Cyberwarfare

by Pendelton C. Wallace

  The DNI took a deep breath. “We tend to agree with Becky, I’d put my money on Iran. They have the means and the motivation. I can’t picture anyone else with the technical capabilities who’d benefit from this sort of attack.”

  The President held his eyes tight shut and bowed his head. Absolute silence held the room. “We need to do something. We need to show the world that we won’t stand for this kind of an attack. After nine/eleven, Bush took decisive action that shut down Al-Qaeda. We can do no less.”

  An excited murmur swept the room.

  “George,” the President said to the Secretary of Defense. “I want a plan for a retaliatory attack on Iran first thing in the morning. Becky, I expect your report with incontrovertible evidence we can present to the UN.”

  ****

  Master Sergeant Bill Stokes had the most boring job in the world. Day after day, hour after hour, he sat at his console in the Defense Information System Agency in Fort Meade, Maryland, and monitored the Department of Defense systems to make sure no one hacked in.

  The DoD systems were, for the most part, cut off from the rest of the world. There were only a few closely guarded access points to the Internet to prevent outsiders from getting in. The firewalls and security around those access points were virtually impenetrable.

  Sgt. Stokes sipped his coffee and worked on a sudoku puzzle. Nothing much ever happened. The best minds in the world constantly built and upgraded the security. The chances of him ever having to follow the emergency break-in protocol were practically nil.

  The red light on his console flashed and a klaxon alarm sounded. He dropped his puzzle and focused on his monitors. Throughout the system, servers were shutting down due to overloading.

  ****

  Captain Tom Jenkins’ back and shoulders ached from the responsibility he carried. His Burleigh-class destroyer carried enough ordinance on board to level a city the size of Manhattan. With the situation in the Middle East, he had been called upon to launch attacks before. His ship had participated in the attack on Syria a few months ago.

  Tom was a devout Christian man. The fact that this order, even though he was carrying out a direct order from the President of the United States, would kill innocent people made his stomach feel like a grinder. He was a warrior and killed when necessary for his country but detested the loss of life.

  He held in his hand the print-out of the coded message from the Commander in Chief. His ship and seven other U.S. Navy ships in the Persian Gulf received orders to attack Tehran.

  Tom stood in his state room looking out over the waves. He was a career naval officer, a graduate of Annapolis. He would never consider not following an order. But this …

  He followed the news. He accepted that his superiors had access to intel he’d never know. But they were attacking a city of almost nine million people. The combined might of eight guided-missile destroyers would virtually level the city. How many would die? Why? The collateral damage list could run into the billions.

  “Captain, Communications.” The voice burst over the speaker on the bulkhead.

  Tom pushed the button. “Go ahead, Sparky.”

  “Sir, all communications are down. I can’t raise anyone.”

  “I’m on my way.” Tom was out the door before his voice transmitted over the intercom.

  His cabin being only a few steps from the bridge, the Captain was on deck in moments.

  “What do we have, Number One?”

  His executive officer stepped up. “All communications have gone down. We can’t even talk to ships we can see.”

  “Do we have semaphore contact?”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  This could be the excuse Tom needed. He hesitated a moment. “Pass the word to the rest of the squadron. The attack will proceed as scheduled.” He turned to the small man at the next console. “Combat Command, prepare to launch missiles.”

  “Aye, aye. Prepare to launch missiles.”

  Tension overtook the bridge. Everyone’s senses went to high alert.

  “Missile Bay,” the Combat Command Officer spoke into his microphone, “you are cleared for launch.”

  Fire exploded from the missile tubes and the long, white rockets charged forth into the night sky. In seconds, their little wings extended, and the missiles hugged the terrain as they flew.

  “All tubes launched successfully, Sir.” CCO said.

  “May God help us all.”

  And maybe God was listening.

  “Sir,” the CCO checked his console. “None of the missiles have established contact with the ship.”

  “What? Double your signal strength.”

  “Not working. We have no control over those birds, Sir.”

  Thirty seconds is the blink of an eye, but also a lifetime. The Captain and the bridge crew watched the white trails of the missiles as they carried their load of death toward Tehran. But they were out of control; could they be certain that they were headed for Tehran?

  “Get Fleet on the line …” Then the Captain realized he had no contact with his superiors.

  A yellow fireball lit the night sky. Then another and another. Tom stopped counting when all of the missiles from his ship were accounted for. The explosions continued until every missile launched blew itself up.

  The Tomahawk Cruise Missile was programmed to contact launch control as soon as it cleared the launcher. If contact was not established within thirty seconds, the missile self-destructed.

  Chapter 21

  Bear wasn’t sure why he was obsessed with whoever released the CryBaby virus. He and Ted had discovered the Denial of Service (DoS) against the Defense Department quite by accident. Something in his gut told him they were related, but he really didn’t know how. It really wasn’t his business. No one paid him to hunt down the culprit, but he had to know.

  Once they figured out how the CryBaby virus spread, it was child’s play to determine the method used to launch the DoS attack. It used the same mechanisms as CryBaby. But, it was a time bomb sitting in the Windows source code. Bear needed to learn how it was activated.

  So far, he liked working for Ted. Ted didn’t question his intentions or tell him what he could and couldn’t work on. Bear felt Ted realized he was smart enough to plot his own path. Who knew what he would turn up? It wouldn’t be the first time some unintentional discovery made someone buckets of money.

  He sat at his workstation and tried trick after trick to find out how the dangerous code got slipped into the operating system. His stomach alarm went off. The clock said eight o’clock. He hadn’t been home for dinner in a week. Nancy was always good about this kind of situation, but when the mystery was solved, he would have to take her on a fancy vacation somewhere.

  Maybe an Alaska cruise …

  He read through the reports line by line. He could be incredibly anal when necessary. Emails, text messages, phone calls -- he looked at any way someone, or something, could access their network. The emails were the most likely. They could contain hidden code or a come-on to go to some website. Once the recipients clicked the button, they were toast.

  Bear grudgingly admitted that Ted did a good job training his staff and setting up security. Everything was done the way he would have done it. Maybe the kid did learn something from him.

  Something actived the DoS attack. Bear believed that it was sent out in a universal email that the DoD servers would hear. If it went out to all Windows computers, it had to have come into their system too.

  Jackknife software allowed him to see all the code in the header and footer packets on each email that arrived at Flaherty & Associates. It was mind-numbing work looking at line after line. A lesser man (or woman) might lose his (or her) concentration, but not Bear. He focused his considerable mental abilities on looking for the one black sheep, the one piece of information that didn’t belong.

  It was past midnight before he found it.

  “Eureka!” He leapt from his chair and did a little happy dance. “I’ve found you.
I’ve got you dead to rights, you clever bastard.”

  It was an email that came from a server in Germany. He worked backward to see where the email originated. Before it got to Flaherty & Associates, it bounced off a server in Ireland, then Nigeria, then, what was this? It originated in the States. The IP address -- it couldn’t be. He had hundreds, maybe thousands of IP addresses stored in his brain. He knew this one. He entered it in the Finder software Ted wrote to trace IP addresses back to street addresses and phone numbers.

  The phone rang five times before he heard Ted’s sleepy voice. “Hello?”

  “Ted, Bear. I’ve got ‘em. I’ve found where the virus started. You’re not going to believe this.”

  “Huh, what virus?” Ted was obviously fighting to wake up. “What are you talking about?”

  “I started out tracking the CryBaby virus. You know that. It was spread by a Windows patch, but something bothered me. I recognized some of the code. We determined it was originally written by the NSA.”

  “Why are you calling me in the middle of the night with old news?”

  “Listen. It didn’t feel right. I’d seen that code somewhere before. When I was in high school a bunch of my buddies and I thought it would be fun to see if we could hack the most secure network in the world.”

  “Huh …”

  “The Department of Defense. We found some cyberwarfare applications they’d written.”

  “Okay.”

  “Ted, you know the denial of service attack that hit DoD the other day? The one no one’s supposed to know about?”

  “Yeah.” Ted seemed suddenly interested.

  “We found that code years ago when we hacked in. This attack was perpetrated using their own code. And I just found out where it came from.”

  “Okay, I’ll bite.”

  “It came from a Seattle network owned by Flaherty & Associates. It was sent out under Ted Higuera’s account.”

  ****

  Ted arrived at the office in record time. He inhaled coffee and followed Bear’s logic. It was true -- he launched the denial of service attack on the DoD.

  He walked back to his office and plopped down in his chair. The office still held Catrina’s first partner, Jonathon Jackson’s dark cherrywood furniture, but it was “Tedized.” On the wall opposite his desk was a giant print of a Spiderman picture signed by Stan Lee and Johnny Romita. On his brag wall, instead of degrees and photos of Ted with celebrities, there were pictures of Mexican Revolutionaries, ghetto kids, and American football players.

  How did they do it? Why did they use my account? I’m a nobody.

  There was zero possibility that some terrorist singled him out for a scape-goat.

  And that was the problem. The NSA wouldn’t sit on their asses on this one. They had to find out how they were hacked and who did it. But why me? They could have used any one of billions of accounts to launch their attack, why me?

  “Ted, got a minute?” Mary Beth apparently arrived at work early too.

  “Uh … I’m trying to work out a problem. Why? What’s up?”

  Mary Beth didn’t wait to be invited in. She sat in the chair across from Ted’s desk. “We did an extraction yesterday. By the way, Abiba was marvelous.” Mary Beth pried the lid off her paper coffee cup. “There’s something about the husband that bothers me that I think you should know.”

  “Okay.” Ted focused his mind on her story. “Whatcha got?”

  “The husband is named Samir Hussaini.”

  Ted held up his hand. “Wait a minute. I know that name.” His mind pulled up the relevant data. “I just met with him.”

  “I would say his activities are suspicious. I don’t know what he’s doing, but it isn’t good.”

  Ted pulled a yellow tablet and pen from his desk. “What’s he up to?”

  Mary Beth took a gulp of her rapidly cooling coffee. “Well, he’s gone from home for long periods of time. He won’t tell his wife where he’s been. His presence is unaccounted for. He’s not at work; I checked.”

  “Uhuh ...”

  “He won’t let Jennifer listen in on his phone calls.”

  “Jennifer?”

  “His wife, our client. Her real name is Jennifer Hussaini. She says he has two cell phones. When he gets a call on the one she doesn’t recognize, he always clears the room. He won’t give her that phone number.”

  Ted scribbled like crazy on his note pad.

  “He can be perfectly fine,” Mary Beth went on. “He can be the ideal husband. Then he gets a call on the secret phone and goes crazy.”

  Ted looked up from his notes. “Any idea who he’s talking to?”

  “No. It’s a burner phone. He’s a chameleon. He blends in with American society, he has an important job at …”

  “Microsoft.”

  “Ah … yeah. But he still holds the old country values. He’s very strict with his family. He wants America to come under Sharia law.”

  Ted leaned back in his chair and tented his fingers. “That makes him and about a million other people in this country.”

  Mary Beth sat her cup on Ted’s desk and stared into his eyes. “Ted, we extracted the family because I was afraid he would do an honor killing. This guy’s half a bubble off level. I think he’s capable of violence. I thought you should know about it because he’s a big IT guy. He works for Microsoft. That comes under your domain, doesn’t it?”

  “Uh … yeah.” Ted closed his eyes and nodded

  “I don’t like to be prejudiced, but this worries me.” Ted looked up at the picture of Spiderman on his wall. “Sam’s the head of the Windows security team at Microsoft. He has old fashioned values. I gave him the patch to fix the Wall Street virus. He wants Sharia law. He’s a danger to his family.” The wheels whirled in Ted’s head. “Oh my God.”

  Ted picked up the phone and pushed the buttons. “Bear, Ted. Listen, do we know if Microsoft has deployed our fix for the Wall Street virus yet?”

  Ted listened a moment. “Well find out. Now.”

  He turned back to Mary Beth. “There was just a major hack against the Department of Defense. Bear traced the source of the hack back to us, me. Someone set me up to take the fall.”

  His face tightened. “At Microsoft, someone injected the Wall Street virus into their Windows source code. When I gave the fix to Sam, he said he would put it in the next release. If he hasn’t done that, I have to ask why?”

  Mary Beth nodded.

  “He doesn’t fix the virus, then somehow, I attack the Department of Defense. It all smells fishy to me.”

  Chapter 22

  The savanna grasslands stretch on forever, occasionally sprinkled with flat-topped umbrella thorn trees. The grass tears at Abiba’s knees as she runs. Something is out there, something stalking her.

  It’s only steps behind her. She looks over her shoulder, nothing. She hears the heavy breathing. She must find a place to hide, but the rolling grasslands offer no sanctuary.

  The tree! The umbrella tree is her only hope. If she could reach the tree, she would be safe.

  She runs faster, faster than she’d ever run before.

  Then she heard it. The unmistakable roar of a lion. It’s right behind her. She looks over her shoulder, nothing there. Then the roar again.

  She makes it to the tree. She claws her way up into the branches. She is safe.

  At the base of the tree, a massive lion, in all his grandeur, roars up at her. It paws the tree. Abiba shrieks in fear.

  The huge lion sinks his front claws into the tree and pulls himself up. Then he anchors his rear claws and reaches higher up the tree. Inch by inch he comes closer.

  The lion reaches the lower branches. He pauses and stares at her. Then he roars again.

  Abiba moves out further onto the branch. It bends under her weight. How far out could she go? If the lion comes out on the branch after her, would it break?

  The lion stares at her. Not making a sound, the big cat slowly inches his way out on the branch. Abiba ho
lds her breath.

  Does he dare come all the way out?

  The branch creaks and sags. The lion must be twice her weight.

  The lion stops and looks at her. There is fire in his eyes.

  “I am the Lion of God,” the cat says and transforms into a man.

  Abiba screams. She knows this man.

  She sits up in bed, covered in sweat and tangled in her sheets. Tears flow down her face. Now she knows. She must tell Ted, to save him.

  ****

  The safehouse was dark, empty but for the Lion of God. Assad might as well have been a statue. He sat staring at his computer screen, not moving. The only sound was the constant tick, tick, tick of the old wall clock.

  The infidel is close. He knows who I am.

  How could Assad stop Higuera? He’d already tried to kill him three times, but each time the slippery Mexican escaped. What next? He told his superiors he would handle it.

  His computer beeped, and a red light flashed on his screen.

  They’ve taken the bait.

  Maybe the NSA would do the job for him. Assad had set a flag in the Flaherty & Associates’ system to let him know when law enforcement found his little surprise. They were hacking into the system at that moment.

  He punched a few keys on his keyboard and a window opened. He could see every keystroke the Feds made.

  They’ve got him. They know he hacked the Department of Defense. A smile spread across Assad’s face.

  Now is the time.

  He’d been waiting for this moment for weeks. When the clumsy government agents finally found his trail of bread crumbs, he was ready to act.

  With a few key strokes he initialized a program that gave him access to the FBI’s databases. Grinning from ear to ear, he began to insert records.

  First, the miserable infidel had been charged with rape in high school. The record was expunged because he was a football star.

  Next, he inserted records detailing Higuera’s illegal hacking when he worked at YTS security. He hadn’t been charged because the law hadn’t caught up with the technology and what he did was not illegal.