William Murray of the Institute for Public Computing Confidence in Washington, D.C., downplayed the incident. "We have had re- ports of several small outbreaks, but we have not heard of any particularly devastating incidents. It seems that only a few isolated sites were affected."
On the other hand, Bethan Fenster from Virus Stoppers in McLean, Virginia, maintains that the virus damage was much more wide- spread. She says the outbreaks are worse than reported in the press. "I personally know of several Fortune 100 companies that will be spending the next several weeks putting their systems back in order. Some financial institutions have been nearly shut down because their computers are inoperable. It's the worst (computer) virus outbreak I've ever seen."
Very few companies would confirm that they had been affected by the Columbus Day Virus. "They won't talk to you," Ms. Fenster said. "If a major company announced publicly that their comput- ers were down due to criminal activity, there would be a certain loss of confidence in that company. I understand that they feel a fiduciary responsibility to their stockholders to minimize the effects of this."
Despite Ms. Fenster's position, Forsythe Insurance, NorthEast Airlines, Brocker Financial and the Internal Revenue Service all admitted that they have had a 'major' disruption in their comput- er services and expect to take two to six weeks to repair the damage. Nonetheless, several of those companies hit, feel lucky.
"We only lost about a thousand machines," said Ashley Marie, senior network manager at Edison Power. "Considering that we have no means of protecting our computers at all, we could have been totally put out of business." She said that despite the cost to repair the systems, her management feels no need to add security or protective measures in the future. "They believe that this was a quirk, a one time deal. They're wrong," Ms. Marie said.
Many small companies that said they have almost been put out of business because they were struck by the Columbus Day Virus. "Simply not true," commented Christopher Angel of the Anti-Virus Brigade, a vigilante group who professes to have access to pri- vate information on computer viruses. "Of all of the reports of downed computers yesterday, less than 10% are from the Data Crime. Anyone who had any sort of trouble is blaming it on the virus rather than more common causes like hardware malfunction and operator error. It is a lot more glamorous to admit being hit by the virus that has created near hysteria over the last month."
Whatever the truth, it seems to be well hidden under the guise of politics. There is mounting evidence and concern that computer viruses and computer hackers are endangering the contents of our computers. While the effects of the Columbus Day Virus may have been mitigated by advance warnings and precautionary measures, and the actual number of infection sites very limited, computer professionals are paying increasing attention to the problem.
This is Scott Mason, safe, sound and uninfected.
* * * * *
Wednesday, October 14
J. Edgar Hoover Building, FBI Headquarters
Washington, D.C.
The sweltering October heat wave of the late Indian summer pene- trated the World War II government buildings that surrounded the Mall and the tourist attractions. Window air conditioners didn't provide the kind of relief that modern workers were used to. So, shirtsleeves were rolled up, the nylons came off, and ties were loose if present at all.
The streets were worse. The climatic changes that graced much of North America were exaggerated in Washington. The heat was hot- ter, the humidity wetter. Sweat was no longer a five letter word, it was a way of life.
Union Station, the grand old train station near the Capitol Building provided little relief. The immense volume of air to be cooled was too much for the central air conditioners. They were no match for mother nature's revenge on the planet for unforgiv- ing hydrocarbon emissions. As soon as Tyrone Duncan detrained from the elegant Metroliner he had ridden this morning from New York's Penn Station, he was drenched in perspiration. He discov- ered, to his chagrin, that the cab he had hailed for his ride to headquarters had no air conditioning. The stench of the city, and the garbage and the traffic fumes reminded him of home. New York.
Tyrone showed his identification at the J. Edgar Hoover Building wishing he had the constitution to wear a seersucker suit. There is no way on God's earth a seersucker could show a few hours wear as desperately as his $1200 Louis Boston did, he thought. Then, there was the accompanying exhaustion from his exposure to the dense Washington air. Duncan had not been pleased with the panic call that forced him to Washington anyway. His reactions to the effects of the temperature humidity index did not portend a good meeting with Bob Burnson.
Bob had called Tyrone night before, at home. He said, we have a situation here, and it requires some immediate attention. Would you mind being here in the morning? Instead of a question, it was an unissued order. Rather than fool around with hours of delays at La Guardia and National Airport, Tyrone elected to take the train and arrive in the nation's capitol just after noon. It took, altogether just about the same amount of time, yet he could travel in relative luxury and peace. Burnson was waiting for him.
Bob Burnson held the title of National Coordinator for Tactical Response for the FBI. He was a little younger that Duncan, just over 40, and appeared cool in his dark blue suit and tightly collared shirt. Burnson had an unlikely pair of qualities. He was both an extraordinarily well polished politician and a astute investigator. Several years prior, though, he decided that the bureaucratic life would suit him just fine, and at the expense of his investigative skills, he attacked the political ladder with a vengeance.
Despite the differences between them, Burnson a willing compatri- ot of the Washington machine and Duncan preferring the rigors of investigation, they had developed a long distance friendship that survived over the years. Tyrone was most pleased that he had a boss who would at least give his arguments a fair listen before being told that for this or that political reason, the Bureau had chosen a different line of reasoning. So be it, thought Duncan. I'm not a policy maker, just a cop. Tyrone sank into one of the government issue chairs in Burnson's modern, yet modest office ringed with large windows that can't open.
"How 'bout that Arctic Chill?" Burnson's short lithe 150 pound frame showed no wear from the heat. "Glad you could make it."
"Shee . . .it man," Tyrone exhaled as he wiped his shiny wet black face and neck. He was wringing wet. "Like I had a choice. If it weren't for the company, I'd be at the beach getting a tan." He continued to wipe his neck and head with a monogrammed handkerchief.
"Lose a few pounds, and it won't hurt so bad. You know, I could make an issue of it," Bob poked fun.
"And I'm outta here so fast, Hoover'll cheer from his grave," he sweated. The reference to the FBI founder's legendary bigotry was a common source of jokes in the modern bureau.
"No doubt. No doubt." Burnson passed by the innuendo. "Maybe we'd balance the scales, too." He dug the knife deeper in refer- ence to Tyrone's weight.
"That's two," said Duncan.
"Ok, ok," said Burnson feigning surrender. "How's Arlene and the rest of the sorority?" He referred to the house full of women with whom Tyrone had spent a good deal of his life.
"Twenty degrees cooler." He was half serious.
"Listen, since you're hear, up for a bite?" Bob tried.
"Listen, how 'bout we do business then grab a couple of cold ones. Iced beer. At Camelot? That's my idea of a quality afternoon." Camelot was the famous downtown strip joint on 18th and M street that former Mayor Marion Berry had haunted and been 86'd from for unpublished reasons. It was dark and frequented by government employees for lunch, noticeably the ones from Treas- ury.
"Deal. If you accept." Bob's demeanor shifted to the officious.
"Accept what?" Tyrone asked suspiciously.
"My proposition."
"Is this another one of your lame attempts to promote me to an office job in Capitol City?"
"Well, yes and no. You're being re-assigned." No easy way to sa
y it.
"To what?" exclaimed Tyrone angrily.
"To ECCO."
"What the hell is ECCO?"
"All in good time. To the point," Bob said calmly. "How much do you know about this blackmail thing?"
"Plenty. I read the reports, and I have my own local problems. Not to mention that the papers have picked it up. If it weren't for the National Expos printing irresponsibly, the mainstream press would have kept it quiet until there was some con- firmation."
"Agreed," said Burnson. "They are being spoken to right now, about that very subject, and as I hear it, they will have more lawsuits on their doorstep than they can afford to defend. They really blew it this time."
"What else?" Bob was listening intently.
"Not much. Loose, unfounded innuendo, with nothing to follow up. Reminds me of high school antics or mass hysteria. Just like UFO flaps." Tyrone Duncan dismissed the coincidences and the thought of Scott's conspiracy theory. "But it does make for a busy day at the office."
"Agreed, however, you only saw the reports that went on the wire. Not the ones that didn't go through channels."
"What do you mean by that?" Duncan voiced concern at being out of the loop.
"What's on the wire is only the tip of the iceberg. There's a lot more."
"What else?"
"Senators calling the Director personally, asking for favors. Trying to keep their secrets secret. A junior Midwest senator has some quirky sexual habits. A Southern anti-pornography ball- breaker happens to like little boys. It goes on and one. They've all received calls saying that their secrets will be in the news- papers' hands within days."
"Unless?" Duncan awaited the resolved threat.
"No unless, which scares them all senseless. It's the same story everywhere. Highly influential people who manage many of our countries' strategic assets have called their senators, and asked them to insure that their cases are solved in a quiet and expedi- ent political manner. Sound familiar?" Burnson asked Duncan.
"More than vaguely," Tyrone had to admit. "How many?"
"As of this morning we have 17 Senators asking the FBI to make discreet investigations into a number of situations. 17! Not to mention a couple hundred executive types with connections. Within days of each other. They each, so far, believe that theirs is an isolated incident and that they are the sole target of such . . .threats is as good a word as any. Getting the picture?"
Tyrone whistled to himself. "They're all the same?"
"Yes, and there's something else. To a man, each claimed that there was no way the blackmailer could know what he knew. Impos- sible." Burnson scratched his head. "Strange. Same story everywhere. That's what got the Director and his cronies in on this. And then me . . .and that's why you're here," Burnson said with finality.
"Why?" Tyrone was getting frustrated with the roundabout dia- tribe.
"We're pulling the blackmail thing to the national office and a special task force will take over. A lot of folks upstairs want to pull you in and stick you in charge of the whole operation, but I told them that you weren't interested, that you like it the way it is. So, I struck a deal." Burnson sounded proud.
Duncan wasn't convinced. "Deal? What deal? Since when do you talk for me?" Tyrone didn't think to thank Bob for the front line pass interference. Keep the politicos out of his hair.
"Have you been following any of the computer madness recently?" Burnson spoke as though he expected Tyrone to know nothing of it.
"Can't miss it. From what I hear, a lot of people are getting pretty spooked that they may be next."
"It gets more interesting than what the papers say," Bob said while opening a desk drawer. He pulled out a large folder and lay it across his desk. "We have experienced a few more computer incidents than is generally known, and in the last several weeks there has been a sudden increase in the number of attacks against Government computers."
"You mean the INTERNET stuff and Congress losing it's mind?" Tyrone laughed at the thought that Congress would now use their downed computers as an excuse for not doing anything.
"Those are only the ones that have made it to the press. It's lot worse." Bob scanned a few pages of the folder and para- phrased while reading. "Ah, yes, the NPRP, National Pretrial Reporting Program over at Justice . . .was hit with a series of computer viruses apparently intentionally placed in VMS comput- ers, whatever the hell those are." Bob Burnson was not computer fluent, but he knew what the Bureau's computer could do.
"The Army Supply Center at Fort Stewart, Georgia had all of its requisitions for the last year erased from the computer." Bob chuckled as he continued. "Says here that they have had to pool the guys' money to go to Winn Dixie to buy toilet paper and McDonald's has offered a special GI discount until the system gets back up."
"Ty," Bob said. " Some people on the hill have raised a stink since their machines went down. Damn crybabies. So ECCO is being activated."
"What the hell is ECCO?" Tyrone asked again.
"ECCO stands for Emergency Computer Crisis Organization. It's a computer crisis team that responds to . . .well I guess, comput- er crises." Bob opened the folder again. "It was formed during the, and I quote, ' . . .the panic that followed the first INTER- NET Worm in November of 1988.'"
Tyrone's mouth hung open. "What panic?"
"The one that was kept under absolute wraps," Bob said, slightly lowering his voice. "At first no one knew what the INTERNET event was about. Who was behind it. Why and how it was happen- ing. Imagine 10's of thousands of computers stopping all at once. It scared the shit out of the National Security Council, remember we and the Russians weren't quite friends then, and we thought that military secrets were being funneled straight to the Kremlin. You can't believe some of the contingency plans I heard about."
"I had no idea . . ."
"You weren't supposed to," Bob added. "Very few did. At any rate, right afterward DARPA established CERT, the Computer Emer- gency Response Team at Carnegie Mellon, and DCA set up a Security Coordination Center at SRI International to investigate problems in the Defense Data Network. Livermore and the DOE got into the act with Computer Incident Advisory Capability. Then someone decided that the bureaucracy was still too light and it deserved at least a fourth redundant, overlapping and rival group to investigate on behalf of Law Enforcement Agencies. So, there we have ECCO."
"So what's the deal?" asked Tyrone. "What do I have to do?"
"The Director has asked ECCO to investigate the latest round of viruses and the infiltration of a dozen or so sensitive and classified computers." Bob watched for Ty's reaction, but saw none yet. He wondered how he would take the news. "This time, we would like to be involved in the entire operation from start to finish. Make sure the investigation is done right. We'd like to start nailing some of the bastards on the Federal level. Besides you have the legal background and we are treading on some very new and untested waters."
"I can imagine. So what's our role?"
"Your role," Bob emphasized 'your', "will be to liaison with the other interested agencies."
"Who else is playing?" asked Tyrone with trepidation.
"Uh, that is the one negative," stammered Bob. "You've got NSA, CIA, NIST, the NSC, the JCS and a bunch of others that don't matter. The only rough spot is the NSA/NIST connection. Every- one else is there just to make sure they don't miss anything."
"What's their problem?"
"Haven't heard, huh?" laughed Bob. "The press hasn't been kind. They've been in such a pissing match for so long that computer security work came to a virtual halt and I don't want to spoil the surprise, ah, you'll see," he added chuckling.
Tyrone sat back in the chair as he was cool enough now not to stick to it, closed his eyes and rotated his head to work out the kinks. Bob never had gotten used to Tyrone's peculiar method of deep thought; he found it most unnerving.
Bob's intents were crystal clear, not that Tyrone minded. He had no desire to move to D.C.; indeed he would have quit instead. He wanted to s
tay with the Bureau and the action but in his comfortable New York existence. Otherwise, no. But, if he could get Bob off his back by this one favor. Sure it might not be real action, watching computer jockies play with themselves . . .but it might be an interesting change in pace.
"Yes, under a couple of condition." Tyrone was suddenly a little too agreeable and smug after his earlier hesitancy.
"Conditions? What conditions?" Bob's suspicion was clear.
"One. I do it my way, with no, and I mean, absolutely no inter- ference." Duncan awaited a reply to his first demand.
"What else?"
"I get to use who I want to use, inside or outside the Bureau."
"Outside? Outside? We can't let this outside. The last thing in the world we want is publicity."
"You're gonna get it anyway. Let's do it right this time."
"What do you mean by that?" Bob asked somewhat defensively.
"What I mean is," Tyrone spoke up, sounding confident, "that the press are already on this computer virus thing and hackers and all. So, let's not advertise it, but when it comes up, let's deal with it honest."
"No way," blurted out Bob. "They'll make it worse than it is."
"I have that covered. A friend of my works for a paper, and he is a potential asset."
"What's the trade?"
"Not much. Half day leads, as long as he keeps it fair."
"Anything else?" Bob asked, not responding to Ty.
"One last thing," Tyrone said sitting up straighter. "After this one, you promise to let me alone and work my golden years, the way I want, where I want until my overdue retirement."
"I don't know if I can . . ."
"Then forget it," interrupted Tyrone. "I'll just quit." It was the penultimate threat and bluff and caught Bob off balance.
"Wait a minute. You can't hold me hostage . . ."
"Isn't that what you're doing to me?" Touc[1]]!
Bob sat back in thought. To an event, Duncan had been right on. He had uncannily been able to solve, or direct the solution of a crime where all others had failed. And, he always put the Bureau in the best possible light. If he didn't go with him now, lose him for sure.
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