“Are you kidding me! WTF Sarge! I mean, do you have any idea what you’re asking me to do? You might as well just ask me to kill my first born!” I/O was inconsolable, fairly incoherent and in a state of complete disbelief as he absorbed his Console Sergeant’s command to wipe the drives of all honeypots and pwned bots under the command of the Cyber Force. This was over 50,000 computers world wide. But it wasn’t the difficulty in carrying out the task. Computers are automated if nothing else. Apparently I/O had developed an emotional attachment to his bots.
“We’re withdrawing from this theater of conflict soldier. Report back when it’s complete.” The Console Sergeant turned and walked out of the war room.
Nearly everyone in the room was empathetic to I/O, except Tyler. “Let it go I/O. We have bigger concerns. Game over man. We all need an exit strategy.”
“What are you talking about?” I/O was coming to terms and seemed ready to talk logic. “Exit strategy for what?”
Tyler addressed the entire room, SecIntel along with the Ethical Hack team. “You heard the Console Sergeant. We’re shutting down operations. And we never existed. Most of us are within a year of returning to the private sector. What do we do for resumes? We can’t talk about it.” Tyler paused but everyone stared at him with blank faces. Clearly they must have understood his point but no one had a response yet. “So, we need an exit strategy. We need to latch on to opportunities where the employer has at least some implicit knowledge of our experience.”
Jane was the first to suggest a plan. “My older brother went to work for the NSA after he left the Rangers. And after two years there he had his pick of employers. NSA will know what we’re about.”
Tyler liked that idea. “Sounds pretty smart. We all need to think about this. This war might be over but it’s not like cyber warfare itself is going away. And we’re not going away – in terms of our skills. We need new homes. And those new homes are going to need a new army of bots, so you might want to be selective in how you carry out your command I/O.”
The End
A Runner's Story 
In other professions, a honeypot is simply a port-a-john. Thanks for giving that word another use. Interesting story.
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Thanks J. The term has been in use in the military and computer security for some time. Most people think of honeypots as simply sacrificial lambs serving as decoys from production systems. But security experts generally use them as way to learn of new threats.
Not sure if you read all the cyber war episodes, but will tell you the metaphor for each story fairly closely followed the latest between the Google vs China news. The personal metaphor on Game Over was a conversation I had at the end of the day with a colleague. We completed a major project together and were talking about our next gig – the exit strategy.
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