Chapter 6 – 30 Days Later in the Oval Office

by admin on August 16, 2011

30 days later ….

The smoke was starting clear in Washington, DC after a whirlwind first month for the McCormick administration.  True to his word, Jack McCormick was taking the country squarely into the 21st century, sometimes kicking and screaming.  The list of accomplishments in 30 short days was impressive. Among them was that the CCIF was officially commissioned and funded. They took over a combination of FBI, Secret Service and ATF facilities to jump start things.  Prakesh and her techno security geeks deployed state-of-the-art cloud based solutions to rapidly scale a computing on demand infrastructure featuring superior collaboration and data information systems.  The government had never seen anything like this before. The CCIF was made up of a combination of some private industry cyber security experts that Prakesh and Hunter Fields brought in, combined with some of the best people from the FBI and other federal crime fighting agencies.  Organized more like a private organization, it was off and running, already starting to make a difference in the silent war that had been raging against the US Government’s computer networks and the nation’s critical infrastructure for well over 15 years.

If there was one potential Achilles Heel in the CCIF it was an overreliance on technology and gadgets. Old fashioned crime fighters still believed the best assets were human assets and the weakest link in technology systems were the people behind the keyboard. Dan Dausey was that type of old time crime fighting agent made anew in a technological world. With the establishment of the CCIF, Dausey was made agent in charge for the South East  region out of Miami.

In the meantime the USTI under Hunter Fields was also off to a well organized start. Again applying lessons learned in the tech start up world, the incubator already had several seeded projects under way dealing with upgrading the nation’s energy infrastructure to accommodate a non-fossil fuel future. Clean electrons was where it was at and several fledging companies were showing promise. Based on the successful Tech Stars program Fields had started in severalUScities, Hunter was making the program everything McCormick had hoped for.  The nation already had a sense of optimism that the entrepreneurial engine that had fueled the tech revolution was now going to pull the country and the economy into millions of new high paying jobs.

Major Crockett was equally as busy. Though he strongly favored the GE fusion program, this was too important a decision to be made without fully understanding as much as possible. He had his people looking at the pros and cons of every potential solution to the energy issue. In spite of his own beliefs about the future of fossil fuels, he even had the information gathered on some of the new exotic extraction technologies that hisTexasoil buddies were advocating.  In the final analysis though, if the GE fusion technology worked it was a home run forAmerica. If not a combination of wind and solar seemed to be the logical choice to gather around.

While Prakesh and Fields were often either inBoulderor out in the field around the country, Crockett stayed in DC near the seat of power. He met almost daily with Jack McCormick and had established himself as one of the heavyweights of the new administration.  In fact he was over at the Oval Office today giving the President an update.

“Jack everything is pointing to the GE solution. If the rate of progress remains at this rate we should see our use of imported oil dropping pretty quickly”, Crockett said.

“That is great Major”, answered the POTUS. But there is more to this than those GE plants, we need the infrastructure in place to bring that cheap, clean energy to every corner of the country. Fields and his geek squads have to deliver”.  Of course Jack would never call the USTI the “geek squad” in front of Fields or any of his crowd, but he felt comfortable enough saying it in front of Crockett.

“I wouldn’t worry about that crowd Jack, they will deliver the goods.  It is just the kind of problem that those folks love to chew up and spit out”

“Your right Major, I am sure they will, but the price I am paying politically to push through the entrepreneur visa program and some of the other immigration stuff Fields wants is giving me heartburn”.

Crockett knew that allowing educated immigrants to remain in the US would pay off in spades to the country and so he supported the Fields driven immigration policies. Seeking to change the subject he said.’ Simi’s wonder gadgets really seem to be doing the job. I heard from friends in Justice that they have been able to bust up several large bot net groups”

Yes, McCormick answered, but Major I still lose sleep over that Iran nuclear incident, what would happen if that were to occur here??

Don’t worry Jack not with Prakesh and her team on the job.

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Chapter 5, Part 2 – The Trojan and Rich McKeay

by admin on July 21, 2011

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25 minutes later and Danny was at the gate of the plant. He produced his FBI ID and was through the gate and parking upfront in the visitor lot.  Locking up the bike, Danny went into the plant, where again his id was verified. He went up to the IT department, introduced himself to the geek at the desk and asked for the CISSP on duty. A certified information systems security professional had to pass a test and take continuing education in security to maintain their certification.

At the GE plant there was always at least one on duty at all times.  Within a few moments Rich McKeay, the CISSP on today came over to see Danny.  Danny had met Rich a few times at some of the Infragard meetings and also when Danny had been out at the plant a few times. Rich said “Hi Danny, thanks for coming up so quickly. I got a call from NY that you were on your way up. I tried to make everything ready for you. Have a cube, fast box and the syslog files ready for you to look at.”

‘Thanks Rich, but first things first. I have been driving that bike for over an hour and a half. I need to hit the little boy’s room.  Will meet you at the cube.”

Danny already had a user account on the system, so he only had to log on with his username and password and he had complete access. As Rich said, he had all of the syslog files pulled up from all of the gateway and perimeter defenses at the plant. This would show Danny pretty quickly everything that was hitting the network and what was flagged as potentially malicious.

Danny began sifting through the log files paying close attention to the origin to those traffic packets that were suspicious. Many people did not know that information over the Internet was in Internet Protocol or IP. All information was broken up into packets, sent out and reassembled. Because of this it was possible to look at every packet and see not only what payload it had but where it came from, where it was destined for and what order it was supposed to be reassembled in.

In a few minutes Danny had found what he was looking for. He called McKeay over to verify.

“Hey Rich have a look at this.  Looks like a well hidden Trojan to me”

Rich had a look at the packets and code in question and confirmed Danny’s suspicions.

“I have seen this one before Danny” There was a SANS Storm Center bulletin about it. It is not widely used, but our intrusion prevention systems were updated against it with a rule update last month. That must be why the alarms went off.”

A Trojan, like the Trojan horse it was named for was a computer packet or set of packets that carried a malicious payload inside what appeared to be an innocent and normal wrapper.

Now that Danny and McKeay had identified the Trojan they wanted to make sure to trace it back to its origin. That is where the digital forensics came in. Analyzing the code in the packets they got a feel for the complexity and what the payload was designed to do.

It looked like a rather garden variety type of Trojan that would set up a bot on the systems that would allow a remote system to take command and take control.  Looking at the source IP or address of where the Trojan came from, they referenced the WHOIS look up service, maintained by ICANN – the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, to see who and where the originating addresses were from.  After tracing them back a few hops, it came as no surprise to Rich or Danny that they came fromEastern Europe.  A lot of the malicious, nasty stuff out there did.  Of course the real question was who had hired the Eastern Europeans to do this.  Danny doubted Ukrainians were really behind this. They might be the ones who wrote the Trojan, but they were probably hired by someone else. In the case of the GE plant, more likely then not it was Chinese, Mid-east or Russian based. In Danny’s mind the question of whether it was state sponsored or private was a paramount question too.  Without going to pay a visit on the authors though, that would be hard to fin out.

Over the years Danny had had a few cases where he did in fact go out of the country to meet the perps in person and shake them up a bit to find out who the real bad guys behind the cyber crimes were.  Instead for this one, Danny had all of the information burned onto a thumb drive which he would take back to the office and turn over to Prakesh’s team. Perhaps they could go find out who was really behind the Trojan.

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Chapter 5, Pahokee

July 14, 2011

Danny loved the exhilaration of driving a bike on the open highway. Passing LandShark Stadium where Danny often went to see the Miami Dolphins and  University of Miami Hurricanes played football, he switched over from 95 onto the Florida Turnpike.  It was three lanes each way and traffic was light, so Danny had a chance [...]

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SCADA War, Chapter 4 part 2 – Black Hat Party

July 6, 2011

Many of their friends back home would find it hard to believe that you could visit Amsterdam and not stop in to smoke at one of its world famous cannabis cafes. To many in the US that was what Amsterdamwas all about.  But Bill “Chewie” Cheukarski and Malik “Al-Slim” Alsemi were not the type to [...]

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Chapter 4, Part 1 – Meet Dan Dausey

June 30, 2011

Even in January it is hot in South Florida. It was 78 degrees, but the humidity was at 85%. If you didn’t live down there you would think a wet towel was thrown in your face.  But Dan Dausey had lived down here since he was 9. He was on the tee of the 9th [...]

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SCADA Wars, Chapter 3, part 2

June 28, 2011

Faisal Dialoque had an uncanny ability to anticipate Van der Uwe’s wishes. It seemed that he was already sweeping through the office door before Pieter had even hung up the phone.  Dressed every bit the French man, he was actually French-Algerian. He was dressed in a custom tailored Armani suit and wearing a paper thin, [...]

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Chapter 3 Part 1 – Big Wind, Inc.

June 24, 2011

In the top penthouse office of a red granite skyscraper in the Zuidas district of Amsterdam, the fact that it was already past 17:00 in the afternoon made no difference. The inauguration of the new American President was big news. One large wall of the office was filled with a dozen different plasma screens each [...]

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SCADA Wars, Chapter 2, part 3

June 22, 2011

Across town on 22nd Street, NW in the Ritz-Carlton’s Ritz-Carlton penthouse suite, Hunter Fields felt like he was dressing for his bar mitzvah again.  For the presidential inauguration Hunter had gone out and actually bought a second suit. His other suit didn’t owe him a dime.  He put it on anytime he had to attend [...]

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SCADA Wars – Chapter 2, Part 2

June 20, 2011

There was a knock on the door and Jack knew who it was before anyone moved to answer.  No, it wasn’t a secret code or anything, but P. Major Crockett was nothing if not punctual. The Secretary of Energy designate was next on McCormick’s list to meet with this morning. It was Crockett who had [...]

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SCADA Wars Chapter 2 – Part 1

June 16, 2011

3 months later The red glow of dawn held the promise of a glorious January day in the nation’s capital. Forecasts called for blustery but clear blue skies; dry, sunny and temperatures in the low 40s.  Actually it was unseasonably mild for DC this time of year.  Jack McCormick had already had eggs, sausage and [...]

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