Intrusion (A Chris Bruen Novel Book 2)

by Reece Hirsch

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2014 Reece Hirsch

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com Inc. or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781477827239

  ISBN-10: 1477827234

  Cover design by Marc Cohen

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2014944829

  For Jean and Ernestine, my enablers, in the best sense of the word

  CONTENTS

  START READING

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  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  “What’s going on here? These are some of the best companies in our nation. Why are they being hacked? Let me explain. They’re the ones that know they’re being hacked. Our experience is, when the FBI and others look into it, for every one that knows it’s being hacked there are more than 100 companies that don’t know they’ve been hacked. That’s significant. In fact, in my opinion, it is the greatest transfer of wealth in history.”

  General Keith B. Alexander,

  Director, National Security Agency

  “I wish to note that intellectual property theft by a government represents the very essence of organized crime.”

  US Representative Howard Berman

  1

  The phone woke Chris Bruen at 3:00 a.m. from an unsettled sleep. The floor-to-ceiling windows of his loft apartment looked out on the Bay Bridge, which was now illuminated by thousands of glimmering LED lights. The light sculpture, as it was called, was a public art project that cast a series of random, repeating patterns across the bridge’s spires. He had promised himself to buy curtains to cover the upper portion of the windows, because the shape-shifting images, which could be read as electric clouds, schooling fish, and raindrops, had begun to infect his dreams.

  Chris grabbed the phone off the nightstand. “What?” he said dully, his voice cracking.

  “Bruen?”

  “Who’s this?”

  “It’s Dez Teal.”

  No response.

  “From Zapper,” Teal added, clearly uncertain whether Chris was awake yet. Desmond Teal was the executive vice president of Zapper, the world’s most popular Internet search engine, and one of Chris’s biggest clients.

  “Dez.” Chris said it slowly, like he was working out a problem. “What’s up? You know it’s 3:00 a.m. here.”

  The sheets undulated as Zoey Doucet, his sometimes/maybe girlfriend, rolled over, trying to cling to sleep.

  “We’ve been hacked,” Teal said.

  “How bad?”

  “Bad enough that I’m calling you at three in the morning, and that’s all that I’m going to say over an open line.”

  “I can be at your offices first thing in the morning.”

  “No, he wants you here tonight. He wants you here now.”

  “He” was Paul Saperstein, Zapper’s twenty-eight-year-old CEO and, as a result of a recent IPO, a newly minted billionaire. Chris drew a deep breath and gave up any hopes of finishing his night’s sleep, troubled as it had been. Chris was a privacy and security law specialist who helped his clients combat hackers and cybercriminals, and this was not the first time he’d been woken up in the middle of the night to respond to a hack.

  “Okay, I’ll be there.”

  “Thank you. This is circle-the-wagons time. See you soon.” Teal hung up the phone, no doubt moving on to spoil someone else’s slumbers.

  If the team at Zapper was circling the wagons, Chris wondered who the Indians were. But he already had a pretty good guess.

  Chris rolled out of bed and began dressing. After slipping into black pants and a gray wool pullover, he stretched his long arms and ran his hands through his unruly black hair, wild from sleep.

  Zoey finally roused herself, pulling her T-shirt down around her and giving him a look of disbelief. “Who could possibly need you at this hour? Aside from me.”

  “It’s Zapper. They’ve been hacked.”

  “Must have been pretty bad if they want you there tonight. Like, tank-the-stock-price bad.” Zoey was the director of the computer forensic lab at Reynolds, Fincher & McComb, the San Francisco law firm where Chris was a partner.

  “Apparently so, but I don’t have any details yet.”

  Zoey gulped some water from a glass on the nightstand. She was probably a little hungover from the night before. Chris certainly was. She put both hands on her cheeks, then ran them around her head, pulling her brown hair back and away from her face. “So should I leave with you or . . . ?”

  “No, no,” Chris said, realizing how unready he was for this conversation. “Here’s an extra key I had made. I was going to give it to you anyway.”

  “Okay,” Zoey said, nodding. She took the key, only noting the significance of the moment with a cocked eyebrow and the ghost of a smile. “Why don’t you at least have a cup of coffee before you go?”

  Chris shook his head as he pulled on his shoes. “I’d better get down there.”

  “If you spend too much time over there at Zapper, you’re going to start wearing hoodies. Don’t be that guy, okay?”

  “My life is a hoodie-free zone,” Chris promised, and gave her a kiss good-bye.

  “Say hi to the boy king for me,” Zoey said, pulling up the covers and seeming to fall back asleep the instant she rolled over.

  Traffic was nearly nonexistent on the 101 heading south down the Peninsula to Menlo Park. Dawn wasn’t close to breaking, but the sky had begun to soften from black to indigo. As Chris pulled off the freeway onto Hamilton Avenue, Zapper’s stylized lightning-bolt logo glowed electric blue from atop a tower.

  Menlo Park initially seems like a town with a split personality, its shaded, tree-lined residential streets around the Stanford campus contrasting with the sleek concrete-and-glass office parks of Sand Hill Road. But it was all part of the carefully balanced ecosystem of Silicon Valley. The intellectual resources of S
tanford fed the tech companies, and being at the heart of tech-sector innovation bolstered Stanford’s academic cachet.

  Zapper’s corporate campus embodied that symbiotic relationship. It truly did resemble a campus, with meticulously weathered redbrick buildings that looked like they had been expensively imported from a place that actually had a history. Paul Saperstein was one of those latter-day pharaohs of Silicon Valley who felt the need to create a sense of permanence and inevitability about his company’s ascendance. Perhaps it was a way of denying the fact that Zapper had been built on the shifting sands of ever-evolving technology.

  There was an unusual number of cars in the parking lot for the hour, most of them high-end and foreign, and more were converging on the lot as Chris arrived. Lights shone from several windows of the main building where the executive offices were housed. Chris found the doors to the building unlocked but no receptionist on duty at the front desk. Instead, EVP Dez Teal was playing the role, ushering people in as they arrived.

  “Chris, thanks again for doing this.” Teal greeted another entering behind him. “Ah, Sergei. How was the flight in from Berlin?”

  Sergei Timoshev glared. “Oh, it was delightful. I feel refreshed. Like new man.”

  With a traffic-cop wave, Teal said to both of them, “Right through to the Edison conference room.”

  As Chris and Timoshev began the walk, Chris asked, “You know what this is about?”

  “No, but it is catastrophe. Clearly.” Timoshev, the president of Stryker Security in Berlin, was a top authority on malware. He wore his black hair cropped close to the skull and looked more like a middle-grade crook than an executive, an impression he cultivated with his glossy black leather jacket and Cyrillic-lettered neck tattoo.

  They heard the gathering before they reached the so-called Edison room. Zapper’s conference rooms were named after pioneers of American technology, from Thomas Edison and Henry Ford to Steve Jobs—a not-so-subtle attempt to place Paul Saperstein in that firmament. When Chris pushed open the frosted glass doors, he and Timoshev were greeted by a rare scene. Arranged around a table at four in the morning sat nearly a dozen of the country’s most respected data-security experts. There was freelance white-hat hacker Doug Reeves, British expat Carina Blount of Blunt Object Consulting, and SoNar, a notorious black hat who appeared to have discovered that the dark side wasn’t always the most lucrative. The rest of the luminaries around the table brought similarly impeccable pedigrees. As a fellow data security geek, Chris recognized this as an assemblage of A-list talent akin to Marvel’s Avengers or the 1992 US men’s Olympic basketball team.

  The tired faces turned to Chris with a few nods that seemed to acknowledge they weren’t surprised that he had also been called in.

  “This is quite a lineup,” Chris said loud enough for everyone to hear. “I’m not even going to try to calculate the collective hourly billing rate.”

  “Oh, we are all off the clock, Chris,” Timoshev said.

  A handful of nods and murmurs seemed to confirm Timoshev’s statement.

  “Since when did you all become so altruistic?” Chris asked.

  Doug Reeves, in his early twenties, with the washed-out blond hair of a surfer, spoke up. “We didn’t. We’re off the clock because we’re all on Zapper’s payroll now.”

  Chris gave a low whistle. The magnitude of the crisis must have seriously shaken Zapper. If the company felt the need to hire all of these security experts on such short notice, then they had really opened up their considerable checkbook—and must be in serious trouble.

  “Is someone going to tell me what’s going on here?” Chris asked when no one else spoke up.

  Shrugs all around.

  The group waited for another half hour as several more top-tier data security experts arrived, all of them guzzling coffee to ward off jet lag and/or sleep deprivation.

  Finally, Teal entered the conference room and closed the doors behind him. “I’ve been waiting to brief you all together. Since we’ve made preemptive offers of employment to everyone, with the exception of our lawyer, you understand already that this is a serious event. We’ve experienced an intrusion, one so massive that it potentially jeopardizes the entire company.”

  “Someone has stolen the algorithms. Clearly,” Timoshev said.

  Teal held up a hand. “Please, save your questions and comments for the end. But yes, it’s the algorithms. They’ve been compromised.”

  Zapper’s status as one of the most successful companies on the planet was based in large part on its proprietary algorithms, a complex skein of mathematical instructions that enabled Zapper to cull the Internet’s vast sea of data and produce results that were more accurate than any other search engine’s. In fact, they were so far ahead of the marketplace that their company name had become synonymous with Internet searches.

  “We discovered the intrusion at 2:25 p.m. yesterday, but now we can see that the adversary had been present on our servers for quite some time, probably months. Our security team noticed an unusually high volume of email traffic last night. Upon closer examination, it became clear that huge files with terabytes of data were being exfiltrated from the system.”

  Given the timing of the intrusion and the arrival of international experts like Timoshev, Chris realized that he’d likely been the last person called to this meeting. Clearly he had catching up to do, so he didn’t hesitate to interrupt Teal again. “Can you tell us where they were being exported to?”

  “Before we hit a dead-end IP address, we were able to trace the activity to a district of Shanghai.”

  “Hacked by Chinese,” said SoNar, who looked freshly arrived from the Old Testament—or a Phish concert. He was tall, thin, and hirsute, with a neatly trimmed beard, moustache, and shoulder-length brown hair.

  “Yes, I’m afraid so,” Teal said.

  “How’d they gain access?” Reeves asked.

  “It appears to have been a fairly straightforward phishing exploit,” Teal said. “Fifteen employees received an email on February 20 from someone posing as Sid Harris, one of our board members. A meeting invitation. At least one of the employees clicked the invitation, and that was all it took to introduce the malware.”

  “Do you think it’s government backed, or are we talking private actors?” Chris asked.

  “We can’t tell yet,” Teal said. “As you know, it can be a hard line to draw in these cases.”

  It had been openly speculated for years that the People’s Republic of China was either sponsoring or tacitly abetting a systematic series of hacking attacks focused on the theft of intellectual property and trade secrets from major US corporations. The Chinese government was believed to be involved because the attacks were so sophisticated and it was hard to imagine such a massive and coordinated offensive occurring without the state’s knowledge or cooperation, particularly in a country as tightly controlled as China. The attacks seemed to be a natural extension of China’s drive to become an economic superpower. It had the burgeoning population and the natural resources—all it lacked were the cutting-edge inventions that US entrepreneurs seemed to produce so effortlessly. There weren’t many things in life that couldn’t be bought, but one of them was the spark of innovation. That had to be stolen.

  One security consultant had been widely quoted as saying that, for Fortune 500 companies, it was not a matter of whether Chinese hackers had stolen their intellectual property but rather whether they knew it yet. In fact, China’s plundering of US corporate intellectual property was one of the greatest transfers of wealth in human history. It made Cortez’s looting of the Aztec gold and the Nazi seizure of the art treasures of Western Europe look like dime-store theft.

  “Isn’t it a little late to be upgrading security?” asked Carina Blount, who wore an elegant brown suit that contrasted with her spiky and unabashedly dyed blond hair. “The cows are out of the proverbial barn at this
point, aren’t they?”

  “Frankly, we don’t know the extent of the damage. We can tell that a large volume of data was extracted, and we’ve identified areas of the system that could have been accessed, including some that contained our most sensitive IP, but the rest is a mystery. We’re hoping that those of you with forensic expertise can help us figure that out.”

  “You’ll know how much they’ve taken when a Chinese start-up company appears out of nowhere and starts stealing your market share,” Blount said.

  Teal introduced a bleary-looking young man in jeans and a black T-shirt with a laptop in hand. “I’m going to let Jonathan continue your briefing, walk you through the details of the forensics that we have so far.”

  Chris followed Teal out into hallway. “Hey, Dez, I must admit that you’re hurting my feelings a bit here.”

  “What do you mean? Did you expect us to make an offer of employment to you too? We thought you were too independent to go in-house, and besides, some matters are best handled by outside counsel.”

  “No, it’s not that. I just don’t think I belong as part of the scrum in there. And why didn’t you call me in on this earlier today?”

  “Everyone’s a bit shell-shocked around here right now. And we knew you were just down the 101 from us, so we concentrated on bringing in the international experts first.”

  “I don’t think this is the best use of my skills.”

  “What are you asking, Chris?”

  “I’m asking where Paul is. I’d like to speak to him directly.”

  “Oh, you don’t want to speak to him right now. Trust me.”

  Chris strode off down the hallway in the direction in which Teal had been heading.

  “What are you doing?” called Teal from behind him. “You don’t have access to that area.”

  Chris ignored Teal’s entreaties, striding down a long corridor past a break room, a daycare center, and a Pilates studio. Zapper was famous for its employee perks. Everything was brightly colored and oversized, sort of like a preschool for adults. Most of the Silicon Valley tech giants had long ago given up the extravagant perks of the first Internet boom, abandoning the notion that the workplace was primarily about play and creativity. By virtue of its astounding success, Zapper had been able to hang on to that illusion.