Cyberstrike, James Barrington [short story to read .TXT] 📗

beginning of a widespread, coordinated and sophisticated case of cyber terrorism. And that,’ he finished, ‘is why we’re all sitting here in this room.’

‘Before we get too deeply into this,’ Barbara Simpson said, as Boston opened the second slide of his presentation, ‘can I just remind you that I know sod all about cyber. I can barely even spell the word.’

‘That’s not why you’re here,’ Boston replied. ‘You’ve got other talents and abilities that will be vitally important to this operation.’ He shifted his attention to the rest of his audience. ‘Now, as I’m sure you’re aware, GCHQ out at Cheltenham works very closely with the American National Security Agency. In fact, you could almost say that their functions are identical, and between them they provide invaluable intelligence about potential terrorist and criminal activities on both sides of the Pond. What you may not know is that we have a separate and dedicated small counterterrorism unit right here in London with links to Cheltenham, Westminster, Hereford and other places. Basically, if there’s a joint national problem that no single agency or department can handle and no one knows where to place it, this lot pick it up.’

‘You mean C-TAC,’ Ian Mitchell stated. ‘The Counter-Terrorism Advisory Committee. I know it’s supposed to be covert, but these days not a hell of a lot really is. And I know Ben Morgan very well. He’s one of the wheels in C-TAC, and the cyber world is quite small when you get down to it. Rumour has it he was instrumental in saving the UK banking system last year from some kind of a meltdown.’

‘I expected you to be well informed, Ian,’ Boston said, displaying another slide on the screen, ‘but perhaps not quite that well informed. All that is still classified. You’re right, but officially he’s simply an academic working on cyber stuff. Now, we have a problem. It’s not really made the papers or the media generally, but there’s been a worrying increase in the number of determined hacking attempts directed against the UK’s infrastructure, the gas, electricity and water suppliers, companies like that. You don’t need me to tell you that the effects of a successful hack that shut down electric power to Greater London, say, for anything more than a few hours would be utterly catastrophic, because not every company or building has backup power supplies. But what’s really concerning us is that utility companies in America have also been targeted. According to my opposite number in the FBI, they’re not seeing weekly or monthly attacks, but daily and sometimes hourly attempts to breach their firewalls and enter their systems. And because most of these attacks use the same suites of hacking tools and tend to follow the same pattern, the uncomfortable conclusion is that we may have a single group of hackers out there aiming to cause massive disruption in both America and here in the UK, possibly at the same time. It looks like it’s all coordinated, and the frequency of the attacks is increasing. And there’s one further conclusion that we can tentatively draw about this.’

Boston paused and looked round expectantly at the attendees.

Once again, it was Mitchell who replied. ‘You think it’s a national actor, not some bunch of spotty teenagers living on pizza and Coke and benefits?’

‘What the hell’s a national actor?’ Simpson demanded. ‘You don’t mean somebody who’s appeared on the stage at the Old Vic, presumably.’

‘No,’ Boston said. ‘He means a group of hackers directed by a nation or a nation-state, like the bloody Chinese. The Red Army – the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, I mean – has employed vast platoons of hackers over the last couple of decades to spy on the West, and more importantly to steal technical and other data to save Chinese scientists from having to bother to invent or develop stuff themselves. Pretty much every major advance in the Chinese military and industrial complex since the start of this century has been entirely or largely based on data stolen from the West. But what the Chinese hackers don’t normally do is cause any damage, because their agenda is entirely different. They work their way in to somewhere like NASA or Berkeley or MIT or Boeing and steal what they can and then they do their best to get out without leaving any traces. These people are nothing like that. EDF and British Gas don’t have any secrets worth stealing. Their computer networks are primarily used just to make sure their electricity and gas supply systems are working properly, so almost by definition any attack on them has to be intended to disrupt or interfere with the operations of the companies. These hackers don’t care about leaving a trail and it’s fairly obvious that causing damage is precisely what they intend to do.’

‘So who are the players this time?’ Tim Inskip asked. ‘Are you looking at Russia, or North Korea, or where?’

‘This is where things get slightly murky,’ Boston replied, ‘or rather murkier. The feedback I’ve had from GCHQ and the FBI, and from C-TAC in fact, suggests that most of the attacks have been domestic. As usual, the locations of the attempted intrusions have been carefully concealed, the origin of the attack bounced around the world from one nation to another before reaching the target, but the one place they always seem to come back to is America. Even those attacks mounted here in Britain seem to have the same path, which is another reason why we think we’re looking at a single group rather than a bunch of individuals.’

‘I’m sure all this is fascinating to those of a geeky persuasion,’ Barbara Simpson said, ‘like the three of you for example, but what I do is undercover work, and I have no clue what useful skill or knowledge I’m supposed to be bringing to this particular table.’

‘Patience, Barbara, patience. I promise you all will become clear.’

For the next half hour or so Richard Boston displayed a series of