May 3
Operations Center, 67th Network Warfare Wing
Air Forces Cyber (AFCYBER)
Twenty-Fourth Air Force HQ
Lackland Air Force Base, Texas
3:53 P.M. CDT / 4:53 P.M. EDT
It had been a busy Saturday for Lester Weatherford and his colleagues, both here and in other cyber-warfare command centers around the country.
The malware virus was widespread, and while the cyber warriors had learned much about deactivating it, the learning curve was in no way steep: The viral programming was devious, concealing its destructive coding in a wide range of software locations inside the various computers that now hosted it. Moreover, no method of mass deactivation had yet been achieved; that meant a laborious series of mainframe-by-mainframe search-and-delete slogging—hard manual labor in what had become keyboard-tap sweatshops at Lackland and elsewhere.
Of course, while this deactivate-or-delete tasking was a definite priority, there was also no shortage of new intrusion attempts constantly knocking on America’s electronic portals: relatively minor hacking efforts from gleefully malicious loners, often inept but still energetically ambitious; the ongoing flow of more sophisticated probing, often from mainland China; even routine “phishing” Trojan Horses, a stampeding herd often from locales like Nigeria and Ukraine that used e-mail attachments to infiltrate the personal computers of the unwary with viruses that could then gallop throughout networks.
These too had to be monitored and dealt with by Weatherford and his peers, as they routinely were on a daily basis; but today this workload was an effort akin to stamping out flying sparks as the teams simultaneously battled a far more widespread forest fire.
At 3:53 p.m. Central Time, the sparks suddenly turned into a firestorm of their own, lighting up the computer monitor at which Lester Weatherford sat.
Holy shit! Weatherford silently exclaimed, staring wide-eyed at the screen.
He glanced around: At other monitors nearby, the same flurry of intrusion attempts flickered and scrolled down the glass screens like a rolling tidal wave. Other technicians around the room had seen it too, necks snapping as they exchanged alarmed glances with each other.
Weatherford reacted first, keying his throat mic.
“Captain, get your butt out here, fast. We got a Condition Zombie kicking off here. Repeat: Condition Zombie. Move it, Cap!”
The officer came on the run.
“It’s a goddamn horde of ’em coming in, Captain,” Weatherford said, his fingers flying over the keyboard. “A couple of thousand intrusions per minute, maybe more. A shit-storm of ’em…”
“What’s the analysis, Mr. Weatherford?”
Weatherford grunted, busy in isolating one of the coding packets from the flood. A new window popped up on his screen, and Docent’s translation software automatically began to dissect the selected machine-code specimen and compare it to others in the archival database.
It took twelve seconds—an infinity, for an ultra-high-speed super-computer like Lackland’s Docent—to render its verdict.
“Sweet Jesus,” Weatherford breathed, staring at the monitor. “Oh, fuck…”
“Weatherford!” the Captain snapped. “What is it?”
“Docent says all this new shit is married to the malware we’re trying to disarm,” Weatherford said. “Captain, this ain’t no piss-ant hacking attempt. Docent says what we’re seeing are fuckin’ activation codes.”
“Say what, Mr. Weatherford? What kind of activation codes? Activate what, exactly?”
Despite his almost-overwhelming shock, Weatherford rolled his eyes.
This guy is a fuckin’ idiot…
With effort, he kept his voice level.
“Somebody is starting to trigger the goddamn virus, Captain, all over the place. They’re trying to shut it down.”
“Shut what down?”
“Everything, damn it!” Weatherford said, and his voice was no longer level. “They’re trying to shut down the whole fucking country!”