William Weber - Zero Day

The next morning, Nate lay in bed, staring down at the text message his brother Evan had sent him less than an hour ago.

POWER OUT. SUSPECTED CYBER-ATTACK.

EMERGENCY SHUTDOWN PROCEDURES NOT WORKING.

He propped himself up on one elbow, rereading the message over and over, his chest growing tighter with each reading, his pulse galloping faster until he could feel the blood thumping in his neck.

Thump… Thump… Thump…

During a major power outage at a nuclear plant it was imperative to insert the rods and prevent the core from overheating. Failure to do so could lead to a meltdown. Anyone who had seen what had happened to the Fukushima plant in Japan or Chernobyl in Ukraine knew precisely what that meant. But the plant had backup generators to supply power intended to keep the core cooled, powered by a bank of batteries designed to last for several days and in some cases weeks. The attack had somehow managed to subvert all of that and perhaps more.

Nate fumbled with his phone, his fingers cold and stiff. What’s going on? He typed the words and hit send. The progress bar stopped at ninety percent. Nate’s cell and wifi signal were both full, so why was this not going through? He was about to call when the text finally completed. Nate knew cell towers utilized battery backup systems designed to maintain communications in the case of power failure. Although he wasn’t sure how much longer they would last, especially once the rest of those affected woke up and found themselves in a deep freeze.

It was for that very reason that Nate had insisted they install a landline at the house. Even in the face of a major power outage, landlines can continue to operate for at least a week.

Nate sprang out of bed, threw on a pair of sweatpants and a sweater and headed for the kitchen. The phone was in a cradle on the wall. He plucked it up and dialed his brother’s cell number. The line rang close to fifteen times, which in and of itself was strange since his brother’s voicemail came on after five rings.

Reluctantly, Nate set the phone back on the cradle and leaned forward, his forehead pressed against the cold kitchen wall. What should he do? That was the question bouncing off the inside corners of his mind. They were now facing a fresher and infinitely more dangerous threat than they had last night, but with even less certainty on how to respond. First an attack on the banks and now on the lifeblood of the country itself, its power supply. Should they evacuate the area and head to some kind of shelter, assuming one even existed? Or should they wait to see if things became more serious? In his text, Evan hadn’t told them to pack up and flee at once, which implied the quick reaction teams at the plant were actively working to get the situation under control. As a former head of cyber-security there, Nate knew something of the protocol. All non-essential personnel would be evacuated while men like his brother struggled to prevent a full meltdown.

Nate went to a large bay window that peered out onto the street, watching with dread as the snow continued piling up. The cold hand closing around his heart was making it hard to breathe. His initial instinct, the one he’d prepared for all these years, was to hunker down and wait it out. They had enough food, water and ammunition to keep them going for a few weeks. Staying put was also generally smarter than hightailing it into the woods. For one, you would be exposed to immense danger during the journey. Second, there was no telling what you’d find once you got to your destination, assuming you even had one. Living in the woods sure sounded romantic, but even that took a hardiness most did not possess. Besides, it wasn’t a sustainable solution.

But the real dealbreaker they were facing was the weather. Grabbing a go-bag and fleeing into the woods in the dead of summer might be challenging, but at least you could sleep out under the stars. In winter, all bets were off. And Nate had to admit, every single one of his evacuation scenarios had taken for granted it would occur some time in the summer. Could that be because the vast majority of the research he had done tended to address that very scenario? Sadly, fleeing your home in the dead of winter, let alone during one of the biggest snowstorms in decades, was not a scenario often covered by members of the prepping community. And perhaps for good reason. If our enemies attacked us during the coldest months of the year, tens of millions would never live to see the following spring.

That very thought helped to crystalize another disturbing realization. None of what he’d witnessed over the last twelve to fifteen hours was coincidental. The country was under the largest and potentially the most devastating attack in its history.

But this latest stage involving the Byron nuclear power plant was beyond evil. Against all odds, the culprits had somehow managed to insert malware into the plant’s security network. Lacking details, Nate could only speculate, but this had been precisely the reason he’d fought so hard to wargame such a scenario. It didn’t matter that our nuclear plants weren’t connected to the internet. Neither was the Natanz uranium enrichment plant in Iran and nation states had still managed to infect their systems with a worm called Stuxnet and destroy about a thousand centrifuges.

The theory was that the malware had been inserted via a corrupt thumb drive. It was a point Nate had brought up more than once to the executives in charge. After the company’s president had ordered him to drop it, Nate had taken his concerns to the board of directors. The following day he’d been terminated from the company.

But that wouldn’t change the deficiencies in his plant’s cyber-security protocol Nate had witnessed. Even after the successful Iranian attack, Nate had seen thumb drives with the company’s logo being used to move information from laptops to desktops within the complex. How hard would it have been for a bad actor working a low-level admin position to slip a corrupted drive onto someone’s desk? All it took was for some overworked and unsuspecting schlub to plug it in and the worm would do the rest.

Another potential access point he’d identified was the hardware itself. Programmable logic controllers or PLCs are digital computer components imbedded inside hardware that’s designed to control industrial processes. In 2007, during the Aurora Generator Test, a group of hackers took control of a generator and sent instructions via its PLC, causing it to explode. That should have been a wake-up call to the world that industrial sabotage no longer required throwing monkey wrenches into the works. The wrench was obsolete and with powerful tools like Stuxnet, the works could be destroyed from almost anywhere.

The attack on Iran’s uranium production back in 2007 had been a clear victory for the good guys. But with Stuxnet’s release, a Pandora’s box of sorts had been swung wide open. Soon the same malicious code that had worked to such devastating effect against the Iranians was being retooled by our enemies and used against us. In a strange twist of irony, we had armed them with the very weapons with which to destroy us.

“We’re in trouble, aren’t we?” Amy asked. She was standing behind him, the comforter wrapped tightly around her. A white plume escaped her lips as she spoke.

Nate stared outside at the blowing snow, weighing his options. Slowly, he turned and laid out the situation as he understood it.

“I just knew something was going on,” Amy said, her blonde ponytail swinging about her shoulders as she shook her head. “I could feel it in my bones.”

“And in my knee,” Nate replied, trying on a weak smile and finding it didn’t quite fit.