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.
“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.”
“God, a wrong requirement could vent the cabin to vacuum,” Paul added.
“Or God knows what else,” Chu said. “What we need is more work at this point. I can’t tell you about the launch or the safety of the vehicle until my team has had time to review the files and compare them with the backups. How do we know they weren’t compromised, too?”
“The backups appear to be okay,” Jones said. “They’re stored on external drives and isolated from the computers here in Nevada. Before we bring any of them up, I want to have my team check the machines that host the backups and make sure they don’t have the same bug.” She carefully placed her cell phone on the table in front of her as she continued. “Gary, this scares the crap out of me. I’ve never seen anything like this—all of our computers had the Trojan embedded in the operating system. The OS is propagating the program
“Hmm.” Childers rose from his seat, pushing the chair back with deliberate slowness. “I hear your concerns, and we will report it. But we’ll do it quietly, and we certainly won’t talk about it to the media. As of now, whoever
“Gary, hold on a minute.” Gesling, remembering the numerous counterintelligence briefings from the years he spent in the military, had an idea. “Let’s follow your suggestion and inform the FBI of the breach. I suspect they’ll want us to resume normal operations, leaving the software in place. That way they might be able to better track the e-mails back to the source, or perhaps they might want to use us to send specific information that they know will be received and acted on. This might be like some of the black ops the British did back in the Second World War with the captured German Enigma coding machine.”
“You want to play spy versus spy with our systems?” Watson asked. “Paul, you’ve been reading too many books. I want this place locked down and secure as fast as possible. We need to let the government know about what happened—sooner, rather than later—but we also need to secure our systems and make sure that nothing else is lost or damaged.”
Paul watched Childers, who had begun pacing during this last interchange. The CEO had reached a decision. Paul could tell by the expression on the man’s face.
