her narrative.

  “You’re not going to believe this,” a young man with a Surface tablet on his lap shouted. “The virus isn’t coming from the outside. It’s not being spread over the Internet.”

  “Wha …” Sam couldn’t get the words out as the whole group fell silent.

  “According to the pop-up screen telling you that you’re infected,” Petersen went on, “the ransom is going to double tomorrow and will double every day for the next week. At the end of that time, the data will be lost forever.”

  Sam turned off the TV. No one at the Windows security work group in Redmond cared about News Front anymore. Everyone sprinted for their desks.

  ****

  Ted hadn’t been home, showered, or slept for two days. He could smell his own BO and was sure Marilyn moved her chair a little further away from him in the Flaherty & Associates network control room.

  Marilyn managed to step out, shower, and dress in the clean clothes her husband, Bill, brought to the office for her. Aside from Abiba, Ted didn’t have anyone to take care of him.

  Abiba, fresh as a spring flower, brought them food and coffee. Ted wasn’t sure if his stomach would survive any more coffee, no matter how good it was.

  “Mr. Ted,” Abiba said, and handed Ted a card. “You have a post card from Mrs. Flaherty.”

  Ted looked at the picture. It was a busy street scene with the caption Hong Kong in bright yellow letters. He turned over the card.

  “Having fun. Wish you were here,” was all that was written on the back.

  “Well, at least she’s not having to worry about any virus
es.” He handed the card to Marilyn.

  “Hmmm … looks exotic.” Marilyn fanned herself with the post card.

  “Okay, that’s server number sixteen,” Ted told Marilyn and pushed his rolling chair back from the desk.

  “How many do you have left?” Marilyn asked.

  “Four more and we’re up and running.”

  Marilyn sighed. “Ted, I went through every email we received. I searched hundreds of websites we visited. I don’t think the virus came from the outside.”

  “Then where could it have come from?” Ted scratched his head with a ball-point pen.

  “You remember Sherlock Holmes?”

  Ted knocked on his temple with the palm of his hand. “I was never a big mystery reader.”

  “Mr. Holmes said that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”

  Ted shook his head. He longed for sleep. He couldn’t quite put two and two together and understand what Marilyn told him. “Huh? I don’t get it. What are you saying?”

  “Think about it, boss. If it didn’t come from the outside, it must have come from the inside.”

  “Yeah?”

  “But it’s infected millions of computers all over the world. What do they all have in common?”

  Ted leaped from his chair. It clicked in his head. “Marilyn, you’re a genius.” He grabbed her face in both hands and planted a kiss on her forehead.

  “Oh, my.” Marilyn was so flustered she sank back in her chair.

  “When was the last Windows update? Look it up. I want to see that code.”

  Chapter 6

  Ted looked around the run-down tavern. It was more than a decade since he hung out here during his university days. The walls were still adorned with Dave Horsey cartoons. The old ones from the days Horsey worked for the now-defunct Seattle Post-Intelligencer. These pictures all depicted scenes from the University of Washington’s glory football days, under coach Don James.