John Ringo: Von Neumann’s War

“Huh?” Roger said. The Asymetric Soldier group used a network separate from the main base network. They used the same physical systems for accessing SIPARNET and the Internet, but their internal working server was of a higher classification than the standard base system, so it was internally sealed off from most of the base systems.

“We’re getting more hits,” Traci said. “Something’s in the internal base system and trying to get through to ours. Damn,” she added, clicking a pop-up. “Add that it nearly made it. I just cut us off from the main base system.”

“We can’t upload this to the base computers, now,” Tom pointed out. “Even if it worked.”

“The hell we can’t,” Roger said. “The computer controlling the IBot program is up in the antenna farm. All we have to do is run this program up and load it to it.”

“Roger, that’s the top of the damned mountain ,” Traci pointed out, hitting another key. “I didn’t even know we had that connection. What the hell is this thing?”

“Pull the physical connections,” Roger said, sliding a USB memory card into the side of the laptop he’d moved the Megiddo program to. “I’ll give you two guesses where that attack is coming from, and only one counts.”

Shane blinked as the lights in the room went off then back on, then off, leaving the room lit only by red safety lights. His monitor flickered as well, changing views without command several times then went off. He looked over to the general just as a heavyset Air Force officer burst through the doors to the command center and stumbled down to the J-2 desk.

Most of the officers and NCOs in the room were muttering or questioning what had happened but Shane leaned back in his chair to watch the general. The major knew that there wasn’t anything in his area of control, or expertise, to be done about whatever was happening. All he could do was wait a few moments to see if things calmed down. And he wanted to watch what Riggs was going to do.

The J-2 listened to the heavyset lieutenant and then swore and got up and headed for the general. Other senior officers were closing in around the commander but the J-2, despite being a shrimp and outranked by most of them, shoved his way through and leaned over to whisper in Riggs’s ear. Given that a colonel was whispering in the other ear at the same time, Riggs seemed to be taking both conversations in.

Riggs nodded for a moment, then waved the J-2 and the colonel away and stood up.

“Listen up,” the general said. “We just got hammered, electronically, by the enemy. They got past most of our electronic defenses. They’ve got trojans and worms in the system which is why everything is shut down: what wasn’t corrupted by the attack has been taken off-line to prevent them getting into it. Data Security has most of it isolated and stopped the attack from the outside. Which is good: given that these things are ahead of us technologically and they are, after all, flying computers, the fact that we could stop them at all is surprising.

“Lasing. Your remotes have been physically pulled to prevent the machines from taking over the lasers. Data Security did that first thing. Get up there, physically, and take control of the lasers. I’ll set up runners to manage control. Colonel Guthrie! Your troops and those lasers are all that stands between this mountain and those probes, if they get going again. Get out there with your unit. Tell them: Hold The Line. J-3. I want paper maps and markers up on the walls in two minutes. We’re going to have to do this the old-fashioned way. Everyone else, we are shut down electronically. Get manual commo in place. Runners. Field phones. I don’t care if you’re using two tin cans and a string. Try to coordinate through the commo officer but get us commo until DS can get the systems back up. Go.”

Dick was pretty sure he had gotten ahead of the tide.

At the first sign that a worm or trojan had gotten into the base system, he had set up a program he’d named “Babel Blaster” that shut down every link in the network. Dealing with the various worms and trojans like the MS Blaster had taught him that. As soon as the first trigger on the internal system went off, Blaster went on and began operating automatically. While Babel Blaster was running, he went into the server room and physically pulled every single cable connecting the entire base. Getting everything back in place would be a bastard. But he had written bots to manage that, as well.

Fortunately, the worms hadn’t managed to penetrate his master controls. Those were on a 256 bit encryption. The weakness of encryption was usually at the password level. If you used a high numeric encryption scheme and then used a simple four alphanumeric password, say your birth year and month, the attacker only had to break the password. And there were only so many children’s names and so many birthdays to go around.

Dick’s master control password was a 196 character string of random high ascii. And he never wrote it down. He may have just been a staff sergeant, but that didn’t interfere with having an eidetic memory.

When he was sure that his master server was safe, he stopped and sat, elbow on table, chin in hand, looking at his screen. He wasn’t sure what he was dealing with but he had certain verities in life. He watched science fiction movies and TV, so he had those to go on. But he disagreed with some of it, based on his personal knowledge and training. One thing that he could simply not believe was that you could cram a full, functional, artificial intelligence into a tiny data packet. No matter how compressed the information, you still were dealing with a limited number of ones and zeros. And all the data packets that got through were small. Ergo, what he was dealing with were fucking viruses, worms and trojans. And he’d been writing those, and fighting those, for twenty years. He couldn’t say that he knew all the tricks, but he did know how to think about the tricks, how they could and could not work. How they could and could not hide.

The problem being that most viruses, trojans and worms were detectable by “signatures,” bits of code that were really variants of earlier versions. But he was pretty sure these weren’t going to use legacy code. And he was the only person who was looking at them: Symantec’s facilities were trashed. Ditto the National Information Security site. Even “heuristic” checking wasn’t going to do it.

He’d have to start from scratch. Okay, he could do that. And he could do more.

“Simone, what the hell are you doing!” Lieutenant Gathers asked as he hurried into the server room. “Everybody else is running around trying to work the problem. What the hell are you doing just sitting there?”

“Working the problem, Lieutenant,” the sergeant said, not bothering to look up. “And I gotta start somewhere. So gimme your laptop.”

Richard frowned at the incoming packet. The packet alleged to be a jpg, but it was clearly corrupted. However, when the “corruption” was analyzed, it turned out to be a short communique from the nice sergeant in Huntsville. The nice, apparently very clever, sergeant.

Richard finished reading the data and then smiled. Any of his former students who had seen that smile would have dropped his class abruptly. And probably left town, taken an assumed name in a foreign country and tried very hard never to be noticed.

Richard had never considered being a soldier. But it appeared that he had just been recruited.

On the other hand, it was a war that he was both predisposed to and capable of fighting.