Cyberwarfare

by Pendelton C. Wallace

  Johnson nodded and took a deep breath. “I suppose they might be on the list. They certainly have world-class hacking capabilities, but, once again, I ask what does this profit them? How do they make money by sending our country back to the stone age?”

  “Well, damnit!” The President slammed his hand down on the table. “This is an act of war. We need to know who’s behind it. This kind of attack warrants a military response. George?”

  The Secretary of Defense straightened his tie. “Mr. President, the military stands ready to respond to any acts of war. As soon as we have identified a target, we can strike within twenty-four hours. Less if it’s in the Middle East, Russia, or China. We have the capability to wreak havoc on their systems electronically, or we could respond militarily.”

  “Mr. President,” the Veep interjected, “this could lead to all out warfare. It could be World War Three.”

  “I don’t want a war any more than you do, but we can’t allow anyone to attack us and let it go unchallenged.”

  “If I were a betting man,” the Secretary of Defense cut in, “I would put my money on Iran. They have the capability and they hate us. They’ve sworn to destroy Israel and there is a substantial portion of their population who would love to see us on our knees.”

  “George, you can’t be so cavalier with your opinions.” The Secretary of State, a tall, thin, cadaverous man, answered. “The truth is, we just don’t know at this point. We need more information. I strongly caution against making any threatening advances until we know for certain who this enemy is. I’m sure every other technologically advanced country on Earth is ramping up their defenses.”

  ‘I want answers and I want them now.” The Presidents voice rose to an unusual level. “I want the military to go to DefCon 2. I want the terror threat level to be raised to red.”

  ****

  Candles lit the courtyard and the smoke from incense was thick. Abiba knelt in front of the stone altar and placed corn, fruit, and a small dead bat on the ground-down stone. She placed straw on top of the food, then small pieces of kindling.

  “Waaq, all powerful, father of all things. It is I, Abiba, daughter of Deliliah, come to beseech your help.” She lit a wooden match and set her offering smoking.

  She looked up at the dark sky filled with stars. “Dearest Waaq, I know you are up there. I know you hear me. Your faithful servant begs succor and understanding of this suffering. I beg of you, show me he who would crush all but the daylight from our lives. Please, show me the man I seek.”

  A light breeze swirled around the courtyard. The smoke in the offering flared into a blaze of flame. Smoke filled the open space.

 

  “Oh spirit-man. Come forward. Speak to me.”

  Abiba opened her eyes. In the twisting flame of her offering, she saw the form of a dark man.

 

  “I need to know why. Why are you raining these pestilences on us? What have we done?”

  The man grew in stature until he towered over Abiba.

  The path of Allah? Was that what this is about? “Spirit from over the seas, where are you now. How can I find you?”

 

  “I want to talk with you. To convince you that I have not forgotten the ways of my fathers. You must believe me. You are hurting many, many people. You must give me the key to stop the pain.”

 

  The man faded into the smoke. Abiba stared into the diminishing flames. She saw the man walking up a concrete path towards a massive apartment complex. Grass and trees surrounded the buildings.

  Then the smoke swirled away, and the courtyard was clear. Abiba rose from her knees, said one last prayer and departed.

  ****

  Dr. Elaine Jefferson, the head of the National Security Agency’s Tailored Access Operations (TAO), took a rare moment to sip her tea and enjoy the peace before the chaos of the day broke loose.

  TAO, one of the world’s elite cyberwarfare teams, never slept. Elaine pushed a button on her desktop and the glass walls of her office turned opaque to shut out the bustle of the office.

  Her office was a blend of tradition and tech. Paneled in dark cherry-wood, the wall panels could slide up to reveal an array of flat-screen monitors. The monitor on her desk gave her instantaneous access to everything from spy-satellite images to the daily lunch menu at Ray’s Diner on Twenty-seventh Street.

  She needed to catch her breath. Too much was happening too fast. She put both elbows on her polished cherry-wood desk and held her head.

  Someone hacked the country’s most secure networks and unleashed chaos. It was her job to prevent this from ever happening. She had failed.

  A jackhammer pounded in the back of her head. Her vision closed into a narrow tunnel. She took a hydrocodone pill from the bottle in her desk drawer, then started to put the bottle back. Oh, what the hell? She opened the bottle and withdrew another pill. She popped them into her mouth and chased them with hot tea.

  “Elaine, got a minute?” John Archer, her number two, knocked softly at her door.

  “Uh … yeah, John. What you got?”

  John entered the room and closed the door behind him. “You got the ‘cone of silence’ on?”

  The Cone of Silence, an electronic jamming application, made it impossible for anyone outside the room to hear their conversation.

  Just the sound of John’s voice tore the growing crack in her brain apart. She pushed a button on her desktop. “Okay.”

  “We have a break.” John took a chair opposite her desk. “We know who unleashed the CryBaby virus. These guys are good. Real good. It’s taken us days, but we’ve finally managed to work our way through their maze of servers to locate the source.”

  “Well …?” She knew her reply was curt, but she couldn’t help herself.

  “It came from Seattle.” John sank back into his chair.

  “Seattle? But …”

  “Yeah, I know.” A big smirk spread across John’s face. “I was sure it was a foreign terrorist, too. But it could be a domestic terrorist, or just a bunch of crooks trying to make an illegal buck.”

  The pain started to creep back into her head. “Uh … so, who is it? Where did it come from?”

  “That’s the weird part.” John shook his head. “It came from a company called Flaherty & Associates. They’re a PI and cyber-security firm. They have a good reputation. We have a file on the principals. They’re both clean as a virgin’s dreams. Never any trouble up to now. As a matter of fact, they’re both sort of vigilantes, crusading against the evil in the world.”

  Elaine rubbed at her temples. Will this pain ever go away? The only thing that helped was to lie down in a dark, quiet room. “So, why would two goodie-two-shoes go rogue?”

  “I’ve got my contacts at the Bureau working on it. So far, we know that there are two registered owners of the company. A Catrina Flaherty and an Eduardo Higuera.”

  John pulled a paper from the folder in his hands. “Flaherty was a police woman, filed a major sexual harassment suit against the Port of Seattle Police Department. Won. Started her own detective agency.”

  He read down the page. “She brought Higuera on board about six years ago. He’s a computer whiz. They opened a cyber-security department and have been doing pretty well. This Higuera’s already on the Bureau’s radar. Apparently, he was involved in a terrorist incident in Canada a few
years ago and has been up to his ears in the drug wars in Mexico. Every time he goes down there, some drug lord or another ends up dead.”

  A steady tap-tap-tapping drove Elaine to the brink of madness. Won’t it ever stop? She looked down and realized that her fingers were tapping the end of her ink pen on the desk. “So, I repeat, why would they go rogue?”

  “We don’t know … yet.”

  “Is the Bureau bringing them in?”

  “They’re gonna watch them for a while, see if anything else turns up. They’ll tap their phones and monitor all their transmissions. They’ve got a twenty-four-hour tail on Higuera. They can’t find Flaherty. We’ll hack their network and examine every file on their system. Whatever they’re up to, we’re gonna know before they do.”

  Chapter 18

  “He hit me!” Jane’s face reddened with fear and indignation. “The bastard hit me. I’m done. I can’t live like this anymore.”

  Two days after the massive power outage, life started to return to normal. Emergency power was on in necessary facilities. The police answered 9-1-1 calls and hospitals were up and running. Fires still smoldered throughout the city.

  Mary Beth sat on the love seat across from Jane in Catrina’s office. Jane’s Dooney and Bourke purse sat on the glass-topped coffee table. Mary Beth looked at the woman. “Are you ready to get out?”

  “He disappeared for two days. Then when I asked him where he’d been, he hit me. Then he took off again, and I haven’t seen or heard from him since.”

  Mary Beth moved over and put an arm around Jane’s shoulder. “I’m so sorry . . .”

  “We can’t stay there anymore.” Tears flowed from Jane’s eyes. “He’s not the same man I married, and I have no idea what he might do next.”

  Mary Beth ran over Catrina’s battered-woman checklist in her mind. “We can get you and the kids out. We can take you to a safe place.”

  Jane shook her head. “You don’t understand. He has friends. They’ll hunt us down. There’s no such thing as a safe place.”

  The September sunshine filtered through the vertical blinds, throwing shadows that looked like prison bars on the wall. “Don’t worry. We’ve done this before. We have a whole organization …”

  “That’s it. He has an organization. I never thought of it before. I’ve seen him with these men. They’re all tough-looking, Middle Eastern men. He says that if I ever leave, they will hunt me down and kill me.”

  “We have safe houses, Jane. Let me worry about that. We can even move you out of state if we need to, get you and your children new identities. We’ve been doing this a long time. We know how to handle it.”

  ****

  “We have another post card from Mrs. Flaherty, Mr. Ted.” Abiba danced into Ted’s office with the mail. Nothing cheered her more than hearing from Catrina.

  “Where is she this time?” Ted asked.

  “This looks like Venice. That girl sure gets around.”

  Hmmm … Ted thought, Venice. Hong Kong. Australia. How far does she have to run to escape her ghosts?

  “GADZOOKS!” Bear’s roar filled the office. “Hey, Hero, you gotta see this.”

  Ted sprang from his chair and ran to Bear’s bullpen. “Whatcha got?”

  “Look at this,” the furry red man said. “We’re being hacked.”

  “No shit.”

  Bear turned his monitor so Ted could see it. “I found this this morning. I’ve been working all day trying to find out where the hackers came from.”

  Ted knew that Bear enjoyed his moments, so he let him go on.

  “Don’t you want to know?” Bear asked.

  “Hell, yeah.”

  Bear turned in his swivel chair to face Ted and crossed his arms. “The NSA.”

  Both men stared at each other for a long minute. Ted broke the silence. “The NSA? But … why? Why would the NSA be interested in us?”

  “I can’t tell you, Kemosabe.” A grin spread across Bear’s face. “But we’ve got to shut them down.”

  Ted pondered that for a moment. “No … I think … I think we need to welcome them in.”

  “Huh?”

  “Yeah, that’s it.” A big smile spread across Ted’s face. “I want to know why they’re hacking us. What they’re up to.”

  “Are you talking about building a honey pot?”

  Ted nodded. “Can you tell when they first hit us? How long they’ve had access to our system?”

  Bear turned back to his keyboard and typed in a command. “Looks like last night, around eleven o’clock. This was just a first jab. They didn’t get into much of anything.”

  “Perfect. Set up the honey pot. We’ll build a whole virtual network for them to browse around in, we’ll put the stuff there we want them to see. When we find out what they’re looking at, we should be able to tell why they’re hacking us.”

  Bear ran his hands through his bushy hair. “Gotcha. Jody and I’ll start on it right away. You figure out what kind of stuff you want us to give’em.” Bear leaned back in his chair with his hands behind his head. “This is better than the movies.”

  Ted strolled back to his desk lost in thought. Why us? What do we have that they want? Are they investigating an individual or are they just fishing? Don’t they need a court order for this? Oh my God! Maria. I better call Chris.

  Ted reached for his smart phone, clicked on an icon and said, “Chris Hardwick.” In a moment, Chris answered.

  “What’s up, amigo?” Chris’s voice almost gave Ted a shred of hope.

  “Hey, Chris. I got a problem. I need some legal advice.”

  “You know,” Ted heard a tinge of irritation in Chris’s voice, “anyone else I’d charge four hundred dollars an hour and tell them to make an appointment. So, what’s the problem?”

  “We’re being hacked. The NSA broke into our system last night.”

  “The NSA? Holy shit. What have you guys been up to?”

  Ted took a calming breath. “That’s what I want to find out. I can’t help but believe it has something to do with Maria. Don’t they have to have a court order or a search warrant to do this?”

  There was a momentary pause. “I’m not up on all the niceties of the Patriot Act, but if they say it’s a matter of national security, they can do just about anything they want. I’ll check with the courts in D.C. to see if they’ve issued a warrant, but I’ll bet good money that there’s no warrant. If I remember correctly, they can get the attorney general’s approval to administer a search without informing the party to be searched. That allows them to get into your network, browse around, and not tell you they’re there.”

  “What ever happened to the Land of the Free?” Ted leaned back in his chair and scratched his head with a pen.

  “Nine/eleven happened.”

  “Crap. So they could have the legal authority to do this?”

  “They could. Or they could be ignoring the legal system all together. Under certain circumstances, the NSA can conduct these searches without going to the courts.”

  Ted shook his head. “So, we’re powerless to stop them?”

  “Let me do some digging, Ted. I’ll get back to you this afternoon or tomorrow.”

  Ted hung up his phone and nodded his head.

  “How’s the honey pot coming?” Ted asked as Bear walked past his office door.

  Bear walked back and stood in the doorway. “Making progress. Jody’s set up the virtual servers and is doing a great job with firewalls, proxy servers, and such. They won’t know they’re not in our real system. We need to get the list of files and applications that you want them to see.”

  “I’m working on it. I’ll have it to you in an hour.”

  It was less than an hour when Ted heard, “Hey, Hero.”

  He hated it when Bear called him that.

  “Look at this.”

  Ted ran back to Bear’s desk.

  “These guys got sloppy. Who do they think they’re dealing with?” Bear turned his monitor again so that Ted co
uld see it. “They left a key hole open for us.”

  “No way. No one’s that stupid.”

  Bear swiveled to face Ted. “Yep, yep, yep. These idiots held the hole open so they could get back in easy. That means we can go through it to get at them.”

  “Well, stop wasting your time. Get in there.” He waved a hand towards Bear’s monitor.

  It didn’t take Bear long to start feeding Ted data.

  After hours of pouring through meaningless documents, Ted had enough. He got up, stretched and headed for the break room. Any of those bagels left from this morning?

  There were. He toasted a cinnamon-raisin bagel, slathered it with peanut butter, brewed himself a cup of coffee and headed back to his desk.

  A new folder full of NSA files was on Ted’s desktop. He clicked and opened File Explorer.

  More useless trash, until he stumbled upon a file labeled “CryBaby Virus – Top Secret.”

  Oh well, in for a penny, in for a pound. He opened the file. It challenged him for a password.

  He opened his Cracker application and let it hack the password for him. He’d been fine-tuning this password cracking app since he first wrote it all those years ago at YTS Security. In a few seconds the light on his dashboard turned green and the file opened.

  “Holy shit.” It was that day’s report on the CryBaby virus. They still didn’t know how it was spreading, but they knew where it came from. The NSA created the virus as one of many cyberwarfare tools they built. But someone got a hold of the code, modified it, and turned it loose on the world.

  No way. According to the report, Ted Higuera unleashed the virus and was collecting millions of Bitcoins in his account.

  Chapter 19

  “Abiba, I need you to come with me.” Mary Beth strode through the office with purpose. She entered Catrina’s office -- she still couldn’t think of it as hers -- and opened the locked desk drawer.

  The ugly black Glock 17 semi-automatic pistol lay in the drawer, along with a box of cartridges, and an expandable steel night stick. Mary Beth stared at the contents. She’d never carried a weapon on a job before.