It took only seconds for Gesling to determine that everyone in the room was agitated about something. They were all seated at the meeting table and all looked up when he entered the room. He couldn’t tell if they were upset with him or were welcoming an interruption to their apparently intense discussion. Paul was beginning to feel agitated himself, because he didn’t have a damned clue what all the hubbub was about.
“Come in, Paul. We’ve got a problem.” Childers motioned for him to take a seat at the table next to him. Paul took the last sip of his soda and dropped the can and the candy-bar wrapper in the garbage can by the door. The IT Lady sneered at him as she looked back and forth between the garbage can and the recycle bin beside it. Paul bit his tongue to prevent him from saying the word hippie and ignored the sneer as he sat.
“Sure. What’s up? You guys look like we’ve lost the vehicle or something.”
“Well,” Chu commented, “in a manner of speaking, we have.”
“What?!”
This time, the IT Lady picked up the discussion. “Paul, we’ve got a major security breach. One of my team began to suspect something was up last week when he noticed an uptick in outgoing data volume from e-mails, file transfers, et cetera. You know, the usual stuff. But this uptick wasn’t from any particular user or at any specific time. It was about a twenty-percent increase in everyone’s data usage. When we looked more closely, we saw that every single file being transferred was statistically larger than it should have been, given our past few years of data.”
“Really?” He leaned forward.
“When we moved from looking at the overall system level and began looking at specific outgoing messages, we saw that each and every message had some additional data encoded and attached to it. Sort of a hidden attachment, as it were. Then we noticed that messages were also being cc’d to an additional e-mail address. And not the same e-mail address—hundreds of different ones, not one being the same. In a matter of a few days, the extra data volume that went out of here was over a terabyte. And that was before any flags had really been raised. Had a single user been sending that much data, we would have shut him down immediately.”
Gesling was not an information-technology expert, but he was pretty smart, and what she was describing sounded deceptively simple. Almost too simple to be possible.
“What data was being sent? Financial? Technical?”
“Good question.” Chu was quick to respond. “Technical. Whoever did this got most of the Dreamscape design and a lot of performance data.”
“That’s the way it looks now.” Jones continued her explanation. “Yes, it was technical. Somehow, a Trojan software program was latent in all of our computers until it was activated last week. Once it turned on, it began to systematically carve up and send out selected data files from every computer in the office. It found our engineering drawings, customized software design tools, parts specifications, test reports, everything. You name it. We haven’t found a single computer that wasn’t compromised.”
“Goddammit all to hell! I can’t believe we let this happen!” It was Gary Childers’s turn to add to the tempest.
“By the time we realized what was happening and cut off our access to the outside world late last night, it was too late,” Jones said decisively.
“Hundreds of e-mail addresses?” Gesling asked. “Is there a common link? Do we know who we’re dealing with here?”
“China” was the answer from the IT Lady. “I asked Phil.”
Phil was on Helen’s team and was well known by just about everyone in the company as the guy you called when your system went down. He seemed to be able to fix anything. He was also an ex-hacker. When he was in high school, he was expelled for hacking the school’s computer system. When he was in college, he was arrested for hacking a computer at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. There was a story about how he’d managed to get out of jail time, but Paul had never heard it.
Phil had always said it was because he did it just for the sake of doing it—sort of like the answer people gave when asked for their motivation in climbing Mount Everest—or for going to the Moon. He never tried to take anything or cause any problems, he just had to prove to himself that he could do it.
He never graduated from college, but that hadn’t kept Helen Jones from recognizing his talent and convincing the company to pay him enough that he would not consider climbing any more Mount Everests while employed by Space Excursions. Phil was good at his job and had outside connections that could help him in situations like this. Helen didn’t want to ask who some of these outside connections were.
“Phil nosed around some. He said that we were getting IP port probes on a regular basis now and that the packets that left here went where the probes are coming from. He thinks it all went to China.”
“Do we know how our systems were compromised?” Mark Watson asked.
“Uh, well,” Jones responded. “Mark, look at your cell phone. Where does it say it was made? Check yours, too, Paul. Gary, flip over that laptop and tell me where it was assembled.”
Childers picked up the laptop that was sitting idle in front of him and read from the back.
“Assembled in China.”
“Same here,” Watson replied.
“Mine, too,” said Gesling.
“Of course they are.” Knowing that she had their full attention, Helen Jones continued her explanation. “All of the computers in the facility were either made or assembled in China. The company name on the outside is as red, white, and blue as you’d ever want. But the lure of cheap labor is too much for the CEOs—present company excluded, Mr. Childers. We’ve outsourced almost all of our computer-manufacturing base to China.
“I believe our computers came with some additional software embedded in the operating system. It was then triggered or turned on by someone who knew what we were doing here.”
“Wait a minute.” Childers leaned forward in his seat. “Are you telling me you’ve figured all this out since last night?”
“Oh, heavens no,” Jones responded. “No, at this point it is just a theory. The idea wasn’t mine. It was Phil’s. It seems this is an active discussion among the hacker community and pretty well known there ‘unofficially.’ There have apparently been other incidents that Phil knew about. When we started looking into our problem, he told me about them.”
Watson could contain himself no longer.
“Folks. Are you aware of the implications here? Yes, we’ve lost some expensive and important technical data. But what about the rest of the country? We aren’t the only ones who own this brand of computers. What about the banks? Other defense contractors? The government, for God’s sake. If her theory is correct, then we could have a security breach of national importance!”
“Alright, alright, let’s settle down a bit.” Childers took back control of the meeting. “All in good time, Mr. Watson. We need to ascertain the degree to which we’ve been compromised, fix the leak—no, stop the leak—and then we can figure out who to report it to. And we will report it—but not just yet. First, I need to understand what this means to us.
“I need to know something for absolute certain.” Childers looked at Gesling and Chu as he spoke. “Is there anything someone can do with this data that will compromise our flight? We have a manifest of paying customers and a launch date. I need to know if this leak will force a delay.”
“Gary, if all they did was copy our files, then we should be okay,” Chu said. “But are we sure that’s all that happened? What if this Trojan program did more than copy the data? What if it changed something in the procedures or, God forbid, in the specifications? Paul might be halfway to the Moon and a bad command dumps all his fuel. We’d better make sure none of these systems are connected to the wireless on the ship.”