Daniel Suarez - Daemon

Mosely wasn’t sure this was even happening. He shook his head to clear it.

Rollins patted his arm. “First, some food and rest. There’s a lot to learn, but the Daemon chose you because you’re smart. And you’ll need to be.”

Natalie Philips paced with a laser pointer at the edge of a projection screen. The Mahogany Row conference room was dimly lit, and silhouettes of her audience were arrayed around a sizeable boardroom table. Military badges on the uniforms of some audience members reflected the light from the screen.

Her title presentation slide was up:

Viability of Daemon Construct Over Peer-to-Peer Networks

She was already addressing the group. “…the feasibility of a narrow AI scripting application distributed over a peer-to-peer network architecture to avoid core logic disruption.” She clicked to the next slide. It bore the simple words:

Distributed Daemon Viable

A murmur went through her audience.

“Our unequivocal findings are that a distributed daemon is not merely a potential threat but an inevitable one, given the standards unifying extant networked systems. In fact, we have reason to believe one of these logic constructs is currently loose in the wild.”

Much more murmuring went through the crowd.

She changed her slide again. This one depicted two sets of graphs labeled Incidence of DDOS Attacks—All Sites Compared to Gambling/Pornography Sites.

She looked back at her audience. “A distributed denial of service (or DDOS) attack involves harnessing the power of hundreds, thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of zombie computers to transmit large amounts of packets to a single target Web domain. A zombie computer is one that has been previously compromised by a malicious back door program. This could be John Q. Public’s unsecured computer sitting in the den. An army of these zombie computers is called a botnet, and its collective computing power can be directed to overwhelm a target, making it too busy to respond to legitimate traffic. The potential to harm an online business is obvious.

“Unlike a simple denial of service (or DOS) attack—which is launched from a single machine and thus easily blocked by an IP address—a DDOS attack comes in waves from different IP addresses coordinated to continually incapacitate the target. Likewise, the nature of the traffic can vary wildly, making it difficult to filter out garbage connection requests. In short: it is significantly more serious. Unless the attacker brags about his deeds, tracing the real source of an attack can be next to impossible.”

She wielded the laser pointer to highlight various parts of the screen. “These two charts illustrate a pattern detected four months ago in the occurrence of distributed denial of service attacks on the public Internet—both overall and as experienced separately by commercial gambling and pornography Web sites, both legal and illegal, hereafter referred to as ‘G/P sites.’

“Note the increase of approximately twelve thousand percent in the occurrence of such attacks against G/P sites during the period January through April. Contrast this with the flat-to-declining trend in DDOS attacks versus the overall population of domains.”

She changed slides to a graphical breakdown of the top international gambling and pornography domains, with call-outs indicating the crime gangs operating out of Russia, Thailand, and Belize. The graph was broken down on the x-axis by time and on the y-axis by packets per hour.

“The CIA has associated the following international crime rings with these three G/P enterprises. Their Web interests encompass tens of thousands of loosely affiliated Web sites hosted on hundreds of domains in dozens of countries. Each one of these crime gangs is a vast IT organization, and collectively they generate billions of dollars in revenue each year. Their operating units include product development, security, finance, and infrastructure support elements—they are, in effect, multinational corporations whose product lines include narco-trafficking, sexual slavery, money laundering, and extortion.”

Her graph showed that the Web assets of each individual crime ring had been attacked in a campaign of orchestrated infowar. Philips’s laser pointer cavorted as she hammered her point home. “The Russians were first in line. We estimate that roughly ten million workstations launched a Pearl Harbor–like cyber attack simultaneously from all points on the globe, beginning in mid-January and stretching through to the end of the month. This effectively brought the Russian business to a halt worldwide—making their online gambling and pornography assets unavailable to paying customers for extended periods. These were not simple smurf and fraggle attacks. The Russians appear to have tried everything, from hardware filtering to rate-limiting connections, but it didn’t put a dent in their downtime. They tried to launch new sites and migrate customers to these, but the new sites also were rapidly targeted and brought down.”

She changed to a slide of translated Internet headlines from a passel of third-world sites. They listed dozens of killings in Asia and Russia.

“This appears to have sparked a brief gang war, followed by a purge within the ranks of the gang’s IT staff. The CIA estimates several dozen related killings, but notably, all during this period, the DDOS attacks did not let up and shifted constantly to originate from new locations. The Russian enterprise did not recover until the end of January, when it was suddenly fully operational.”

She looked up at her audience. “The following cell phone conversation was intercepted by ComSat assets over the Republic of Georgia on January twenty-ninth and is a conversation between an unidentified caller and a known Russian mafia figure based in St. Petersburg, herein denoted as Vassili. The transcript is available over Echelon. The abstract number is listed in your presentation binder. This raw intercept comes to us compliments of Group W.” She turned to face the screen as tinny, foreign chatter came in over speakers. An instant translation appeared on the screen in a scrolling fashion as the words were uttered in Russian:

Vassili: We’re driving. Tupo [nearby person], no. Where are you? Where are you now?

Caller: Belize City.

Vassili: They are online there?

Caller: Yes, yes. They’re running perfect.

Vassili: Perfect? Since when?

Caller: Perfect, like before perfect.

Vassili: Before the attacks?

Caller: Yes, yes.

Vassili: Do they know the extent of it there?

Caller: No. Nobody knows.

Vassili: They’re angry about Tupolov, yes?

Caller: Yes. But they have their money now.

Vassili: You paid the dead American?

Caller: Yes.

Vassili: And now we’re online again?

Caller: Yes.

Vassili: [unintelligible]. They’ll be next, and we must regain market share while they are down. You know what to do?

Caller: Yes. Sobol told us.

The screen cleared and the lights came up as animated discussions filled the room. Philips called to be heard over the din. “There are additional intercepts of a similar nature, but I think this is a representative sample. The waves of attacks continued until a couple of months ago, hitting each organization in turn—and growing in ferocity—at which point they disappeared suddenly and entirely.”

One of the DOD brass spoke up, “What’s your read on all this, Doctor?”

“I think the crime gangs running online gambling and pornography have been forced to pay protection money to someone or something.”