Tag Archives: Cyber Command

Cyber War – NATO

14 Thursday Jan 2010

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Tyler was falling in and out of sleep at the keyboard.  He was tracking 17 targets and had laid traps for 5 of them, but the usual adrenalin wasn’t there.  Eight hours earlier his house was bombed by his enemies.  He was spared from having to witness the head and limbs being separated from the UPS driver’s torso because first the flash blinded his video feed and then the blast blew apart the camera.  But the drama had left him drained.

After the blast he crawled out the egress window of his basement office and called his Console Sergeant.  The Console Sergeant immediately contacted the rest of the unit working from home and they successfully diffused additional bomb attempts.  So Tyler was now working at the home office of Cyberman First Class, Carl Weaver.  Carl’s unit called him I/O because the guy could hook stuff up.   Remember the movie Independence Day when David (played by Jeff Goldblum)  jacked his Apple laptop into the console port of an alien space ship – apparently with a universal serial bus cable?  Well in the real world, I/O was the guy who could probably actually do that.

I/O called over to Tyler to wake him, “Dude, you watching your dashboards?”

“Hmm, yeah, yeah.  I’m tired man.”

“Go lie down in my guest room, I got your dash.”  I/O paused but knew Tyler wasn’t moving and wasn’t likely to reply either so he struck up a line of conversation to see if he could stimulate him.  “You hear about the drone pilot?”

“No man, I just saw them carry a stretcher into their war room.  What happened?”

“Well they follow the same protocol as us but one of them was beta testing some new VR gear.  He’s brain dead.”

“What!  Are you fucking shitting me?  Holy shit!”  Tyler was alert again.

“I shit you not.  And here’s the deal.  Those drone pilots are Air Force man.  That theoretically  pulls NATO into this.  The  articles of NATO don’t cover cyber war – not that the President has ever acknowledged this as a war – but attacking the Air Force constitutes an attack on a recognized NATO member.  Up ’till now, NATO considered this a U.S. / China trade war.  The shit has hit the fan.”

Cyber War – Home Theater

13 Wednesday Jan 2010

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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.

Cyber War

12 Tuesday Jan 2010

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Tyler was emotionally exhausted as he completed the shift turnover checklist with his replacement and badged out of the cyber war room.  He shuffled down the hallway, past the drone pilots’ war room and through the data center mantrap.  The parking lot was dark as he beeped his remote to find his car and he honestly couldn’t tell if it was morning or night.  For the last month he’d been pulling double shifts every other day (actually it makes more sense to refer to the time periods as every other 24 hours) and he had to stare at the military time display on his watch for several moments before his brain registered AM vs PM.  It was PM, so he figured he could quaff a few drinks at the Pwn Shop Lounge  on his way home.  His start of week AM shifts were followed by PM shifts, but his 2nd PM shifts were followed by a free 12 hours.  And the 2nd half of the week was the inverse.  He couldn’t keep track of it any longer.

Once inside the Pwn Shop Lounge, Tyler immediately saw some of the SecIntel soldiers and joined them at their table.  He ordered a cheeseburger and fries and poured himself a beer from the pitcher using an apparently extra glass.  “Cheers comrades.”  Tyler didn’t muster much excitement with the salute, it was more out of formality.  He didn’t work on this crew’s shift, but he did work SecIntel every other night – the last being 12 hours earlier.

“Cheers Tyler.”  This from Jane, the lone female cyber soldier in the crew.  She wasn’t exactly unattractive.  It was her voice, it had zero feminine qualities.  But from the neck down, visually while she wasn’t speaking, she wore the blue skirt and white blouse uniform like a porn star.  And Tyler was sitting next to her.  “So how’s the ethical hack shift soldier?  You fry some Choogles yet?”

Tyler thought “Choogles” was such a stupid term.  It hadn’t really caught on (it refered to Chinese cyber warriors in the context of them trying to replicate the secintel of Google) but Jane was young and into the hacker speech style.  “Not sure Jane.  Google doesn’t confirm our kills for 7 days.  Our black ice generally executes within 24 hours but it takes the Chinese a week to process the death record electronically.  How you doin?”

Tyler’s burger arrived before Jane could reply and she waited while he responded to the server.  “I’m good Tyler.  Wednesdays are my Fridays.  I’m ready to unwind.  You got 12 hours?”

Tyler liked the sound of that.  Hard to believe it wasn’t even a year since Google exited the Chinese market for search engines – which escalated into a full-blown cyber war – and he’d been laid only 3 times since.  War is hell.  “Let me finish this burger.  You want some of my fries?”