Chapter XLI: Operation TAKE HOLD, Part I
1730hrs, 16 December 2013, Somewhere in the Southwestern United States.
"The Internet is like a vault with a screen door on the back. I don't need jackhammers and atom bombs to get in when I can walk in through the door." William R. Cheswick
In the offices of the...let's call them, the Information Operations Section, there sat a curse jar. But this was no ordinary curse jar. This was the geek's curse jar. For every meme that was expressed, 50 cents was to be deposited. Every TV Tropes reference was one dollar (if caught with anything related to TV Tropes on official computers, the offender would be punished even more severely). Anything from imageboards was not allowed, under pain of actually doing PT. The most heinous of the curses depended on how the executive officer, Major Sam Tyler, felt on any given day. This time around, it was "an arrow to the knee" and the "Over 9000" meme, which were a $20 fine. There was plenty of pizza for the entire office after that particular fine had been put into place.
Long derided by the other branches of the US Military, the Air Force was the youngest out of all of them, being founded in 1947 after a reorganization of the military with the National Security Act (which also created the Department of Defense, replacing the more succinctly named Department of War). Unlike other branches of the military however, where the separation between officers and enlisted was significant, the division between the officers and enlisted of the USAF was considerably smaller, almost nonexistent at times. When the USAF was still part of the army, known as the US Army Air Force, enlisted crew and officers working in bombers and fighters collaborated closely, removing those obstacles that were apparent in other branches of the military. The Air Force was more of a technical branch, with more focus on the brains than brawn (but then again, they did have bombers and nukes...); a huge chunk of the DOD budget was spent on the Air Force. It also helped to make for living conditions were significantly better than…er…the other branches.
"Okay everyone, that's it for the day," Major Tyler called out to the command room. Rows of desks and computers, along with a huge screen on the wall displaying data and other necessary information loomed over the entire room. "Time for the next shift."
"Damn, that was a funny one with that guy outside of the base," Chief Master Sergeant Robert Jameson said to him (not Master Chief, that's a completely different branch…but same pay grade, nonetheless).
"Trying to crack our server, and not even being able to hide his IP and MAC address," Tyler said, shaking his head at some of the attempts to access information on DoD servers. Of course, like any major institution, there were massive holes in the computer networks that had allowed for systematic penetration of their security, compromising their operational status. But ever since they had started using Nakanishi software to plug all of the gaps, things had been going quite smoothly ever since. Of course, they had only just switched over to Windows 7, even though Windows 8 had come out last year. Typical government protocol, but there was a reason behind the madness. One that most people couldn't figure out, especially so if you worked in government.
"So, you got anything planned for your leave time?" CMS Jameson asked Major Tyler as he was packing up his briefcase.
"Nah, I'm staying here, gotta keep watch over all of this stuff," he said to CMS Jameson, putting his laptop in the briefcase. "Plus, the 32rd Squadron is coming back from Germany after that three month tour there."
"You deployed overseas for Iraq, right?" Jameson asked. He had already done several tours in Afghanistan and Iraq, like many people in the military.
"Once, but I was just a Fobbit," Tyler replied, shrugging. "After my deployment, I asked for a PCS and transferred here."
"Heh, I've been to Iraq before," Jameson replied. "In 1991. And 2003. And 2006."
"Don't remind me," the XO kidded with him, rolling his eyes at the very experienced airman in front of his. "Hey Mason! Time to leave!" he yelled at a solitary figure, still typing away at his computer.
"Staff Sergeant," Jameson called out to him. "It's time to go," he said in a kind of sing-song voice. The Air Force was not known for its formality.
"Just a few more seconds…" Mason replied. He was kind of nerdy, with pasty white skin, large BC glasses and a haircut right out of the seventies.
Tyler sighed and walked over to the computer station where Mason was furiously working. "Look, Mason, I know that you're upset over Allison last week, but…"
"What about me…?" Senior Airman Allison Vogel, said, suddenly appearing over the shoulder of Major Tyler. Blonde hair, blue eyes, great measurements, and the envy of many guys (and girls) on the base, she had been asked out many times. Fraternization was of course, against military regulations, but that didn't stop anybody.
Unfortunately, Mason was one of those that got rejected; he didn't even stand a chance. She glared at Mason, who avoided her piercing stare.
"It's nothing," Tyler replied to her, trying to defuse the situation. "Carry on."
Allison looked at the two of them, scoffed, and walked away toward the exit.
"Alright, alright, I'm going," Mason sighed. "I was so close too, I thought. Never did anything like that while I was in school."
Tyler didn't have the heart to tell him that he never stood a chance in the first place, but as the XO, it really wasn't his place to advise on such issues, unless they got too out of hand.
"Look, you'll get over it. My first wife didn't end up so well, and look how me and my second wife are doing!"
Mason looked at him. "Didn't your second wife sleep with the base commander?"
Tyler rolled his eyes. "Oh come on, details, details. Plus, she was hammered at the time, and she promised never to do that ever again."
"Right…"
"Come on Mason, Jameson is buying drinks at the E-Club tonight…"
CMS Jameson stifled a groan at that, but he knew that the Major would reimburse him for his troubles.
That got Mason moving; free drinks were always a good way to start the week off.
"Let me shut down the computer here and…"
Something caught his eye. "Huh. My computer is running kind of slow…" Mason opened up the task manager and checked the programs running.
"Jesus!" There were almost fifty programs running at the same time, and the number kept increasing. Everything was being bogged down, and the amount of data incoming in only meant one thing; a cyberattack.
"Sir, we have a situation!" Mason yelled. Major Tyler ran over to his computer and assessed the problem. From what it looked like, there was an inordinate amount of data streaming in from all over the place, completely overloading the servers. Vogel and Jameson ran over to their respective workstations, and started to try to throttle the data stream back to prevent any more loss of information. They weren't having much luck with that.
"Kill the connection!" Tyler yelled at them.
"I'm trying, but there's too many computers and too many programs!" Vogel yelled from her workstation.
"No! Disconnect everything!" Major Tyler physically pulled out the Ethernet cord to his computer, which stopped all of the incoming traffic. Thank god for the benefits of tethering a computer down to a hardpoint. "Chief!"
"Yes sir!"
"Shut down everything, including the servers, the wireless network, all of it! Nothing moves until we get a fix on what the hell is going on!"
"Roger!" CMS Jameson ran to the server room, which was down from the main work area in a small alcove of offices.
"Chief!" one of the techs there yelled out as he burst into the room, fumbling with the keypad and his security card in his haste to get in. "We're getting a lot of shit here!"
"Shut it all down!"
"What?!" Shutting down the entire network for the base would be catastrophic. But then again, so would every computer burned up and rendered unusable.
"Everything, wireless, wired, shut it the fuck down!"
"On it!" The tech sergeant on duty quickly gave commands to disengage from the DoD Network.
In the meanwhile, Major Tyler was trying to reach his CO, Colonel Paul Edwards, who had already left for the day. But nothing was getting through on the cell network; all he kept getting was a busy tone.
"Dammit!" He reached for the phone on his desk as dialed Edward's cell phone. Maybe he could get to him that way.
The phone rang for what seemed like an eternity, with various people running in and out of Major Tyler's office, bringing him reports, status updates and progress on defeating the cyberattack.
"Colonel Edwards speaking." Finally, he picked up.
"Sir, this is Major Tyler, there is major incident going on here…" he took a deep breath before continuing. "Sir, I don't know how they did it, but they're into most of our servers and they've got most of the data in there."
"Jesus, how the fuck did this happen!" Edwards turned his car around; he had just left the base and was about to turn onto the highway but now home was going to have to wait.
"I have no idea, sir," Tyler said, looking at some of the reports that were now coming in from the different squadrons under his command. "We have major breaches in the research servers, almost all that data has been wiped out, major breaches in the communications and encryption servers, major breaches in the data processing servers. We're trying to get everything disconnected from the network, but we're going to have to a major cleanup after this is all said and done."
"I'm on my way back!"
He managed to get to the turnaround and sped back as fast as he could. Edwards decided to take the gate entrance nearest to the hospital on base, as he would be on the base faster. They were closing the place down, unfortunately, but oh well. A white Chevy Tahoe cut him off as he passed by one of the bars frequented by many AF personnel on the way out from work, and he honked his horn, pissed off at the driver. But the Tahoe kept accelerating, and then it veered to the left and straight into the checkpoint at the entrance to the base. In a second, there was a bright flash, and the Tahoe blew up.
Edwards slammed the brakes on his car, narrowly avoiding several others who did the same once the explosion went off.
"We're under attack!" Colonel Edwards screamed over his cell phone, ducking down and popping the glove compartment open in his '70 Ford Mustang. Inside was his military issue M9 Beretta, loaded but not cocked. He chambered a round and got out of his car, still in his dress blues.
"I understand that sir," Tyler said, wondering what that loud noise was.
"NO! We're under attack physically!" Edwards yelled, getting out of his car and running toward the base gates, where the suicide bomb had gone off. Two Security Forces officers were down, along with a couple of others who had been unlucky enough to be caught in the blast.
"What?!"
"Lock down the entrances to the building and don't let anyone in or out!" he ordered, checking on a driver who had been stunned by the explosion. He nodded that he was okay, and Edwards moved on. "Do you have your sidearm on you?"
"Well…"
"Do you?!"
Tyler opened up one of the desk drawers, second one on the right. There lay a M9 Beretta, but it only had one magazine of ammunition…
"Yes, I have it."
"You might need it. I'll get back to you as soon as possible." With that, Edwards hung up and started assisting people who had been injured.
"Ma'am, ma'am, are you okay?" he asked a middle-aged woman in another car that had been waiting in line to get in, ostensibly to go to the hospital. Thank god that was nearby; they were certainly going to need it.
"I'm…I'm a bit dizzy," she replied.
A bullet suddenly zipped by and pinged off the roof of her red Grand Marquis. She screamed and tried to curl up into a ball. Edwards looked around and saw three U-Haul trucks pull up and disgorge gunmen, armed with a variety of Uzis, AKMs, M16s and shotguns.
For them, they probably didn't think this one through though since the Security Forces (the police/protection detail of the USAF) did its training right near the gate area there. Within moments of the explosion, several HMMWVs were rolling from the vehicle depot, armed with M240 machine guns and packed full of Security Forces troops.
Edwards returned fire with his pistol, snapping off several shots as he had been trained and hitting one of the Uzi wielding maniacs. The man simply shrugged it off. Edwards chalked it up to either armor or drugs. Maybe both. He continued to fire, but it was becoming evident that the situation was getting worse rapidly.
Suddenly, the Humvees showed up across from the gunmen, and the unmistakable sound of machine guns clattering away punctured the hulls of the U-Haul trucks, setting one ablaze and scattering the rest of the terrorists, who were then apprehended by dismounted SF personnel.
Then another explosion went off in a different part of the base. It would have seemed that another suicide bomber had hit another checkpoint. The Security Forces piled back into their Humvees and responded to that crisis, while Edwards got back into his car and raced toward the offices of the Information Operations Section.
Five minutes later, and some harassment by the Security Forces, he arrived.
"Sir, here's the latest developments," Major Tyler said to Colonel Edwards as he walked in the door. He still had his pistol, tucked in a pocket somewhere.
"Did you at least get an IP address? Something?"
"Sir, we don't know how they're doing it, but all our security was completely bypassed,"
"So that Nakanishi software was completely useless?"
"It would appear that way."
"Fuck." Edwards continued to his office, which was right outside the command area. It was humming with activity, with service members running about, trying to fix the situation.
"Attention!" CMS Jameson called out. Most of the people were about to snap to attention but Edwards replied extremely quickly.
"At ease! Get back to work!" Everyone complied with that one.
Colonel Edwards opened up his office door and stepped in, followed by Major Tyler.
"Was there any indication of this?" he asked Tyler, sitting down at his simple wooden desk. He placed his pistol in one of the drawers and took out a flask, filled with Jonnie Walker Black. Tyler saw it and pretended not to notice. The Colonel had some Scottish in him and besides, he seemed to do better if he had a little liquid courage to soften the nerves.
"That's a negative," Tyler said, poking at a Blackberry Playbook (it was the only tablet that the US government allowed for sensitive work at this point). "Traffic from the usual suspects was low, there was no indication from any groups that we were keeping tabs on…"
"What about…?" Edwards started to ask, but Tyler read his mind and spoke ahead.
"No suspicious activity or anything like that."
"You sure?"
"Positive. I don't think they would have done something like this."
"Damn."
"What are your orders?"
Edwards was silent for a second, contemplating the situation at hand. They were under a massive cyberattack, their defenses not only breached, but completely bypassed altogether. That meant that somebody within the Nakanishi Group, or someone with experience in Nakanishi programs was orchestrating this attack.
"Tyler, go back and check the log files on the Nakanishi activity in the last twenty four hours. You know, the one that we're not supposed to…" Edwards had been told by the generals not to press Nakanishi for more information about their software, but had said nothing about monitoring server traffic. Which was in the purview of his unit anyway.
"Got it, I'll have Vogel and…" he looked out of the office door and saw Mason helping Jameson with someone. "…Mason check the log files."
"You sure about that…?" Word got around fast here.
"I'm sure. It'll help unit cohesion."
Edwards shrugged. "Your call."
Major Tyler walked out of the office and toward the command area. "Vogel! Mason!"
Both of them came running toward him, avoiding eye contact with each other.
"I need you two to go over the log files from the Nakanishi server that we have set up. Look for anything suspicious."
"Yes sir!" The two of them stalked off, still trying to avoid eye contact but doing a horrible job in the process.
Tyler continued to poke away at his tablet computer, cursing the horrible interface and lack of support for this stupid thing. He went back into Edwards' office and continued to analyze the situation from the reports that they were getting.
"Sir!"
A couple of minutes later, Tyler and Edwards' meeting was interrupted by an airman, running in from outside. He was covered in sweat and breathing very hard. He snapped to attention as soon as he got inside the office.
"What is it?" Edwards ask, waving the man to be at ease.
"I've been sent by the base commander to appraise you of recent events, since communication is down."
"Go ahead." Edwards could obviously see that this young man was very stressed out, and tried to react appropriately.
"Sir, it's a mess," the airman began.
"I am aware of that…"
"No sir, you don't understand." He gasped for more air. "Sir, they've hit everything, training bases, bombers, nuclear silos, everything..."
"What!" That was bad news indeed.
"And it gets even worse sir," he kept going on. "Someone tried to take out the President as well."
Both Tyler and Edwards exhaled at that news. This was very bad.
"Do you have any other news?"
"That's all I have at the moment."
"Very well. Please tell the commander that we have received the information, and if we need more, we'll send somebody."
"Yes sir." The airman ran out as quickly as he had come, almost steamrolling Senior Airman Vogel as she came into the office for a status report.
"Ms. Vogel?" Colonel Edwards called out. "What do you have for us?"
"Sir," she said, glaring at Tyler, who again, pretended to ignore the various (and usually harmless) shenanigans that went on here. "I…we found a huge data spike in traffic from China and Iran, sir."
"The Chinese and Iranians…?"
"It would appear that they have found and exploited a previously unknown vulnerability in Nakanishi software, allowing them to attack our network and servers." She read stoically from a piece of paper she had in her hand.
"Jesus, this is an act of war!" Edwards exclaimed. Something didn't sit right with that statement with Tyler though, even as his CO was all riled up.
"But I thought I asked you to look up on Nakanishi," Tyler asked, confused. Why was she bringing up this then?
"Sir, that's what we found," Vogel replied. "All the data traffic points to high usage from these areas, exploiting this vulnerability."
Tyler thought about it for a second. That was way too convenient. China and Iran had been hostile to the United States before, but despite all of that China would not simply throw away its trade relations with the US to launch a massive cyberattack on its major trading partner. There was simply too much to lose. As for Iran, well, maybe, but they made easy scapegoats for anything.
"What if it isn't a vulnerability?" he said out loud.
Vogel and Edwards looked at him.
"What do you mean?" Edwards asked, slowly.
"Perhaps this so called vulnerability is part of the program," Tyler replied, thinking this through. "Maybe it's been deliberately placed there."
"By the Chinese?" Vogel asked.
"No, by Nakanishi themselves."
Colonel Edwards leaned back in his chair. That whisky seemed very good about now…but he couldn't. Not when they were on to something big.
"Haven't we heard about that worm going around Asia for awhile now?"
"Yeah, that one. The one that's like Stuxnet?"
Tyler continued on with his theory. "It would take a lot of processing power to launch an attack this large, right? So what if, and this is a hypothetical 'what if', but if Nakanishi released that worm and used it to build a botnet. I mean, the largest botnet was 30 million computers, and that's a lot of processing power."
"But why would they do that?" Vogel asked.
"I don't know. But if they did, they have something to gain. Nakanishi runs a lot of things here."
The revolution hit all of them like a sledgehammer. Nakanishi ran their software. Nakanishi gave them free servers. Nakanishi provided the computers. Hell, Nakanishi provided them with mice and mousepads.
"Jesus…" Edwards muttered. This could be big. But how big was it though?
"Sir!" Mason came running into the room. "Major, we've got a big problem with another server."
"We can discuss this later," Edwards said, recognizing they still had to deal with the current situation.
"Understood." Major Tyler and Vogel left to deal with the continuing cyberattack, while Colonel Edwards pondered the next course of action he should take in regards to Tyler's increasingly plausible theory.