Chapter XL: rm –rf *
2200hrs, 16 December 2013, Near Herefordshire College of Technology, Hereford, United Kingdom
"If you have ever done any security work, and it did not involve the concept of "network of trust", it wasn't security work, it was masturbation. I don't know what you were doing. But trust me, it's the only way you can do security, it's the only way you can do development." Linus Torvalds
"He's in a constant state of dumbassness right now…what the fuck is he doing now man?!" Centerstrain01, Ghost Recon: Future Soldier playthrough.
Anne and Alan lay in their loft flat, exhausted after an hour's worth of love-making. Lady Gaga's "Alejandro" played softly in the background…well, as softly as any Lady Gaga song could go anyway.
"You're getting soft," Anne chastised Alan, breathing in and out rather quickly.
"Oh hush," Alan replied. "You enjoyed it."
"What time is it dear?" Anne asked.
Alan looked at his watch. "Shit, it's almost ten-thirty," he muttered.
"What time is it exactly?" Alan had a bad habit of exaggerating the time, due to his former stint with the French Foreign Legion. All that military training...well, sometimes it paid off, mainly in bed though; he was still in good shape.
Alan sighed. "It's ten o'clock," he said, reluctantly.
"Dammit, we could have been fucking each other for fifteen more minutes!" Anne teased him.
"Sorry, we need to get going on this part of the operation. Otherwise…"
"Oh alright, I'll fire up the computers."
Both of them hopped out of their bed and put on their clothes (more like their underwear), and headed over to the other part of their flat, which held no less than five computers, with ten monitors, and several different partitions per computer, holding virtual machines for every server and desktop OS imaginable.
Anne and Alan were contractors for Nakanishi Europe, which had paid a large grant to the Herefordshire College of Technology for research and development. In return, Anne and Alan were allowed to use their equipment without question and any resources they needed to do the bidding of the Nakanishi Group.
Alan went over to his workstation and started hitting the power buttons to all the CPUs and monitors to turn them on. This of course, drew a lot of power but they could afford the monthly bill, which was sometimes ran into the tens of thousands of pounds. Ann went over to her workstation and started to do the same, but not after she had grabbed a couple of Mountain Dews from the fridge and passing one to Alan.
Anne chided Alan over his use of Ubuntu, which was pretty easy to use and wasn't so intimidating as some of the other Linux based operating systems. Ann said "screw it" and customized her own kernel, based on her own needs for data manipulation and control, allowing her to access raw data quickly and efficiently, without the need for shiny GUIs and all that stuff. Alan did that too, for his security work, but he liked to use Ubuntu just because it was so damn easy; it worked like Windows without all the hassle. Well, usually, for the most part.
"Alright, I'm up," he said to Ann, typing some commands into the command line.
"Give me a second," Ann replied, opening up some of the virtual machines that would allow her to access the backdoor program to some of the Department of Defense's computer networks.
"I'm all ready on my end," she called out in a sing-song voice to him.
"Okay, let's do this."
"Leeerrrooyy Jennnnkinnnss!" Anne shouted out, to dramatic effect. Alan glared at her and she got to work.
First, Anne made sure that the backdoor program was working and in order. It was, having been undetected by the security sweeps and the constant monitoring by the US Government. Of course, it also helped to have multibillion dollar contracts and to provide the majority of the security software to them anyway. They had managed to lock down the DOD network so tight that virtually all traffic coming in and out on their network was completely secure. In a binary world, that might seem impossible (well, it was impossible, since everything has only two functions; on or off), but somehow, the Nakanishi Group, America and Europe had managed to create a perfectly secure system. Of course, there were some glaring flaws, like the ability of administrators to maintain complete control over their users, basically rendering the computers they were using into dumb terminals. And that everything was on the cloud. And that everything was basically proprietary goods of the Nakanishi Group, but hey, that didn't matter when you had a good deal of Congressmen in your pockets. To make it look like a cyberattack, preferably from another nation (Anne and Alan couldn't agree which one to choose, Iran or China, so they decided on both), they would utilize a botnet that had been set up on unsuspecting users in both countries. In China, the trojan had been distributed through a worm embedded pirated movies and video games. In Iran, it was through illicit news that made it past the massive firewall that the Iranian government had put up, in addition to the usual pirated software and such. Spam email also worked well, as many users in those nations were not as tech savvy or knowledgeable as other users in the West. And of course, porn. Let's just leave it at that. But it had been making the news, but again, it was blamed on some malicious teenage hacker somewhere in China that had too much time and not enough places to spend his energy.
By the time of the attack, over sixty million computers, mainly located in China and Iran, but from all around the globe, were under the control of these two black hats.
The plan was deviously simple. Instead of Anne and Alan just turning off the entirety of the DOD network, they would have a massive wave of traffic dumping malicious software everywhere; at the milder end of the spectrum, there would be a lot of porn to clean off of the hard drives of many computers (or not), tons of malware, spyware, and other useless widgets clogging up processing power. It would take techs weeks, if not months to get all the stuff of they would place on the hard drives of many a DOD computer. On the more extreme end of the scale, some programs would flash the BIOS of every computer it touched, ruining the hard drive, and possibly causing actual physical damage to the computer itself. Of course, all important data would be snagged and a digital screenshot taken, preserving all of zeros and ones in a moment in time before they were wiped out from the DOD servers. With all the traffic coming in, it would be almost impossible to determine what data was lost and/or stolen in the resulting mess that would occur in the cyberattack. Nakanishi could, and would claim that they had no idea of the attack, and would also claim that for an attack of this size, no one was prepared. Of course, in the aftermath of the physical, terrorist attacks on US military installations, cities and other important areas pertaining to commerce, education, transportation, and historical significance, a cyberattack would only compound these problems a hundredfold. More than likely, they would slip by unnoticed, and the Chinese and the Iranians would have a lot of explaining to do. All of this would go by completely undetected, and despite the reputation drop to Nakanishi, they would quickly recover in the post attack world and reap huge profits.
This would be the case, if Anne and Alan hadn't decided to go after everything else.
"Alan, this is so boring!" she sighed, looking at the plethora of monitors at her workstation. "We gotta do something else!"
"Anne, you know what Zoicite told us," he replied, sternly. "We can't go after NATO, the Ministry of Defence, or hell, even the Metropolitan Police."
"But think of the chaos that we would create!" she pleaded, her eyes blinking frantically. "Right here, from our computers!"
"No," Alan shot back, turning toward her in his swivel chair. "Taking down the entirety of the DOD networks is a massive undertaking unto itself, and I am not going to get caught and burned. I've already had one chance with the Legion, and I'm not going to fuck it up again."
He turned back to his work, but Anne continued to pout at her desk.
"Come on!" she snapped back. "Where's that adventurer spirit that you had when I met you!"
"Those days are kind of behind me," Alan smarmily replied. "I kind of like what I'm doing now."
"So, you're going to let the bigwigs up at Nakanishi HQ push you around, huh?" Anne scoffed at him. "I never pegged you for a sycophant."
Alan sighed and kept looking at his workstation, while Anne continued to glare at him incessantly. After a couple of minutes like this, he finally gave in.
"Alright, you got me."
"Yay!" Anne's mood cheered up immediately. Her hands flew across the keyboard. "What should we attack?!" She immediately answered her own question.
"Let's take down the NATO command networks!" She polluted the communications network of NATO with several petabytes worth of traffic, slowing it down and completely ruining response times of the military units trying to get to terrorist afflicted areas.
All of these was done with Nakanishi equipment, software, IP addresses, their hubs, their switches, their technology. All of this would point back to them.
But Alan and Anne didn't care; this was their show, and they were going to make the biggest mess that they could while they had the resources and the time.
"Did you get to the Met?"
"Nah, save the best for last, hehe." Anne smiled at Alan, who went back to destroying whatever poor servers that he had access to.
"I've having trouble with that firewall to the MVD database," she told him a couple of minutes later, looking intently at her screen. "Think you can take care of it? They don't use our software…"
"I can try…" Alan brought up the IP address that Anne was talking about; this was a remote access point for overseas operatives looking for Russian criminals in foreign countries. She noted that there were logins from every corner of the world, including an IP address right down the road. He figured that someone had to keep watch on the SAS guys there.
By the time they had finished their work, they not only had shut down the DoD network, but every major military organization that used Nakanishi software, every law enforcement network, communications, mobile phone networks, stock markets, corporations (including a little bit of Nakanishi's own software and development data storage servers, but they at least had the foresight to back them up), and everything else that was connected to the internet. They even went after some personal users, making their lives miserable, with gigabits of malware and widgets that bogged down their systems. They finished at 0800 the next day, after a marathon of hacking. The last thing that Anne did was switch off the entirety of the Metropolitan Police Service's communication network, and to disable all of the mobile towers in the area. After that, the two of them went back to bed, starting yet another round of marathon sex before falling asleep at about 1000.