Zero Days, page 6
Drayton didn’t immediately reply, sculpting his ice cream with his tongue, stunned again by what Schoenberg had learned about his past. ‘There was pressure, yes, but it was my choice to leave.’
‘Not good with officialdom, are you Drayton?’ the German said. Again there was that faintest of smiles, unreadable as always, and then yet more questions.
‘And Bell’s Russian partner? Dmitry, wasn’t that his name, Dmitry Gerasimov? What happened to him?’
‘He fled,’ Drayton replied. ‘And Efren Bell denied they were ever in business together. To East Europe. The Balkans maybe. There were a lot of rumours, none of them good.’
‘It was Macedonia,’ Schoenberg said. ‘Dmitry set up what he called a financial services company. You didn’t hear about that?’
There was another cry from the far end of the atrium as police dragged away a protester who’d thrown something at the gallery window. It came as a welcome distraction for Drayton. Of course he’d heard about Macedonia. But he was beginning to resent the questions, especially as Schoenberg seemed to already know the answers. What was the point? He wanted to push back, to steer the conversation away from his past and demand answers of his own. But the German’s manner wasn’t that of an inquisitor, more of a gently curious old uncle.
‘Like I said, there were rumours,’ Drayton replied.
‘Macedonia was essentially a boiler room operation, at least in the early days,’ Schoenberg said. ‘Selling shares that didn’t exist to gullible American and European investors. Then Dmitry diversified into fake websites and bogus social media accounts. They looked legitimate, but were full of inflammatory and outrageous stories.’
‘A click farm?’
‘One of the first.’
It was a simple business model. People love to click and share that sort of material, the weirder the better, and back then advertisements blindly followed the clicks. So it wasn’t unusual to see ads for top brands beside stories about the Pope in a Vatican orgy, aliens kidnapping Queen Elizabeth, or Obama eating children as a midday snack. A whole industry grew around it, and it was lucrative.
‘Dmitry was one of the first to discover its political power,’ Schoenberg said. ‘That people actually believed a lot of that stuff, or at least wanted to. It generated anger and hate, and not just money. And that realisation attracted a whole new set of clients.’
Lawless Macedonia became a hub for click farms and then the new political influence operations until, under enormous international pressure, the government started to crack down, a new anti-corruption commissioner taking her job seriously.
‘The commissioner was shot dead a month into her job,’ Schoenberg said. ‘Dmitry was accused of ordering the hit.’
‘And did he order it?’
‘He didn’t need to. He pulled the trigger. After she turned down his bribes and ignored his threats, it became very personal. Dmitry cashed out and moved on soon after that. He had little choice. And Macedonia was in any case becoming too crowded. Cybercrime offered a brighter future elsewhere.’
‘Where did he go?’
Schoenberg didn’t answer directly. ‘To friendlier shores. Where his skills were in demand.’
Then the German asked, ‘What kind of character was Dmitry?’
‘Vengeful, vindictive, though technically very smart. Very determined. That’s how he was usually described. Though I never met him in person. Didn’t meet Bell either. Though during the investigation I felt almost part of the family.’
‘And you’d recognise Dmitry if you saw him again.’
‘He’s hard to forget.’
He watched Schoenberg, who had turned away from Drayton and was standing with his hands behind his back, looking again at the big screen. He appeared to be deep in thought. The American found him impossible to read.
‘And Efren Bell is now the toast of Wall Street,’ Schoenberg said, turning back to Drayton. ‘He used his windfall from the financial crises to set up his Digital Pagoda Fund, now the biggest single investor in start-ups. If he succeeds in raising his latest tranche of money, another one hundred billion dollars from investors, it will be the largest pool of private cash ever raised.’
Drayton crunched at the last piece of his cornet, an aggressive crunch that launched a dollop of raspberry cheesecake gelato down his trousers.
Schoenberg handed him a paper napkin and said, ‘Time magazine calls him the most influential person in technology today.’
*****
Chuck Drayton’s Sundays with Anna had taken on a routine. Mid-morning out of bed. The gluten-free and sugar-free vegan banana bread breakfast at the café beside Eberswalde Strasse U-Bahn station. A short walk to the Mauerpark flea market to join the crowds squeezing between tables straining with old trinkets and tacky souvenirs. Maybe buy one or two. Perhaps a walk up the nearby hill to one of the remaining stretches of wall to watch graffiti artists daubing over last week’s splodges. Then to a bar beneath their apartment for lunchtime jazz and enough beer to more than offset any benefit from the banana bread. Back home mid-afternoon and usually back to bed, scattering clothes on the way, to take up where they’d left off mid-morning.
This Sunday Anna had other things on her mind. She was out of bed early, telling Drayton to keep his hands to himself, and when he joined her in the living room late morning she was at her laptop at the table by the window.
‘Twenty-four hours to go and so much to do. It’s so exciting. But the security, the catering, the stage and lights, the screens. Cleaning up the factory yard. It’s been a nightmare.’
‘Is he bringing the Rolling Stones with him or something?’
‘Come on Chuck, you promised. No bitching about Efren Bell. Please. This is big.’
Drayton left the apartment. He was determined to stick to the routine. At least the lunchtime bar and jazz part of it. By the time he got back to the apartment, Anna had gone to the factory, but she’d left her laptop open on the table. He messaged her: ‘Hey, Anna, you’ve forgotten your computer. You want me to drop it by later?’
She messaged back: ‘Don’t worry, I have the files I need. I can survive without it today. Thanks x.’
He pressed one of the keys and a screensaver of changing Alpine photographs was replaced with a busy desktop. No password protection. Not smart. He set up a password, acting almost out of instinct and keeping it simple. AnnaBerlin. Thinking she could change it later. She should have basic security.
Then he was distracted by a phone call.
It was Milo Müller.
‘I need to see you.’
‘I can be at the office in half an hour or so.’
‘Not the office,’ Milo insisted.
Drayton found Milo and Norgaard at their usual table in the corner of the Control-Delete bar, Fritz the dog sleeping at their feet, Fritz the owner trying to explain to a French couple in the corner that the beer was supposed to be cloudy. ‘It’s Weissbier. Weissbier.’
Milo was excited. He’d spent weeks trawling through the hacker forums of the dark web, posing as a hacker himself. Gaining trust and invitations to closed and more exclusive groups, deeper down, where forums and chats could quickly grow, split and then disappear, re-emerging under different names. Like hydra-headed monsters. Some needed passwords, ever changing. It was a paranoid world, and Drayton had urged him on, urged him to look for patterns and clues. And now he thought he’d found one.
‘He goes by the hacker name Neo. The thing is, like, he’s in your face. And the anonymising. Usually they multi-anonymise, depending on the forum. But Neo, you know, he’s uni-identity.’
He was gabbling, his brain moving faster than his mouth, which tended to happen when Milo got excited. He was spitting out rapid chunks of jargon.
Norgaard translated. ‘What he’s saying is that this Neo doesn’t switch around identities like other hackers. And he’s boastful and sloppy.’
Milo said he had an instinct. ‘It’s the way he brags about the Cerberus hacks, as if he knows more about them. There’s a German hacker forum, and he told them there’d be free travel on the Berlin U-Bahn. And this happened before the hack. Before the hack. Like he knew it was coming. Like he knew it was coming.’
Drayton called Schoenberg at his Lake Tegel home. He said the dark web was all smoke and mirrors, but he trusted Milo’s instincts, and Schoenberg said they should brief the Cardinals. A meeting was set for the following morning.
*****
They lined up as usual on the two long sides of the conference room table. Schoenberg, Drayton, Milo and Norgaard on one side, the Cardinals on the other. Schoenberg began with a round-up of the latest Cerberus attacks: A Brazilian dam shutdown, several hospitals crippled in Singapore, which counted as a relatively quiet week. Then Milo began to talk – excited, nervous and struggling with his words as he repeated what he’d told Drayton and Norgaard.
‘All hackers brag,’ said Strykov dismissively.
‘It means nothing,’ agreed Wang.
‘We’ll need more than that Milo,’ said Cullen, in that slightly patronising way a teacher might talk to a small child who’s come up short with their homework. ‘What exactly are you saying anyway, that this Neo somehow is Cerberus?’
Milo kept his eyes firmly on the desk in front of him, his right hand spinning his cell phone. ‘Well maybe not Cerberus as such… But like… He like… You know… He seems to know a lot.’ He was speaking to the table, struggling with the words.
Milo wasn’t good at presentations. He wasn’t good at anything that wasn’t mediated by a screen. He could spend hours in the anonymous world of the dark web. Entrance only via special software. Bouncing between hacker forums and brushing shoulders with the darkest of the dark, but he struggled with real people, and was visibly wilting before the baying Cardinals. He repeated that Neo seemed to know in advance about free travel on the U-Bahn.
Strykov began to tease him over his heavy use of ‘like’. ‘The U-Bahn’s like shut down like. But, hey, nobody’s travelling, free or paid, like.’
Norgaard stepped in for Milo. ‘That’s true, it’s shut down, but it didn’t straight away. The hack hit the ticketing system and station gates, and for the first few hours they decided to leave the gates open, people travelling for free. It was the afternoon before they got worried about safety and shut the whole thing down. So it does fit with Neo’s prediction about free travel.’
‘Anything more?’ said Cullen, impatiently.
‘Neo’s joined a couple of forums, talking about Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency stuff,’ Milo said, sounding clearer, bolstered by the support from Norgaard, ‘Like he might have a chunk to spend.’
‘And?’ said Strykov.
‘And the cryptocurrency chat rooms he’s been entering, they are mostly hosted here in Berlin.’
‘That means nothing,’ Cullen said.
‘He seems familiar with places they talk about,’ Milo said. ‘And the times he comes online, it fits with this time zone. At first it looked as if he was in the Far East. Then he moved here.’
‘This is a big time zone Milo. And hackers work weird hours,’ Strykov said.
‘Is this the best you can do?’ Cullen sneered.
Milo’s reply was faltering and barely audible. ‘Like I said, it’s… You know… An instinct.’
‘Well, we’ll need more than an instinct,’ said Wang, standing to leave.
‘Next time you call an emergency meeting, Herr Schoenberg, please make it for something worthwhile,’ Strykov said, his words punctuated with a wheezy laugh.
Schoenberg ignored the taunts. He began to massage his head and pull at a tuft of hair above his left ear, the signs Drayton had come to recognise as agitation, but keeping it under control as ever. ‘That’s good work Milo. Thank you. Though it does sound as if you’ve got a little more digging to do.’
Drayton could barely contain his anger as he watched Milo getting mauled. He wanted to hit back. What had the Cardinals ever brought to the table that was any use? And he probably would have told them that and a lot more if his attention had not been grabbed by his cell phone, increasingly panicky messages from Anna filling the screen. ‘I can’t get into my laptop,’ ‘It’s not letting me in. All my stuff,’ ‘Urgent stuff,’ ‘FUCK!!’ ‘What should I do?’ ‘I seem to be locked out.’ ‘It’s asking for a password,’ ‘I don’t have one.’ ‘FUCK, FUCK!!’
Drayton replied with ‘AnnaBerlin’, the password he’d locked it with.
‘Really sorry. I meant to tell you.’
She shot back, a series of short angry outbursts. ‘What the FUCK Drayton?’, ‘You fucked up my morning. Today is SO important’, ‘Don’t you dare touch my fucking computer. EVER!’
He messaged back saying he was only trying to help, that she had to be more aware of security on her computer.
‘Drayton, you are paranoid. FUCKING paranoid,’ was her response.
*****
‘There you go, Milo. Uncle Holger’s medicine. You’ll feel better after this. It’s a craft beer. Eight per cent. They brew it out the back.’ They were back in the Control-Delete Bar, trying to calm Milo.
‘They gave you a tough time,’ Drayton said. ‘But you did well.’
‘Didn’t feel that way,’ Milo said.
‘You know what?’ Norgaard said. ‘They all seemed almost overeager to ridicule you. It was a performance. For each other. For us. A show to give the impression that Neo is a waste of time, and not worth taking seriously.’
‘And you think they did – take him seriously?’ Milo asked.
‘Very seriously,’ Drayton said. ‘These are people who’ve made a career out of deceit. They lie for a living. Doesn’t just happen online, Milo. Muttley stopped wheezing, at least for a while. Winnie-the-Pooh was no longer looking out the window. Even Captain America was fully tuned in. When was the last time you saw that?’
Norgaard asked Fritz to turn up the volume on a television that was mounted on the wall close to their table. CNN had cut to a packed senate committee room, senators sitting in a horseshoe in front of a witness table. There were two people at the table, a man in uniform and a woman in a brown business suit. There was a strap across the bottom of the screen with the words, ‘THE BOSTON HACKING HEARINGS’.
‘I don’t know what annoys me more,’ Norgaard said. ‘The creepy witnesses or the ignorant senators. The senators are all in their sixties and seventies. Makes you wonder if they’ve ever used a computer in their lives.’
One senator leafed slowly through papers in front of him before theatrically removing his glasses and addressing the witness table. ‘So what exactly is a zero day, General?’
‘It’s a vulnerability that is unknown to those who would want to mitigate it and open to exploitation by a zero day exploit,’ said the witness in the uniform.
‘Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!’ shouted the senator, raising a hand, a look of mock horror on his face, while a bank of cameras clicked manically beneath him. ‘Hold up. Hold up. Can we have that in plain English, General?’
‘Well it’s an unknown vulnerability. At least to the vendor.’
‘Please!’ yelled the senator. ‘Imagine you’re explaining to your mom and dad. Right? And mom and dad think surfing the web is something spiders do on wet days. And a hard drive is a tough journey back from work. You get what I’m saying? Now please let’s try again.’
The woman in the grey business suit beside the General raised her hand. ‘Maybe I can help out here.’
And the senator said, ‘Maybe you can. Talk to your parents.’
‘It’s a computer bug. A flaw in a computer system. But one that the owner of that system doesn’t know about, so they’ve not yet found a way of fixing the flaw.’
‘Because they don’t know about it?’ the senator said.
‘That’s right. But the hackers do know about it. Maybe they’ve discovered it, or bought it from somebody else. And the weapon they use to get into the computer system, to exploit that bug is the zero day exploit.’
‘Well, I’m still not sure my mom and dad would get that, but we’re making progress.’ said the senator. ‘Why zero day?’
The General said it referred to the time between a bug being discovered and a patch being made for it. The patch being kinda like a repair. And zero days meant just that, zero days. Because the computer owner couldn’t develop the patch because he didn’t know about the bug.
The senator was scratching his head now.
‘So let me make sure I’ve got this right,’ he said. ‘I’m running the city of Boston. Somebody has discovered a hole in my computer system that I have no idea about. That’s the zero day. He fires a bunch of ransomware through that hole and cripples my computers, locks me out. That’s the zero day exploit. Yeah?’
‘Well in broad terms.’
‘I don’t want broad terms. You’re the cyber experts. You’re the CIA. The NSA. The guardians of our nation’s computers. Yes or no.’
‘Well yes, basically.’
‘This hearing’s looking at what happened in Boston, but we could be talking about the power grid, the water supply, transport, air traffic control. Anything run by computers. Correct?’
‘That is correct,’ said the General.
The senator pressed on. ‘So in the arsenal of cyber weapons out there, these zero days, they are the most deadly? Like nukes?’
‘I’m not sure that analogy is quite correct,’ said the General.
‘Why not?’ said the senator. ‘You’re talking of potentially massive destruction. And there’s another thing. What happens when we discover a zero day. Do we announce it to the computer industry, to the world, play the good guy, so they can fix it and everyone can sleep safely in their beds at night? Or do we keep it to ourselves, squirrel it away, stockpile it, like nukes, just in case we might need it to attack somebody else’s systems?’
When there was no immediate answer, the senator said, ‘Well? Talk to me. It’s a simple, question, and I’d like a simple answer.’
The General leaned and talked to the woman next to him. He drank some water and shuffled some papers in front of him. Another two uniforms approached the table and they all conferred. The camera cut to a wide shot of the committee room. It cut to the senator who’d been doing the questioning and was now rubbing his nose and looking impatient.
