Ch.43: The Cyber Attack

The peace didn't last. It couldn't.

By 0600, I was back in the command center, wearing one of Julian's shirts and nursing a black coffee. The screens on the wall were a wall of red.

"We have a problem," Silas said, not looking up from his terminal.

"What is it?" Julian asked, walking in. He was dressed, his hair wet, looking like he hadn't just spent the night dismantling his emotional walls.

"The shard," Silas said. "The encryption is recursive. Every time we crack a layer, it generates two more. It's not just a lock. It's a hydra."

"Sterling's doing," Julian muttered. "He's flooding the drive with junk data remotely."

"How?" I asked. "The drive is offline."

"The drive is offline," Julian said. "But the authentication server isn't. The shard needs to ping the Firm's mainframe to verify the key. If we block the signal, the drive locks. If we let it through, Sterling floods it."

"So we need to shut down the mainframe," I said.

"We can't," Silas said. "It's air-gapped. Buried in a bunker under the Firm."

"We don't need to shut it down," I said, a plan forming in my mind. "We just need to make it look the other way."

I sat down at the terminal next to Silas.

"We're going to hack the Firm," I said. "But not the servers. The people."

"Social engineering?" Julian asked.

"Aggressive reallocation of resources," I corrected.

I pulled up the employee directory for Sterling & Wolfe. I found the head of IT. The head of Security. The head of Finance.

"We're going to trigger every alarm in the building," I said. "Fire. Theft. Data breach. We're going to flood their systems with so much noise they won't notice a single ping from a ghost drive."

"I can route the traffic through a botnet," Silas said, his fingers flying across the keyboard. "We can simulate a DDoS attack from a hostile nation state."

"Do it," Julian said. "But add a personal touch."

He leaned over my shoulder.

"Target the partners' accounts. Move their money. Randomize their passwords. Make them panic."

We launched the attack.

It was beautiful chaos. On the screens, we watched as the Firm's internal network lit up like a Christmas tree. Emails were bounced. Elevators froze. The sprinkler system in the executive washroom deployed.

"They're scrambling," Silas said. "IT is overwhelmed. Security is locking down the building."

"Now," I said. "Send the ping."

Silas connected the shard. The progress bar jumped. 50%. 70%.

"It's working," Julian said.

Then, the screens flickered.

A skull appeared on the main monitor. A laughing skull.

"Counter-measures," Silas hissed. "They're tracing us."

"Block it!" I shouted.

"I can't! It's an AI. It's rewriting my code faster than I can type!"

The trace was hunting us. Bouncing through the proxy servers. China. Russia. Brazil. Getting closer.

"If they find the penthouse," Julian said, "the game is over. They'll send a missile, legalities be damned."

"We need a new IP," Silas said. "Somewhere to dump the trace."

I looked at the map on the screen. The trace was in the city now. Sector 3. Sector 2.

"Here," I said, pointing to a location. "Route it here."

"That's a residential address," Silas warned.

"I know," I said. "Do it."

Silas typed the command. **REDIRECT.**

The trace locked on. The skull vanished.

"Target acquired," the system chirped. "Trace complete."

Sterling's hackers thought they had found us. They were sending the hit squad right now.

"Where did you send them?" Julian asked.

I pulled up the address on the map. 442 Elm Street. A nice, suburban house with a white picket fence.

"Captain Miller's house," I said.

Julian looked at me. A slow smile spread across his face.

"You sent Sterling's hit squad to his own Police Captain's house?"

"Miller betrayed me," I said, watching the police scanners light up with reports of 'shots fired' at the Captain's address. "He let them take the shard. He let them hunt us."

I leaned back in the chair.

"Let them eat each other."