Another security agent, fully taciturn, held the heavy door for her. No windows inside, either, unless you saw the motion detectors and cameras in the corners of the room as metaphors. They did, after all, provide a view of any unauthorized entry.
Participants were still settling in as Lana made her way to her assigned seat. They included General Clifford Sprouse, the Commander of the U.S. Cyber Command (USCC), who sat directly to the right of Holmes. The general rose, meeting her halfway around the table for the introduction that Holmes provided with his customary briskness.
Others were more familiar to her, men such as Joshua Tenon of the NSA, a veteran cyberwarrior who’d had a salt-and-pepper beard before last year’s catastrophic attack on the grid. Today, he tugged nervously on the pure white hair that framed his chin, giving Lana a lascivious stare when he thought she wasn’t noticing.
Teresa McGivern was present, which came as no surprise to Lana. McGivern had been at the agency “forever,” as she generally put it when queried, and had been slated to retire when the grid went down thirteen months ago. Her display of mettle throughout the ordeal made Holmes recognize, once again, how truly irreplaceable she was. “Sayonara Myrtle Beach,” McGivern once joked to Lana about her postponed retirement dream.
Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Deming was seated with two senior aides across from Lana. She rose to greet him formally, having only “met” him previously in the videoconference called by Holmes yesterday. Deming looked as though he hadn’t slept last night and might have nicked himself shaving this morning. Lana spied a red spot on his neck and a tiny pink smudge just below it on his starched white collar.
But for Lana’s money, the shocker at the table was Admiral Wourzy, the chip counterfeiter from the California casino, who also happened to be the navy’s chief of cybersecurity. He was short, squat, with hair so black and lacquered straight back that he might have dyed and shaped it with shoe polish. He also appeared unhealthily pale, as though he had, indeed, spent too many hours resting his elbows on the green felt of gaming tables. Just seeing him made her think of gambling, the way a smoker lighting up can make an ex-smoker watch in envy as the tobacco reddens and the addict draws the gray fumes deep into his lungs. She was glad she was in a SCIF with no opportunity to jump online for a quick hand of Texas Hold ’em.
When Wourzy smiled anxiously at her, she sensed his embarrassment, which she found disarming for reasons that did not register readily. She nodded at him, maintaining a pleasant enough expression, to which he responded by mouthing “Hello,” as though a bond had just been formed.
Oh, great.
But Lana had always taken up for the underdog. She could easily imagine how humiliating it would be to find yourself the pariah at the table, someone so clearly tolerated only because of extreme circumstances. But it wasn’t as though he’d sold state secrets. He’d been a buffoon, and would undoubtedly pay for it once his expertise was no longer part of the nation’s triaged response. She’d certainly behaved foolishly at online gambling sites, where she’d watched her money disappear into cyberspace. She’d lost enough in one year to have paid for Emma’s first year at the college or university of her choice. Lana winced inwardly at the memory.
“What we’re seeing with the hacking and hijacking of the submarine is unprecedented,” Holmes began after they were all in place. “So far, we’re aware of only one survivor. He’s First Class Petty Officer Hector Gomez, who’s in charge of the Missile Control Center. He says he cannot take control of the Delphin or its missiles. But the submarine is operational and Admirals Deming and Wourzy assure us that there must be more than half a dozen men or women running the reactor plant, control room, and missile system.
“The parts of the sub in view of cameras show dozens of dead bodies. Early this morning we received their demand. They, whoever ‘they’ turn out to be, want all the Arctic nations making claims on the resources of the region to abandon their ‘exploitive practices’ and leave. That was the entire communiqué that first showed up on my home computer at 4:00 a.m. Of course, such abandonment is not going to happen, which they must anticipate.”
Home computer? That was what resonated most for Lana, and she suspected that was true for Holmes as well. He looked profoundly disgusted over having to admit that his sophisticated cyberdefenses had also been penetrated by the hackers — plural — for surely this was a high-performance team at work. She figured a corps of the NSA’s finest techies was at his house triaging and performing digital forensics on every piece of hardware he owned.
“Sounds, on the face of it, like it could be Anonymous, or an environmental offshoot,” Tenon said. Anonymous, as the name would suggest, was a band of mostly unknown, decentralized hacktivists who embraced a wide spectrum of progressive and environmental causes — and had made hash of their enemies’ computer systems, which included the U.S. government’s on occasion.
Lana was dubious. Hacking a nuclear-armed submarine, even with inside help, went well beyond the capabilities of anything Anonymous or its affiliates had demonstrated in the past.
“We prepared a report just last month,” Tenon continued, “on the increasing militancy of that sector. Although, to be frank, it feels like too easy a conclusion for my comfort, and a task too difficult for what we’ve seen from them in the past.”
Lana nodded her agreement. The question that troubled her was: What would the hackers do now? Use the submarine as the weapon it was intended to be? Threaten to bomb DC and Moscow if the two most powerful Arctic nations refused to budge? Killing untold millions and spewing sickening levels of radiation over several continents seemed counterproductive from an environmental point of view. Consistency may be the hobgoblin of small minds, but in this case inconsistency would make absolutely no sense if it hailed from Anonymous or its cohorts.
“So that was it?” McGivern asked. “Just leave?”
“That’s correct,” Holmes said.
“How bizarre. No threats?”
“None,” Holmes replied. “But with a nuclear-armed sub the threat’s implied.”
“But not with any specificity,” McGivern countered, to which Holmes nodded.
General Sprouse asked about the hackers’ TTPs: tactics, techniques, and procedures. “Do we know of any digital fingerprints that might suggest any known perpetrators? I’m thinking of APTs and the Chinese.”
Beijing had made great use of Advanced Persistent Threats, which were essentially gangs so corporate in nature that many worked normal business hours to hack targets with great patience. They often spent years surveilling and doing careful reconnaissance of their targets’ networks and computer systems, carefully probing a target’s cybersystems. Among their favorite malware were Trojans, which provided backdoor access to a computer system, and worms, which spread their virulent code throughout the target. Sometimes their malware was even introduced during the construction of the device, which, theoretically, could include components of a nuclear-armed submarine of sufficiently recent vintage.
“It’s too early for the forensics,” said Admiral Wourzy. “That sub is almost a completely isolated entity. We have few trails to follow. It’s not like the attack on the grid where there were defined ports of entry.” Trojans and rootkits. “Our Cyber Incident Response is going to be virtually impossible with our limited remote access.”