Chasm Waxing: A Startup, Cyber-Thriller Read online

General Shields vacillated between gut-wrenching heartbreak and white-hot rage, although he knew he was functioning much better than Lisa. At least, I’m doing something positive with my pain and not popping pills, he thought. General Shields personally wanted to destroy the radical Islamists, one-by-one. He was upset with the hamstrung US response to his son’s death.

  Americans went to the polls in November 2016 to elect a new President. Terrorism and ISIS were important issues in the 2016 election. During the campaign, Thomas Goodson used extremely harsh rhetoric against Islamic terrorism in general, and ISIS specifically. However, once in office, he became more cautious. No one—except Shields—wanted to commit large numbers of ground troops to Iraq or Syria.

  Goodson announced stepped up air strikes against ISIS in Iraq. He continued his predecessor’s strategy of relocating most special operations units from Syria to Iraq, to avoid further debacles like Charlie’s death. America was unable to identify friend from foe in a complicated civil war.

  Because he wanted to avoid air combat operations in the same airspace as the Russians, and civilian casualties, the new POTUS refrained from air strikes in Syria. He preferred drones. Goodson bickered with NATO allies about who should bear the brunt of operations in the ancient country. No-fly zones were imposed to protect Syrian civilians and stem the tide of refugees that were drowning Europe and causing upheaval in the EU and Turkey. In contrast to the decisive actions of the Russians, who began bombing ISIS in Syria in the fall of 2015, the US looked weak.

  While the average American didn’t distinguish between Iraq and Syria, General Shields was incensed. The only response to Charlie’s killing was airstrikes in a neighboring country, reduction of the US special operations units in Syria, and no-fly zones. And drones. Lots of drones.

  If the President wouldn’t do the right thing, General Shields would.

  In the four years since the election, by the spring of 2020, the Caliphate was weakened in Syria due to continued airstrikes from Russia and NATO. Iran also had ground forces in Syria that attacked the Caliphate. However, Russia and Iran were more concerned with supporting the current Syrian government, than defeating the Caliphate. The Syrian government even bought discounted oil from the Caliphate.

  Air strikes in Iraq also sapped the Caliphate. But many members of the Caliphate simply fled to Libya, the Sinai, Europe, or faded into the civilian populations. They would return when the attacks stopped.

  But Iraq wanted the US to do much more. The Caliphate’s vast propaganda machine continued to draw recruits from all over the world, especially after they changed their name.

  In 2019, due to the limited US campaign against the Caliphate, the Iraqi government’s frustration boiled over. Iraq expelled all American forces in the country. Then, they turned to the Russians and Iranians to lead future air strikes and ground operations against the Caliphate.

  The US’ strategy of timidity towards the Caliphate played havoc with General Shields’ psyche. He inhaled another shot. There was a knock at the door. The General grabbed a piece of gum and opened the door.

  Lin Liu entered the room.

  Lin was in her late twenties. She wore nude pumps and a tight white dress. Her eyes were jade green. The second-generation Chinese-American was gorgeous. “I’m sorry I’m late General. Everybody at the Fort was jockeying for an invite, even this late on a Friday night. I had to fend them off with a stick.”

  “Are you sure they were only interested in the Accelerator?” he chuckled. “Well, good job. I don’t need them here. The last thing these entrepreneurs and startup kids need is for a bunch of govies to get in their way.”

  On the job for only two weeks, Lin had never been to the offices of Defense Innovations Accelerator. As often happened in the military, the General’s previous assistant was reassigned. General Shields requested Lin because she was non-military. He hoped to keep her as his personal aide for longer than two years. It totally discombobulated him to switch personal assistants. And she wasn’t bad on the eyes.

  “We’re just finishing up. I came in here to return a call. Let’s go across the hallway. Then, you can see how this place works. By the way, there’s a much better way to get here from the Fort. I’ll show it to you next time.”

  Chapter 4 – The Gecko Explanation

  6:20 p.m. (EDT), Friday, July 24, 2020 - Columbia, MD

  Suite 602, Conference Room, Defense Innovations Accelerator

  General Shields re-entered the conference room. This time, he was accompanied by Lin Lu. Ali completely forgot about the bug he was tracking. Samantha uneasily shifted in her chair, as the General introduced his new personal aide.

  “Ok, back to the demo,” said Shields. “Please explain the monsters and catapults. Why were there so many of them? Remember, Lin is new to the Accelerator; and I’m still looking for grandma-level explanations.”

  “Catapults? Actually, they’re supposed to be trebuchets,” said Becca. “Did they look like catapults? Were they too small?”

  Samantha gasped. “Becca, we’ll worry about the artwork later. Tell the General why there were so many.”

  “Oh, sorry,” replied Becca. “During that part of the demo, I fired up our botnet and simulated a DDOS—a Distributed Denial of Service Attack—in REALSPACE. The botnet attack sent a massive amount of IP packets to the servers on the test network. When the servers receive all those packets from the Internet, they freak out. The servers can’t handle all the packets. In REALSPACE, the result of a DDOS attack is that no customer can connect to Gecko’s website.”

  “IP, botnets?” said the General. “Grandma is having a tough time understanding this.”

  Becca smiled and shook her head.

  She had never met a general, let alone a five-star general. Shields was the first five-star general since Omar N. Bradley, in 1950. The muscular Shields only looked like a movie star General. He didn’t fit the stereotypical persona of a general. He didn’t seem authoritarian, strict, or curt. However, Becca had a sense that the General could be all these things—and more—if needed.

  As a hacker, Becca kept close tabs on the NSA. The NSA was the best hacking organization in the world. Just before Becca graduated from high school, Edward Snowden took over two million classified documents, while working as a contractor for the NSA. Snowden gave a portion of the material to selected members of the press. They, in turn, slowly leaked the information. The disclosures allowed Becca to study NSA capabilities carefully.

  Becca also knew her technology history; her dad made sure of that. The General’s massive fiefdom at the NSA was due to IP and the growth of packet switched technologies. Packet switching was more efficient and resilient than dedicating an entire circuit to a communications channel. Becca recognized the irony in talking to General Shields about IP.

  “Internet Protocol is how computers talk to each other over the network—whether it’s a wired network or a Wi-Fi network. For example, pretend I write an email to Grandma. When I send her the email, the email destination is translated into an address, just like your postal address.

  “Only it’s not Grandma’s street address; it’s the IP address of her email provider. Let’s say the address is 192.168.1.1. The email travels in pieces called packets. In the real world, it’s like I tore a letter to Grandma into numerous strips.

  “On each piece, I put my IP address as the sender, and Grandma’s IP address as the recipient. I’d also number the strips in such a way, that it wouldn’t matter when Grandma received the individual pieces. Grandma would be able to reconstruct the letter without worrying about when she received each strip. IP is the rules the network agrees to follow. It adheres to this protocol as it sends the individual pieces—the packets—over the network.”

  “You’re assuming that the letter is not encrypted, right?” asked Lin.

  “That’s a great question.” Becca saw Samantha roll her eyes. “It doesn’t matter. IP works the same for an encrypted letter, as it does for the un-encrypted message. If
I sent Grandma an un-encrypted email, all the packets would be forwarded in plaintext. Anyone that understood English could read it. It’s just clear text. Now, if the email is encrypted, the plaintext would look like gibberish. That’s called ciphertext. Grandma would only be able to read the message if she used her encryption key.”

  General Shields interjected, “Or anyone else in possession of Grandma’s encryption key.” He smiled smugly, “Hypothetically, of course.”

  Becca let his words hang in the air before she proceeded. She wasn’t sure everyone understood what Shields meant. People’s eyes seemed to glaze over at the mere mention of encryption. “Our botnet was just a bunch of servers in the Amazon cloud that we rented. We configured them to flood the Gecko test network with packets. In the real world, botnets are infected computers that hackers use to perform attacks and mask their identity. Grandma’s computer could be a part of a botnet and she wouldn’t even know it.

  “Skilled hackers can hide the origin of the attacks, making it look like Grandma was the hacker. Companies usually don’t prioritize figuring out the identity of the attacker; they just want the attacks to stop. But, if you’re a nation fighting a cyberwar, attribution is a huge issue. You don’t want to nuke Grandma by mistake.

  “Back to the DDOS attack. As we flooded the Gecko network with an enormous number of packets, the network couldn’t do anything else. It was stuck in a loop, trying to figure out how to route all the packets. That’s why there were so many arrows flying in the air. The good news is that we mitigated the threat. SoCalSheMerlin cast a spell in GAMESPACE that defeated the DDOS attack in REALSPACE.

  “In REALSPACE, the G-Agent recognized the DDOS attack, and communicated via the REALSPACE API to G-Bridge. Then, G-Bridge talked the GAMESPACE API. This caused the Unreal Engine to appropriately render the consequences in GAMESPACE—the meteors destroyed the giants and zombies.

  “In REALSPACE, the DDOS attack consisted of a specific type of packet, called SYN packets, sent from the botnet. To mitigate the threat, REALSPACE filtered the SYN packets, and launched virtual load balancers. So the mitigation stopped the offending packets and surged to improve the amount of traffic the network could accept. That’s the good part.

  “After that, the wheels came off,” said Becca, with disappointment. “The arrows that flew over the castle, and landed in the courtyard, represented a spear phishing attack. The malicious attachments on the spear phishing email were rendered as gold coins in GAMESPACE. I’m encouraged that the G-Agents recognized the attack. That’s why we saw arrows in GAMESPACE in the first place.

  “But the Cleric’s spell should’ve thwarted the spear phishing attack. It didn’t. The Gecko customer service agents clicked on the attachment. That’s when the demo broke down, and the workers could no longer do their job. There’s a bug in the code somewhere. Ali will track it down.”

  The General looked at the clock. “Becca, Grandma thanks you for your explanations. The ability to succinctly communicate complex topics is one of the most critical skills in the technology world. Only then, do you actually know that you know something—when you can explain it to your grandma. Just last night, President Goodson called and asked me to explain encryption.”

  Becca giggled. Her eyes widened behind her black, wire-rim glasses.

  “It’s about time to start our Friday evening,” said the General. “But before we break, Samantha, how’s the AI coming?”

  Artificial Intelligence was a broad and complex term with a long history in computing. Generally speaking, it referred to the enablement of computers to mimic human thinking and display human-like intelligence.

  Samantha replied, “Right now, we use AI to recognize cyber-attacks in REALSPACE. But, I think you’re asking about AI to replace the necessity of the G-Master, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “We haven’t progressed as far as I’d hoped. As you know, we don’t want the dependency of a Gamification Systems’ employee monitoring every game. So we’re working hard on it.”

  “Roger that,” said the General. “Show me what you have at next month’s demo. You guys should talk to CyberAI about the AI. Artificial intelligence is their core competency.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Samantha, this looks good. Keep at it. Spear phishing is a very hard problem. 90% of all data breaches begin with spear phishing. It’s complex and involves social engineering. It doesn’t surprise me that you’re struggling with it. Now, I’ve kept all of you here too long. Thanks for accommodating my schedule.” Lin and the General left the room.

  Samantha surveyed Becca and Ali. “Well, that went pretty well. Good job guys. Ali, how long do you think it’ll take to locate that bug?”

  “I’ll work on it this weekend. I remember fixing it. Maybe I checked in the wrong source code into GitHub.” GitHub was software that managed files and took care of file versioning. Software source code—whatever the programming language—boiled down to digital files, composed of text.

  Different software engineers at Gamification worked with different files. The entire process of creating, checking out, and updating source code files, was the lifeblood of a software company. A finished software product was simply a number of files, spliced together, written in a particular programming language. When executed, the files worked to perform the requested task.

  Ali was telling Samantha that he could have mistakenly uploaded the wrong version of his source code file to GitHub.

  “Ok, great,” replied Samantha.

  “You know Samantha; I think I’d work much faster with a personal aide like Lin.” Ali snickered.

  “Stop. I wasn’t impressed. I didn’t think she was that pretty or smart,” Samantha said. “Also, Becca, you can’t call this Castle Gecko. I thought we talked about that? Gecko Insurance Company won’t appreciate it. We don’t want the Gamers to have any idea of what’s actually occurring in REALSPACE.”

  “Right” replied a crestfallen Becca. “I didn’t have enough time to change everything for the demo. I was thinking of another name. Do you like Castle Chevaliers?”

  “Yeah, that sounds great.”

  “Aren’t you a little skittish about working with CyberAI? Don’t they do what we do?” asked Becca.

  Small startup companies were always deeply concerned about competition. Samantha replied, “I’ve always thought so too. So let’s be careful.”

  While Samantha checked her phone, Becca and Ali packed up their laptops. Once finished, they both waited for Samantha.

  “Oh, don’t wait for me, guys. I’ve got something I need to discuss with General Shields. Have a great weekend.”

  Chapter 5 – The Accelerator

  4:15 p.m. (EDT), Monday, July 27, 2020 – Fort Meade, MD

  Eighth Floor, Director’s Suite, Ops 2B, NSA Headquarters

  General Shields slammed the phone down. The violent smash abruptly ended the conversation with his counterpart at the CIA. Shields’ office at NSA headquarters was twice as large as his Accelerator office. Behind his desk, stood a wooden credenza with ceiling-high bookshelves. The room contained an eight-seat conference table and a separate casual seating area. Like the Accelerator office, Charlie Shields’ picture was displayed most prominently.

  The Intelligence Community called CIA Director, Walt Black, the DCIA. The Intelligence Community—abbreviated ‘IC’—was a federation of over 17 agencies in the US government. The organizations with the biggest budgets in the IC were the CIA, NSA, and National Reconnaissance Office—NRO. The NRO’s job was day-to-day management of spy satellites. DIRNSA got along famously with the Director of the NRO. The two agencies effectively cooperated with one another. On the other hand, General Shields despised Walt Black.

  Lin Liu arrived in DIRNSA’s office. “Good afternoon sir, are you ready to go over to the Accelerator? Josh Adler, of CyberAI, is scheduled to give us a demo at 1700. Sir?”

  General Shields looked into Lin’s jade eyes. A revealing, dark green blouse intensified her
eyes, making them sparkle like two emeralds.

  “Walt Black is a complete moron. President Goodson must have selected him based on the reputation of the DCIA’s father. All the DCIA does is build his drone fleet, at the expense of what the CIA should be doing—HUMINT.” HUMINT stood for human intelligence; information derived from human sources—spies.

  “The CIA was founded to use secret agents to spy on the Russians after World War II. The DCIAs in the Cold War knew what they were doing with HUMINT. The Iraq/ Afghanistan War Directors knew what they were doing. But Walt Black offers his intelligence customers virtually no HUMINT on the Caliphate. I give him NSA SIGINT. Rather than use SIGINT to develop his HUMINT, all he does is order drone strikes—based on my SIGINT.”

  SIGINT stood for intelligence derived from signals. The NSA’s mission was collection of foreign SIGINT and protection of US military SIGINT.

  SIGINT consisted of wired and wireless phone calls, text messages, email, and other Internet traffic; like chat, and Skype. SIGINT also included signals from satellites, weapons systems, radars, telemetry from space launches, and ballistic missile launches. In 2020—every day—the NSA scooped up more SIGINT than 20-times the entire collection of the Library of Congress.