The Spiraling Web
Page 8
1.14
Alice’s skeleton of a body was hunched over her workbench as usual when Detective Summerall walked into the lab. A thick, acrid smoke rose slowly from where the technician carefully soldered electronic components to a motherboard, but it could have been a keyboard for all Dana knew about electronics. A pair of thick, black goggles covered Alice’s eyes. Her face was smeared with oil and dirt where her tangled blonde hair did not obscure it, as were her denim overalls. Summerall could never make the connection between the woman’s appearance and her line of work. She always imagined computer specialists wearing white lab coats in a sterile room, like those processor chip commercials where the engineers were always dancing around in biohazard suits.
While Alice was a detective in the lab, Dana was a detective in the field. She was a hefty woman, in her mid fifties, unlike Alice, who was a frail, bony wraith. Their statures matched their duties. Alice wrestled with malicious data, while Dana dealt with the human element--even if the criminals were mostly scrawny computer geeks like Alice. She occasionally got to take down one of the obese kind, which was a little more satisfying, but only in a sadistic sort of way.
Alice looked up at Summerall for a moment and set her focus back on the electronics, “Be right with you Dana. I’m just rigging a faster bus to the… this way… I’ll be able… to…” she trailed off, immersed in the microscopy.
Summerall was used to this quirky behavior from her coworker. Alice was a true IT guru, meaning there were no resources left in her brain for understanding real people. Her world was entirely digitally informed and electronically engineered.
Dana looked over all the technology she did not understand. Electronic components littered two workbenches, and towering CPUs chugged away at various tasks with the computing power of several million hertz against the far wall. Mow Chein, Alice’s assistant, sat in one corner tinkering with a VR helmet. He did not glance from his work as Dana strolled by. People were inconsequential to Mow also.
“Is this the hard drive?” Summerall asked leaning over to peer at a multi-layered cylinder jury-rigged into a soldered mess.
“Don’t touch!” Mow shouted. His glaring eyes were magnified through his thick eyeglasses. “Very delicate!”
Alice took no notice, “Yeah, that’s the little bugger. You can see the VR representation over there.” She pointed without looking from her work.
Dana looked to her right and found a small monitor running several windows, Each one displayed various stats on the drive: processing power used, network traffic, and database transactions. It was incomprehensible to Dana, who stared at it blankly for a few moments before her eyes wandered elsewhere.
Alice pulled her goggles down around her neck and scrutinized the board she was working on. Getting up from the bench, she walked over to the component tower beside the hard drive and slid the board into one of the frame’s many open slots. She connected it directly to the hard drive with a red and black striped wire and flipped a switch. Dana thought she saw a tiny flash of light on the board, but otherwise nothing changed.
Alice let out a whisper of a curse, removed the board, and squinted at a tiny burn mark on its surface, “Wrong jumper settings… Well, that was a $10,000 goof-up.” She tossed the board into a nearby wastebasket and seemed to notice Dana for the first time.
Instead of greeting the detective, she waved her over to a nearby workstation. “You want to see the strangest program I’ve ever encountered?” she asked, sliding a keyboard out from under the workbench and turning to the monitor.
Dana leaned in to look over Alice’s shoulder, “Show me what you’ve got.”
Alice used the mouse to pull a window forward from the stack, revealing a page of light-blue text. Dana could not recognize any of the characters on the screen. It looked like cryptography to her.
“That’s the virus’ code?” she asked.
Alice shrugged, “I guess so, although I couldn’t tell you what programming language. Something extensible, I think. I’ve never gotten results like this from the decompiler before”
“‘Extensible’?” Dana asked.
“A dynamic programming language, it can grow and build on itself. This is an unknown font-type, after all, so the program must be telling the computer how to read it, spawning its own operating system on the fly. Now watch this,” Alice selected a code string and deleted it. The surrounding characters began changing, filing into the missing segment, until the code returned to its original state. Alice looked at Dana expectantly.
Dana looked at Alice, “Okay, explain what I just saw.”
Alice’s smile dropped in disappointment and she pointed at the screen, “The code repaired itself. It didn’t just copy the erased lines back into the whole, like some viruses do. In those cases, you simply empty its cache so it has no way of remembering what was there in the first place. In this case, the program actually rewrote itself back to its original state, like it sensed the missing data and ran a process to calculate what was needed to replace it. It actually healed the data. Isn’t that fantastic?”
“No, it isn’t,” Dana said, shaking her head, “What I just heard is that we can’t just erase this thing off the infected computers. Am I right?”
Alice half shrugged, “Not quite, you see, it’s more complicated than that,” she selected the same section of code and tried to delete it again.
A warning message from the Operating System popped up with an alert chime:
CANNOT DELETE PROCESS
AS IT IS REQUIRED BY
THE OPERATING SYSTEM
Alice turned back to Dana, “The virus has disguised the damaged code as a necessary system file. So the security won’t let you remove it, but…” she selected the segment of code and deleted it using her administrative privileges, the code was removed and slowly healed again, “The program wasn’t smart enough to disguise the healed code very well. The system may not know the difference, but I do.”
“So the virus has a chink in its armor,” Dana said, nodding.
Her sunken eyes and cheeks made Alice’s smile almost ghoulish, “Wait till you see my solution.” She glided over to another terminal on the wheeled office chair. “Nobody breath,” she whispered. Eyes locked on the monitor, she hit the “enter” key, “This is attempt number seventeen. The first eight attempts the virus pwwned me with its ability to alert copies of itself throughout the network. It used everything from instant messaging to commandeering the server’s e-mail and Internet services to broadcast the alert, communicating it exponentially, until they were all adapted to the new threat.”
“At least, that is Alice’s interpretation of the behavior,” Mow interjected.
Alice continued, oblivious to Mow, “Overcoming this seemed impossible at first, but programs require processing power to work, right? If the anti-virus program could monopolize the system resources, the virus would have nothing to react with. So I had to force the system into dedicating all of its processing power at once to the anti-virus.
“A programming loop was the easiest solution, but the virus kept figuring out the simple timing. So I tasked the anti-virus with testing the first 100 billion integers for prime numbers simultaneously using an inefficient algorithm developed by the Indian Institute of Technology in 2002, with additional steps added to further reduce its efficiency.”
Dana looked at Mow, “Was that English?”
Mow shrugged unhelpfully.
Alice did not miss a beat, “After depriving the virus of all system resources, came the hurdle of extracting the virus from the system without damaging legitimate programs. The virus is undetectable to my existing code sweepers. It would lie dormant until the danger passed and then re-infect the computer with a newer version.
“I patched a decompiler, scandisk utility, and an omni-language debugging tool together to form the method of attack, decompiling and analyzing every byte on the hard drive for symptoms of the alien code. It works in the momentary p
rocessing gaps found in the algorithm, occurring whenever a prime number is confirmed. There are 4,118,054,813 primes—more than enough chances.
“You didn’t use proprietary softwares to build this did you?” Dana asked.
“This solution required ideas from the greatest minds around the world,” Alice replied without looking at her. “No one person or corporation could accomplish it.”
“They’ll see what you’ve done after you release the anti-virus,” Dana said. “You’ll loose your job. You might go to prison.”
Alice was silent, watching the anti-virus flood the network, consume its resources, and painstakingly sifting through each bit of code. The process ran at a snails’ pace, and would take half an hour to complete in simulation. On the World Wide Web it could take days, possibly weeks. Normally such a solution was unacceptable, but half the Internet was down. The situation called for extreme measures, even breaking the laws her agency enforced.