Tyler sat in his game chair booting up his home theater.  The console sergeant ordered the unit to work from home after some oriental black ice took out the war room.  No one on his team was injured but he saw them carry a stretcher into the Drone Pilots’ war room on his way out the door.  Good thing his transfer to the Ethical Hack team full time came through – SecIntel was going to take some shit for this.

The Chinese sourced most of their attacks out to North Korean cyber mercenaries, and those guys weren’t known to have black ice capable of causing physical injury.  Tyler’s team only had two confirmed kills and they’d been at this for awhile.  Their black ice manipulated the target’s monitor and other I/O devices to stimulate a heart attack.  It required the target be physically susceptible and that was a very small population, but it helped spread fear.  All’s fair in cyber warfare.

Protocol would have placed Tyler on a jet to their disaster recovery site, but a funny thing about the Internet.  DARPA created the Net as a measure of robustness for critical computing systems.  The idea that internetworking would add redundancy.  This irony is not lost on hackers.  Tyler’s DR site went down with the same attack that took out his war room.  In retrospect, it’s better to maintain a DR site offline.  But the U.S. Cyber Command is resilient, or at a minimum his unit subscribes well to the consumerization of I/T.  Tyler’s unit was able to work from home.  Home Theater didn’t refer to Tyler’s personal audio/video equipment, but to his home war room.

The system was now fully up and Tyler scanned his situational dashboards.  He heard the brakes of a truck pull up outside his house.  He didn’t have a window view of his front porch but had a video cam out there and brought that up on one of his dashboards.  UPS.  Tyler couldn’t recall any outstanding shipments and googled the UPS tracking site.  Meanwhile the UPS driver placed the package at Tyler’s door and clicked on his wireless PDA to indicate the delivery.  Before he could turn halfway to walk back to his truck, the package exploded, setting fire to Tyler’s house.  The driver became the 2nd official U.S. casualty of cyber war.