by JM Addison
Chapter 21
“Hello, Michael Ludwik…” was his typical way of answering the phone in his office. He noted from the clock that it was well after 6:00 PM and wondered who would still be here who would want to talk to him.
“Mike, it’s Annette. I have an interesting message that I think you will want to see right away. It’s about our suspected data theft problem.”
“What is it?”
“If you have a couple of minutes, I want to bring it by. I would just forward it to you, but, at this point, I don’t trust anything, not even our internal systems.”
He waited a few moments before she arrived and pondered over what it could be this time. She popped into his office, quietly swung the door closed and sat in front of his desk. She wordlessly slid a piece of paper across his desk and waited for a reaction.
After quickly skimming through the message, he inquired, “Where did you get this?”
“It was sent from an outside email to our ‘info’ mailbox. Jill receives all messages addressed to that mail location and she thought that I would be the appropriate person since I am the one who does most of the systems security work. As you can see, it raises the level of suspicion we have about the integrity of the data being sent on the network.”
The paper contained a message from someone identified as MC65543 at one of the large, free e-mail sites on the internet.
“Have you replied to this yet?” Mike asked.
“No, I wanted to talk to you first. I thought that we should reply, but I don’t know about the validity of the information. We get a ton of spam on that address, but we look through it before discarding. This one would have been tossed too, except with everyone here being warned to be extra cautious Jill thought it might be worth looking at. I do not know this person or what the source of these claims are. It’s just that we were talking about this very thing, and ‘Tada!’ we get this message shortly afterwards. Sounds a little too far-fetched to be circumstantial. Could someone here have known about our conversation? Could this be some sort of hoax to distract us?”
The message made the strong insinuation that encrypted data was not necessarily ‘safe’ and asked if there has been any suspected instance where confidential data may have been exposed and used against the sender.
To Annette, it seemed impossible that e-mails sealed with 128 bit strength encryption could possibly be stolen and then successfully decrypted by the thief and used against them. Even the government used the same level of encryption. It had to be safe. She understood enough about the process to know that the effort required to do this was so large that it became a virtual impossibility. 40 Bit encryption could be ‘broken’ by today’s powerful personal computers in a short time. But each additional bit effectively doubles the effort required. That was 88 more bits or… trillions of times more difficult. In other words, a mathematical impossibility.
No, it must be that someone right here at Sequitus knew about the suspicions they had and sent this message as some sort of a decoy.
Mike continued, “You don’t think this is really valid, do you?”
“Well, it seems too unlikely. These encryption methods are very good. They’re in use all over the world for all sorts of private data transmissions.”
“Well, we need to reply to this message. At this point it’s only one more lead, but it can’t be ignored. We don’t want to reveal anything that could expose us in the message, but we could say something like ‘we very are interested in understanding the means behind such a possibility and would like to discuss the matter with him or her’.”
“OK. I will see what I can set up. Actually, I do hope this is only a decoy. I can’t imagine the problems we all face if today’s current standards are in some sort of real jeopardy.”