Riggs nodded for a moment, then waved the J-2 and the colonel away and stood up.
“Listen up,” the general said. “We just got hammered, electronically, by the enemy. They got past most of our electronic defenses. They’ve got trojans and worms in the system which is why everything is shut down: what wasn’t corrupted by the attack has been taken off-line to prevent them getting into it. Data Security has most of it isolated and stopped the attack from the outside. Which is good: given that these things are ahead of us technologically and they are, after all, flying computers, the fact that we could stop them at all is surprising.
“Lasing. Your remotes have been physically pulled to prevent the machines from taking over the lasers. Data Security did that first thing. Get up there, physically, and take control of the lasers. I’ll set up runners to manage control. Colonel Guthrie! Your troops and those lasers are all that stands between this mountain and those probes, if they get going again. Get out there with your unit. Tell them: Hold The Line. J-3. I want paper maps and markers up on the walls in two minutes. We’re going to have to do this the old-fashioned way. Everyone else, we are shut down electronically. Get manual commo in place. Runners. Field phones. I don’t care if you’re using two tin cans and a string. Try to coordinate through the commo officer but get us commo until DS can get the systems back up. Go.”
Dick was pretty sure he had gotten ahead of the tide.
At the first sign that a worm or trojan had gotten into the base system, he had set up a program he’d named “Babel Blaster” that shut down every link in the network. Dealing with the various worms and trojans like the MS Blaster had taught him that. As soon as the first trigger on the internal system went off, Blaster went on and began operating automatically. While Babel Blaster was running, he went into the server room and physically pulled every single cable connecting the entire base. Getting everything back in place would be a bastard. But he had written bots to manage that, as well.
Fortunately, the worms hadn’t managed to penetrate his master controls. Those were on a 256 bit encryption. The weakness of encryption was usually at the password level. If you used a high numeric encryption scheme and then used a simple four alphanumeric password, say your birth year and month, the attacker only had to break the password. And there were only so many children’s names and so many birthdays to go around.
Dick’s master control password was a 196 character string of random high ascii. And he never wrote it down. He may have just been a staff sergeant, but that didn’t interfere with having an eidetic memory.
When he was sure that his master server was safe, he stopped and sat, elbow on table, chin in hand, looking at his screen. He wasn’t sure what he was dealing with but he had certain verities in life. He watched science fiction movies and TV, so he had those to go on. But he disagreed with some of it, based on his personal knowledge and training. One thing that he could simply not believe was that you could cram a full, functional, artificial intelligence into a tiny data packet. No matter how compressed the information, you still were dealing with a limited number of ones and zeros. And all the data packets that got through were small. Ergo, what he was dealing with were fucking viruses, worms and trojans. And he’d been writing those, and fighting those, for twenty years. He couldn’t say that he knew all the tricks, but he did know how to think about the tricks, how they could and could not work. How they could and could not hide.
The problem being that most viruses, trojans and worms were detectable by “signatures,” bits of code that were really variants of earlier versions. But he was pretty sure these weren’t going to use legacy code. And he was the only person who was looking at them: Symantec’s facilities were trashed. Ditto the National Information Security site. Even “heuristic” checking wasn’t going to do it.
He’d have to start from scratch. Okay, he could do that. And he could do more.
“Simone, what the hell are you doing!” Lieutenant Gathers asked as he hurried into the server room. “Everybody else is running around trying to work the problem. What the hell are you doing just sitting there?”
“Working the problem, Lieutenant,” the sergeant said, not bothering to look up. “And I gotta start somewhere. So gimme your laptop.”
Richard frowned at the incoming packet. The packet alleged to be a jpg, but it was clearly corrupted. However, when the “corruption” was analyzed, it turned out to be a short communique from the nice sergeant in Huntsville. The nice, apparently very clever, sergeant.
Richard finished reading the data and then smiled. Any of his former students who had seen that smile would have dropped his class abruptly. And probably left town, taken an assumed name in a foreign country and tried very hard never to be noticed.
Richard had never considered being a soldier. But it appeared that he had just been recruited.
On the other hand, it was a war that he was both predisposed to and capable of fighting.
He flexed his fingers and for just a moment wondered how clever he really was.
He finally decided that he was clever enough. And if not, there was always the brute force approach. There were other clever people left in the world. Presumably a computer could not disconnect itself.
Dick looked up as a harried Dr. Reynolds ran into the room.
“IBot transmitter computer?” Roger asked.
“Clean as far as I know,” Simone replied. “I pulled the connections before the server that it’s hooked to got corrupted. Is it still transmitting?”
“I think so,” Roger said.
“It’s still clean,” Dick replied. “If these bastards got in it it wouldn’t be transmitting.”
“Good,” Roger said, running out of the room.
“Everyone rushing about,” Dick said, shaking his head. “Don’t they know there’s a war on?” He hit “Enter” and leaned back. All four of the attacking programs that he’d found so far had certain bits of data loaded into them. Most of the data was what to do in the event that they were discovered. But they also were supposed to report back on what they found. As far as Simone could tell, he’d prevented that. However, the data told them where to report back.
Intelligence flows two ways. And there were still lots of people on Earth who could do something with things like the electronic location of one of the probes’ master computers and information on what protocols it expected when information was being sent in. And the difference between information and sabotage in the computer world was… very, very small.
With one click of a keystoke, Dick had just sent the data to all of them.
“You wanna play games, motherfucker? I’m a master of playing games.”
“General, the probes are coming live again,” the lieutenant said, breathlessly. “Not all of them, but quite a few. We’re engaging them as they approach, but we can’t get all of them. Some of them are headed for the antenna farm. Others are hitting places further down the mountain.”
“They’re taking out the IBot transmitters,” the J-2 said. “At a guess. We’ve got transmitters lower down the slopes as well as the main transmitter up on the hill. And bots scattered in the minefield.”
“Some of them are blowing up down there, but not all,” the lieutenant added.