Buzzworm (A Technology Thriller): Computer virus or serial killer?

by Theo Cage

  "My orders come from the Director at Langley. That's our law around here. You can talk to him. He reports directly to the President."

  I glared at her for a minute, then turned back to the body. She threw in the reference to the President like it should end the conversation. I was guessing I wouldn’t be talking to either the President or the Director of the CIA in this case. I would be buried in the basement along with all the other old files. Then I smiled, a big self-effacing grin that I hoped would be hard for her to resist.

  I shook my head. The brass was always there. Sometimes you just couldn’t see them. But you could always smell them.

  "You CIA types. National security. Covert operations. The problems of the world on your shoulders. Weighty matters. And then here lies Frank, valued employee, now dead. And I'm just a cop off the streets who can't do a damn thing to help you figure out why. Cause the evidence's gone." I closed my book and filed my pen away in an inside pocket. Then I turned for the door.

  “Where are you going?" she asked.

  "Gonna call the boys in blue to come pick up this mess. Not much more I can do here."

  "But you haven't even looked at anything, done any investigation!"

  I stopped, shoved my hands into my coat pockets. "I know a cleaned room when I see one. You people are good. Really good. All that's left is the blood. And I'm sure you have something in your bag of tricks to make that go away too."

  I reached for the door, and then turned back to the color wall photo. "By the way, can I get you guys to do one of those with me in bed with Beyonce too? That would look great in the rec room." She stared at me. I stood there, my shoulders hunched over, trying to look as guileless as possible.

  "I… can't believe that… "

  "The Beyonce thing? Hey. It's no big deal. I know you're the CIA. You got bigger fish to fry."

  "I don't have time for games, detective."

  "Too busy re-writing all those rule books?"

  Jo's complexion was turning pink. "The Washington Police tell us they're sending their best detective. You show up, take one look at the… "

  I pointed. "Crime scene?"

  "Yes. One look at the crime scene, and then you disappear for lunch. We have donuts in our cafeteria too, you know!"

  I squinted at her. "Ahhhh. A donut joke." I looked at my watch, a scratched Seiko that was a gift many years ago from my wife. "Usually it comes quicker though. Right after the introductions."

  She stared at me.

  "What was Frank working on?" I asked.

  "I told you, I can't say."

  "OK. Why not just give me a hint. Before anyone else shows up. I promise I won't phone the Post."

  She put both hands in the pockets of her lab coat. "Video. He built programs that manipulated video. I can’t say anymore and I don’t see how it’s relevant to his death."

  "Video’s of?"

  "Detective Hyde, imagine a foreign country is preparing an attack on one of the military installation owned by an ally. They think it only holds a few tanks, a few planes. No big problem for them. We take photos inside and then manipulate them so that it appears that the area is bristling with deadly technology. A dozen F-18's. A few bombers. We create a video out of the imagery. We send it out to the news media. They broadcast it. The enemy sees it. It cools their ardor for the attack."

  I was impressed. "But Frank's not the only guy who knows how to do this stuff. Hollywood is full of 'em."

  She closed her eyes — started to take a deep breath — and then winced. Her father may have been a country doctor, but it still hadn't prepared her for the smell of death in a small closed room. "He was one of the best, but you're right."

  "No motive there then? No international incident. But then, you guys have already figured that out."

  "Pardon?"

  "There was a murder at Langley. In '67. You didn't think we knew about it? You people were so deep into the cold-war thing then, you probably though it wasn't even necessary to call the good old Washington Police."

  She folded her arms. "I obviously wasn't here in '67. I wasn’t even born yet."

  "But you knew about it." She sat down in one of the computer chairs, swiveled back and forth for a moment. "So, what do you know about Frank?" I asked, pulling out my trusty no batteries required note pad again.

  She sounded weary. She was a classic A type, ready to wind down into tears, but working hard to hold it back. "He was a technoid. Built his own graphics stations. Wrote some of the first software we used for simulations back in the nineties. Quiet type. As you can see, a bit eccentric for the CIA. But some kind of genius. He kept to himself. And for all we can tell, he died because of a computer virus. I guess that's somehow appropriate."

  I stood back on my heels, stretching. It had been about twenty-four hours since I slept last. "Computer virus? Now I thought those things only messed up computers. You think they're going after people now, too?"

  She was searching for the height adjustment on the chair, her feet not quite touching the floor. "I don't know what to think. We've been sensitive to this virus business ever since a sixteen-year-old kid shut down the entire early-warning system in the late 90's. With a virus he wrote in his high school computer class."

  I moved around the room, expecting our forensic team to arrive at any minute. "Yeah. I heard about that one. I don't remember any bodies involved though."

  She took a deep breath. "We have what is supposed to be the most sophisticated computer firewall system in the world. A wall that stops everything. Nothing gets through… that is, until about two months ago. We've had dozens of hits since then."

  I looked up from my notes, so Jo explained, "Every time we get a security breach we call it a hit. This thing comes in, messes up files, screws up whatever it can, then disappears, like a hit and run driver. It's even started leaving messages with our staff."

  "Have you got copies?"

  "You mean copies of the message? Only one. We got lucky and captured one yesterday."

  I squinted at her. She expected I would have lost my patience by now. "Pictures. Movies. Some of it pornographic."

  I frowned and shook my head. "Just another sicko hacker on the loose?"

  "When you say hacker, that infers someone getting access over high-speed data lines. The techs assure me that can't happen here. Even God himself couldn't place a call into this building if we didn't want him to."

  "So how does the virus get in?"

  "We don't know. And since this thing is definitely a virus, it still has to be in here somewhere. It's what they call a worm. It wiggles in and then goes into hiding, waiting to pop up again. In a way, it's never gone. We've got some worm expert from Canada working on it as we speak."

  I stopped writing. "You had to import a worm expert? The CIA couldn't come up with one of their own?"

  "It's a very specialized field." The obviousness of that statement hung in the air for a moment. Worm experts. I didn't think it was appropriate to laugh in the company of a fresh corpse so I just chewed on my lip.

  "You think Frank was involved?"

  She shrugged, not terribly surprised by the question. "His job was to create very realistic but false environments. Real enough to fool the other guys. One of our technicians said the virus was like watching MTV from Hell. So we can’t rule the possibility out." She jumped down off the chair. “That stays here by the way. As I said, this is all very classified.”

  "Could this have been a game for him? A little espionage of his own? Was he happy?"

  "Who knows?” She was clearly puzzled by the question. “I thought he liked the work. But he was pretty much a loner. Divorced for ten years. Had a daughter, but he never talked about her. Not much of a life outside of his work."

  "We’ll need the computers he had in this room before you cleaned it. All of them. There may be something there that gives us a clue as to what he was up to. You going to let me look at those other files? The one you captured?"

  "Of course."
>
  I scanned the room one more time. "I don't know about this virus. But I do know he wasn't killed by a computer bug."

  "He died at precisely the time we had a record of this virus violating his computer."

  "Coincidence," I said.

  "How can you be so sure?"

  "Frank was in a hurry to die. There's no sign of a struggle. Pretty hard to have another person slice your abdominal wall open and not get their foot prints in the offal."

  "Wha… " She looked up, shock blasting the color out of her cheeks.

  "I've seen it before. It's not pretty, but it works, Frank committed Hari Kari."

  "My God!"

  "And he did it with the sharpest thing he could find in a hurry — which means this wasn't very well thought out."

  "With what?" she asked.

  "A screwdriver," I answered.

  CHAPTER 7

  Roger Strange had over ten years experience with computer viruses of all kinds. He had written several himself — had tracked down and eliminated hundreds.

  What Roger was working on today was a variation known as a worm. Worms were a key weapon in modern computer warfare; they were viruses that knew how to replicate. The suspicion was that Buzzworm had somehow infected the entire intelligence community by spreading through internal email and messaging. Roger was fairly certain, given what he had been told so far, that Buzzworm was also a Trojan. Trojans were designed to sneak into networks under cover. Since the virus couldn’t be found by conventional means, it was assumed that it was hiding somehow. And since it had infected every network in U.S. intelligence community, the virus must be a replicating worm.

  Roger Strange's job at this point was simple. Find the Trojan. Clean it out.

  One of the clues to tracking down a virus, was knowing what its intentions were. Roger knew that viruses have several purposes — some serious, some inane.

  One very common virus that spread to millions of desktop PCs in the late ninety’s, was called Hellstrom. At some point in the middle of someone’s work, a computer-generated ant would come crawling across the screen and begin feasting on the letters or numbers in the document. It was very entertaining and quite clever. Hellstrom was also a huge nuisance, but hardly a disaster. Cleaning it out was also a fairly simple procedure. Other viruses with more nefarious purposes were designed to just lay low and hide until a specific time or date. Then they would come to life and suddenly begin devouring entire files; sometimes wipe out an entire network of hard drives full of years of work.

  As viruses became more sophisticated, so did their instructions. They have been evolving and growing better defenses the same way a biological virus mutates. More and more, Roger was seeing evidence of files not just being zapped by a virus, but being carted away. The virus would open a port or a backdoor that would give a remote hacker unrestricted access to the user’s files, and even monitor keyboard activity or the users webcam. Ultimately a backdoor virus could take over complete control of a computer, without the user being aware.

  Most of Roger’s clients, from a business he ran before he got an all-expense paid trip to Overton, used firewalls to protect themselves from viruses and spam. A firewall was like an electronic moat that surrounded your office or company and warned if some hostile caller was trying to break in. The better ones, translate expensive, could track down the culprits and even automatically notify the police.

  The hacker group that Strange worked with on the original CIA firewall, had quietly added a clever little add-on. They were fairly confident that they had come up with an unbreakable wall. But should some clever programmer find a way in, they wanted to be alerted first. So they could respond in their own special way. The alert was simple; a text message to everyone on the team with pertinent information about where the attack came from. It was a simple reverse hack. Problem was, they had never received an alert. Whoever had crafted Buzzworm, had somehow worked around their secret fire alarm. How was that possible without having almost unprecedented access to the entire CIA system?

  There was no question: Buzzworm was state-of-the-art. For Roger, step one was elementary. He had gone through the extensive CIA network carefully, where he was allowed, which was literally 99% barring some data files that were locked, and using several up-to-date products, was searching for a few telltale virus traits. Like searching for fingerprints left at a crime scene. A few showed up, but they turned out to be the residue of a couple of garden-variety bugs that only resided on personal hard drives, testimony to how prevalent these damn things were becoming. Roger cleaned these out and left messages for the appropriate employees, warning them to be more careful in the future about bringing outside software into the CIA system or loading stuff off the Internet indiscriminately.

  After completing that task, he was left with absolutely no other evidence of an infection anywhere. In order for a virus to sneak into a computer, it either has to tack itself on to another program, in which case you can look for programs that are bigger in size than they should be, or make themselves invisible or hidden. The problem was that few of the programs used by the CIA were off-the-shelf. That meant extensive research on every file, and that was time consuming.

  Buzzworm, as sophisticated as it was, also had to be enormous in size. This was the ultimate in hacker arrogance. It showed clearly that someone had no doubt they could find their way back in, any time they wanted. Through the very security system that Roger and his friends had helped.

  Roger had come to hate the hacker, or team of hackers, that was behind Buzzworm. First, they had challenged his special industrial strength firewall. That meant they had beaten him. Second, they had access to one of the world’s most secretive computer systems, a hacker’s dream, and that was his fault. Finally, they had thwarted his early warning system. How long had they had access and for what purpose, no one was sure. And finally, they had cleaned up and closed the doors behind them without leaving a trace. Roger was beyond frustration. At one point, he had smashed down on his keyboard with such fury that he had to ask Vienna for a replacement.

  Roger was hunched over his new keyboard in the tiny room they had found for him, a closet really, no phone, nothing on the walls, the only sound the buzz of the air-conditioning, when he heard a slight rap on the door-frame. He turned expecting to see Jo.

  "I hear you're working on our virus problem." She was blonde, late twenties, in a dark gray suit, white blouse, no jewelry. Beautiful face and almost no make-up. Serious type.

  "More like it's working on me," he said, rubbing his stubby fingers. Roger found the whole building cold and impersonal. And some management-type must have decided that people worked more efficiently if the air-conditioning was running constantly at max. "By the way, is it always this cold in here? Or are they afraid that Vienna will thaw out?"

  She didn’t smile. She folded her arms over her chest and shivered. "You get used to it. Long underwear is very big around here."

  Roger stood and extended his hand. "My name's Roger." She took it firmly, not seeming to notice his truncated fingers.

  "Mary Ellen," she said. "But around here they call me Med."

  Roger cocked his head. "Are you one of the staff doctors?" He thought maybe they'd sent a shrink to check him out.

  She was surprised by that thought. "I wish. I could use the pay-scale." Out of habit, Roger checked his screen to see if there was something there he should hide from prying eyes. Was she just curious? Or checking him out for security reasons. At least they hadn't sent Dodge again. Somehow he had the sense that she was waiting to be invited in, but Roger couldn't imagine the two of them fitting in the room at the same time, though he was willing to give it a try. "Years ago, no one in the CIA was supposed to use their full name on memos and internal docs," she volunteered. "So we got into the habit of using nicknames. Mine was MED. It’s my initials. Unfortunately, these things stick with you."

  Strange looked surprised. "You've been here that long?"

  "Long enough to become p
aranoid," she said with a straight face.

  He sat back in his chair, clearing the screen he was working on. "I don't know. I've only been here a day, and I'm already showing signs of schizophrenia."

  Med smiled in a distracted way and looked behind her into the general work area, which was crowded with medium gray dividers and dozens of computer operators. Roger imagined them going through millions of overseas fax documents or electronic emails, looking for clues to subversive activity. Professional peeping toms. Then she turned back to him and said in a conspiratorial tone "We don't usually get our head of security to rough up visitors quite so soon. We usually wait a few days. In your case, they made an exception." The last line was said with such seriousness, Roger felt he had to respond.

  "I had absolutely nothing to do with..."

  "I know," she said quietly, before he could finish. Roger found he didn't know what to say to that. How did she know? And what did she know? She stood there, like something was on her mind, but wary.

  "Where would someone get a coffee around here?" Roger asked.

  “Vienna asked me to fill you in as much as I could on our systems. So I guess that could include a coffee.” She nodded in the direction of the hallway to the left. "Follow me."

  Roger stepped out of his small office and locked the door. He guessed she was management. She carried herself like someone who knew what she was doing, someone with the keys to the place. "What do you do here, Med?"

  She turned and slowed down for him. "It's classified." He couldn't tell if she was serious. They walked down the hall to a bank of elevators. They got in, and she pressed a button. "I’m not being difficult. You need to understand that there are a lot of things I can’t talk about freely. It’s not that I don’t trust you. It’s just the way it’s done.” Roger just shrugged. “I work in program development here. For Vienna. That’s all I can say right now.”

  They got off on the second subfloor. She guided him down a wide hallway. "What if I asked you how long you've worked here?" he asked. “Would that be a safe question?”