A/N1 Of course I don't own CSI: Cyber. I'm just borrowing a character or two.

A/N2 I don't know if New Hampshire's power grid uses a Juniper firewall but I do know that those firewalls were vulnerable for a time. Check Wired for some details.

A/N3 In the series references are made to the 'deep web' as if that were all evil. In fact the term is used to mean any part of the internet that isn't indexed by regular search engines like Google.

That would include the machine I am typing this on. The evil part is a subset of the deepweb called the 'dark net' which is much smaller.

Somewhere in New York.

"Ah: Juniper firewall!" Raven thought. She had read about weaknesses in this brand. There was a master password that had been hard coded into the operating system and she and a group of online friends had found it by reverse engineering the code.

This meant she was through to the internal network but she'd have to stop now and go to the diner where she worked, got to pay the rent somehow, so she would start nmap off on its work to map the internal network, sending the output to a file, and queued up a poweroff afterwards, Backtrack, the Linux distro she was using, would save the file for her.

Raven had taken the job at the diner out of necessity. After she'd dropped out of high school her

parents had basically given her an ultimatum: "Go back to school or get out of the house." She had gone upstairs and packed. If she had looked back as she left she would have seen her parents having one enormous argument with her mother in tears. But she didn't.

She had found a place to sleep and the job quickly. She had taken a little longer to find an apartment with internet access but she had managed. Her beloved GameVex under the TV and her laptop, on which, without her parents' knowledge she had installed a copy of backtrack linux, had been with her throughout. While she had been with her parents the linux distro had been in a VirtualBox accessible only via a hidden user on Windows out of necessity. Now however it had its own partitions on her laptop's hard disc and could be accessed via the boot menu.

She taken a look at the New Hampshire power grid because that was where her father worked. She had originally thought of destroying his employment record. But she decided that would be too obvious, not as obvious as the changes she'd made to her high school grades perhaps. But this would be investigated by people a lot smarter than the stupid teachers at her high school.

So she had started prodding the company's website. She had even found some vulnerabilities but none that would allow her to do the kind of damage she wanted to. So she'd now turned her attention to open ports on the company's main servers. But in order to do that she had had to get through the firewall.

When she got back from the diner she printed the nmap output and from that she drew a map of the network. Then she selected machines that might have subnets off them and set nmap to work on those while she ran her own port scanners to probe the others.

There were risks in all this of course, a sharp eyed sysadmin looking at the logs was one, but she was using tor and a dark net proxy server so she was pretty sure that the suspicious activity would never be traced back to her.

This became her routine over the next few days: sleep, map, eat, work, repeat.

After four days she'd mapped the entire network as far as she could tell. Open ports had been mapped too. Now it was time to make some decisions. As far as she could tell the power grid itself was controlled by a Windows server called "gridserv", the name was a bit obvious but hey. Unusually it had a remote login port open. Better, from her point of view, it was unencrypted. This smelt like a trap though. So she proceeded with caution.

She installed a key logger and a packet sniffer on the target to make sure this wasn't a trap and to find out more, sending the output to a dark net equivalent of pastebin located somewhere, probably Russia, could be Tibet or anywhere out of US law enforcement's reach. Perhaps it was Bolivia, but who cared? The nice thing about it was there was no connection between the file being sent and it being retrieved. It bounced around servers, was retrieved using different credentials from the ones used to post it.

After a day she could tell that this machine wasn't the main grid controller but she also discovered that the engineers had a web based control system. She had gathered fragments of the web traffic between gridserv and the machine that appeared to actually control the grid. And she had got one of the engineer's login details, astonishingly the login wasn't encrypted.

If this was a trap it was an extremely sophisticated one.

She decided to try out what she was going to do next by building a virtual equivalent of gridserv on her laptop. Using VirtualBox she built her own copy of gridserv, copying files when she needed to via the dark net pastebin. Again a sharp eyed sysadmin would have spotted what she was up to but by now she was sure that the New Hampshire Power company didn't employ such a creature. No surprise really: it employed her dad after all.

Over the next few days she played about with the virtual power grid, finding weak points and seeing what she could do.

Then she sent out the message to an anonymous hacker board: "Make sure your uninteruptables are topped up." This was signal to other hackers that someone was going to take down a power grid somewhere.

On the day she felt excited, she was working at the diner but had left cron, the Linux scheduler, to do the jobs for her via the dark net.

The news came through on the diner's TV at 16:30 EST: The great state of New Hampshire was suffering power problems, engineers were working to fix them. In the meantime hospitals were on generators and TV was off the air, drivers were urged to take care as the traffic lights were out. People were urged to check on old and vulnerable neighbours.

Everyone else in the diner looked at the TV with horror and concern. What had happened? Was this the beginning of a new scandal to rival Enron? If anyone had looked at Raven's face they would have seen her trying to suppress a smile, and almost succeeding.