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

Simon Sifter's office, FBI HQ Washington DC

Avery Ryan knocked on the door. Elijah Mundo was already in the office with Assistant Director Sifter.

"Ah! Come in Avery, let me introduce you to Elijah Mundo, former Marine who has become an FBI Special Agent. He'll be joining us in the Cyber Division from today." Sifter got straight down to business.

As Avery shook hands with Elijah she looked quizzically at Sifter.

"Agent Mundo was a Signals and Computer specialist in the Marines." Sifter continued. A look of understanding came across Avery''s face. So he might be useful for more than just muscle after all!

"Normally I'd suggest you two get to know each other a bit but I'm afraid something urgent has come up. You may have seen on the news about the power outage in New Hampshire yesterday afternoon. Well it seems like that was a cyber intrusion and the person who did it is going on the Cyber Most Wanted list. Power should be back up in the state by this afternoon but a lot of damage has been done. One of the engineers is currently under arrest because his credentials were used to take down the grid. There's a plane on the tarmac to take the two of you to Concord. Special Agent Krumitz. Do you want to take him?"

"For the moment I think Krumitz would be more useful here." said Avery.

"OK it's your decision."

With that Avery and Elijah left the office.

"I just need to talk to Krumitz and then we'll go." Avery said as they reached the cramped quarters that had been allocated to the new Cyber Crimes division of the FBI.

Somewhere in New York.

Raven was pretty pleased with herself. Her reputation as a hacker had now been enhanced. She had been invited to take part in some other projects and was deciding which ones to join, some had fees attached. But there was one project she had jumped at joining: making a linux distro for the GameVexi with hacking tools in it.

This involved hacking some of the GV's firmware, Raven had some experience of disassembling firmware from hacking the Juniper firewall so was initially asked to help with this aspect of the project.

Concord, New Hampshire, FBI Field Office

Avery has just finished interviewing the engineer that had been arrested, it did not go well. It seemed this man genuinely had no idea how his credentials came to be used to take down the power grid.

"He doesn't know anything so I have asked for him to be released." Avery told Elijah."Let's get the system logs to Krumitz, see if he can do anything."

"Will do!"

"Whoever our hacker is: they're going to be a celebrity in that world now. That makes it harder to maintain anonymity, let's see if we can use that. I'll get Krumitz to look at Dark Net social media."

"Sorry, the Dark Net has its own social media?"

"Yes, Elijah they have chat rooms,, message boards: it's a shadow world, like any underground. You've seen 4chan? That is gentle compared to some of this stuff. But people can only enter most of the boards and chat rooms by invitation, which makes it difficult for law enforcement. Fortunately we have one of the best white hat hackers in the world in Krumitz."

"White hat?"

"Yes, you remember the old western movies? You could tell the good guys from the bad guys by the colour of their hats?"

"Well yeah..." Then realisation dawned. "Oh so that imagery has been imported here. Our target is a black hat hacker?"

"Yes, only there are no physical hats, which makes it more difficult!"

Both laughed.

"Oh and there are grey hats too, but I'll explain those when we come across them."

A day later Somewhere in New York

Raven was taking delivery of a new GameVex. This one was provided by the hacker collective who were doing the linux distro. It was for experiments. Elsewhere the roms and microcontrolers had given up their data and this had been sent to her to be disassembleii..

Concord

Avery's phone rang.

"Krumitz, I'll put him on speaker."

"Hi" Krumitz's voice echoed a little.

"Hello Daniel, I've put you on speaker so Elijah can hear you too, what do you have for us?"

"Okayyyy. Right there was some stuff in the logs. Basically our hacker is good at this and cautious."

"Taking down a power grid doesn't sound like caution to me!" Elijah interjected.

"Well he is. He found his way through the firewall, mapped the entire network, scanned all the ports. Then installed a keylogger, downloaded files, probably installed a packet sniffer. And yet he's untraceable." Daniel's voice sounded a little irritated.

"A keylogger? So that's how he got the log in details. The file downloding, anything significant there?" Avery was intrigued, this was a good opponent. Maybe, if she could turn him, a second candidate for a programme that she was about to propose to Sifter.

"I think he may have built a virtual version of the network to try things out on." Daniel's voice had a note of triumph in it as he heard Elijah blow out his cheeks.

"I see what you mean about cautious. But how can you be untraceable? I thought you left digital crumbs wherever you went on the internet." Elijah was, despite himself, impressed, both with fat boy and the hacker.

"Well that is kind of true on the surface web. Our target was using the dark net, and, probably, tor. On the dark net things are done differently. Messages bounce around between proxies, go via countries which wont cooperate with the US. And even if they did the chains are often so long and tortuous that they are impossible to follow."

"OK, thankyou Daniel, anything on the social media?" Avery was convinced that this was how the target would trip up.

"Yes, well maybe, a user called "dUnc3" posted that people should make sure their uninteruptable power supplies were topped up a few days before the hack. The same user is being credited with the hack. But that may be a red herring..."

"OK that'll have to do, try to find out who dUnc3 is. See if he's used the same handle elsewhere, good luck." said Avery as she ended the call.

"To get a keylogger on the machine he'd have to have admin access wouldn't he? How did he get that?" Elijah thought, out loud.

"Good question. We should ask about remote logins. I'll ring Krumitz you talk to their techs. Also

see if they have an email archive in case someone got spearphished."

"Sorry still catching up with civilian terminology, Speafished?"

"You're familiar with phishing?" Elijah nodded, "Well Spearphishing is just a more targeted form of phishing. The spearphisher knows his target, the email may have appeared to have come from a senior tech telling the techs to change their passwords using a link that looked legitimate. In reality it will have been to a website set up by our hacker, it will look just like the internal password change screen. It only takes one tech to click on the link to give our hacker a way in."

"Then why install the keylogger?"

"Our hacker is clever and cautious. He doesn't want the email linked to the attack. So install the keylogger to obtain other credentials."

"This is one clever hacker."

i To quote Raven from Ghost in the Machine (S1E11) "Game Consoles are also computers". There are distributions of linux for the XBOX, GameCube, Wii and even the DS! There was a linux distribution for the PS3, at least until Sony tried to stop it.

ii The language that computers use natively is called an assembly language and disassembly is the process of turning the binary code version of this back into more or less human readable format.