by D S Kane
She thought about her collection of hacking tools, contemplating which would be most appropriate to commandeering the aircraft’s flight control system. The best place to look for hacking knowledge was Shodan, the hacker’s version of Google. She spent a few minutes scanning Shodan and then thought for a while.
It might not work to attempt to find a backdoor, even though she was sure the system, which the airline had built decades in the past, would have one. She would need to be careful to leave no trace of her work, since if they could attribute the work to her, they would then search her out. She had seen automobile braking systems, steering, and ignition hacked at DEF CON and was sure she could perform an exploit that would mirror the steps of the hackers who’d presented there. She had no physical access to the airline’s computers, so evil maid attacks were out of the question. That left her with a few options. She might try to search for malware already embedded in their systems, but it would be hit or miss, because she couldn’t depend on there being anything for her to connect with.
Charlette settled on a man-in-the-middle attack, and searched the airline’s website for their head of security. She used a social engineering ploy. First she went to a federal government site for the FAA and selected the name of a government security officer she could use in a spoof. She sent the airlines security head a spearphishing email claiming to be the government security officer, requesting the security head to open the system to the latest software update: “We have an emergency software update to fix a zero-day we just discovered in the Skylark Airlines communications module with the FAA. After the update completes, we will need to schedule a security audit and pentest to determine if your computer systems remain compliant with current federal requirements. Please reply ASAP.” In under five minutes, she received a response, stating the airline’s security chief was out on pregnancy leave and would return in sixteen more days. But, since the reply came back—albeit automatically—the email had been received, launching the malware she had designed. In effect, she now had an administrator password. She had “pwned” them and now had an active RAT embedded in their system, with a rootkit she could use to exploit them. And she intended to use it immediately.
First, Charlette deleted her own email and their computer’s response. Then, she scanned their database for the modules representing each of their aircraft. Soon, she was operating the flight control system of Skylark Airlines Flight 982. She could now make the aircraft do whatever she wanted it to do.
* * *
Lee Ainsley closed his stuffed suitcase. He scanned his image in the mirror and straightened a wayward lock of longish blond hair. Tightening the full Windsor knot on his tie, he smiled. Then, he headed down the stairs. “Okay, Cassie. I’m leaving.”
She hugged him, and he ran his fingers over her short-cut brown hair. She kissed him.“How long?”
“About ten days, I think. I wasn’t briefed on the scope of the trip, just told that it’s to determine security weaknesses on one of our Midwest bases. So, ten days is my own guess, but it’s never taken me longer than that.”
Cassie nodded. She looked out the kitchen window at the walls of the compound. The leaves were turning colors on Kirke Street in Chevy Chase, so close to Washington DC. “Okay, I guess. It’ll feel strange to be alone here. Just a few mercs as guards. With Ann not coming home until tonight, I guess I’ll just order a pizza or some Chinese takeout. Take care, sweetie.”
They hugged again and Lee donned his Burberry trenchcoat and left. As he started the car, he thought about the assignment in Provo, Utah. He’d never even known the NSA had a site there.
CHAPTER 4
November 23, 12:05 p.m.
San Francisco International Airport,
Domestic Terminal 3
Ann felt a rush of relief as she exited the taxi at SFO. She approached the ticket counter, standing in a long line for nearly twenty minutes. The clerk held out his hand and she passed him her driver’s license and stated her flight number. The clerk responded by printing her boarding pass for Skylark Airlines Flight 982, flying from San Francisco Airport to Reagan National. “I’m checking one suitcase.”
She visited the Harbor Village dim sum vendor and bought herself dinner. Then she walked to the security checkpoint, where she stood in line for over an hour. As the line moved, slowly twisting toward the checkpoint, she glanced at her watch. Her brown hair fell into her eyes and she straightened her ponytail. Finally, she reached the guard’s seat and handed her boarding pass and driver’s license to the guard.
She was happy, thinking about her first semester at Stanford. She was on her way to acing three of her five courses—the important ones, in computer forensics. And she’d done this honestly, without having hacked the grading system. She knew that hacking the school’s servers would be dangerous for anyone majoring in computer forensics.
She padded down the aisle to seat 24C and stowed her computer case under the seat. She watched others find their seats on the flight. Five hours and she’d be home with Cassie and Lee, her adoptive parents. She thought, I’ve so much to tell them.
The other seats in her row were unoccupied. She stretched out. As the aircraft finished loading its passengers and the flight attendants performed their funny version of what to do if the worst were to happen, she nodded off. She’d intended to work on a midterm paper once they reached an altitude of ten thousand feet and the crew told them it was safe to turn on their electronic devices. She felt the throttle thrust to full. She could feel the force of the engines push her deeper into her seat as the beast lifted into the air.
She used her feet to pull the notebook to where she could reach it. Time to work.
The paper was still mostly an outline of itself. It was an analysis of the famous Apple versus FBI case and several of the follow-on cases, with their political and practical implications. Ann’s major argument was that if the United States outlawed or crippled encryption, hackers from other countries would still have encryption, and, since there was no way to keep encryption products from being downloaded from foreign software vendors into computers of US citizens, there would be no effective way to control the end result. Even worse, without encryption in the United States, foreign hackers would easily be able to hack into computers in the United States and steal bank account information from normal users. She added a bit of flesh to the bones of her argument, providing a few coding examples as illustrations of the point, then sat thinking about what to write next.
When it happened, it was sudden. The aircraft jolted and went silent. At first, no one reacted. Then, all the passengers were also silent. No noise except for the wind outside. Everyone was now abuzz. Ann realized the engines had stopped. She froze in fear, anticipating the crash that would most certainly take her life. For a few seconds, all she could think of was whether her death would be painful or just too sudden to even feel.
Then, she found herself acting without even realizing she was doing something about her situation. Her notebook computer still worked, ruling out an EMP attack. Since the engines had all died simultaneously, mechanical or electrical sabotage was unlikely.
Ann opened a secure area of her notebook where she stored all her hacker tools.
She’d been using the on-flight WiFi and hoped the flight control system was within the same computer. It was but she found it was completely open. No password was required. She assumed this meant someone else had opened the “backdoor” and failed to lock it behind them. A hacker had pwned the aircraft. She needed no hacker tools to penetrate the flight control systems.
Her steps were quite different from those she assumed that the hacker had used. Ann used a hacker tool to insert her own rootkit into the flight control system.
It took her almost two minutes of steady pounding on the keyboard to get her to the cockpit control system. What she found was… nothing! No activity in the cockpit.
She read through the buffers, looking to see if the pilot and copilot were even alive, and, yes, they w
ere. But the aircraft was now beyond their control.
Ann looked further and found questionable commands within the buffer, and more in the command stack, a few minutes from being issued. Ann assumed control of the plane had been permanently altered, moved to a third party.
She inserted a Reset To Default command. It appeared in the command list, but it was immediately deleted. Someone was active at the other end of the system, holding it secure from her attempts. She tried fighting the hidden hacker, but the other hacker withheld control of the aircraft from her.
And the aircraft was now heading down at a steeper angle, now falling faster. Passengers screamed.
Ann thought, I’m gonna die! She decided to do something desperate and drastic. She turned the flight control system off. Totally off. Then rebooted it.
It might take a minute or more before it would be usable.
She unbuckled her seat belt and gripped the aisle’s seatbacks to maintain her balance as she staggered to the rear of the aircraft where the flight attendants were buckled into their own seats. “Listen, I’m a hacker. I just rebooted the aircraft’s flight control system, so now the pilots can manually control the plane. It had been taken over by another hacker. A black hat. Please, tell the pilots! They can save us now.”
They stared at her in horror, as if she was an enemy.
“Now! Tell the pilots the aircraft works again. But they won’t be able to control the plane until the systems finish booting.”
One of the attendants spoke into a handphone.
Ann held tight to the nearest seatback, waiting for something to happen. Her heart pounded in her chest.
She could see out one of the windows. The ground was getting visibly closer by the second.
The aircraft lurched but then steadied, no longer losing altitude. Ann took a deep breath. She returned to her seat. Once again, she hacked into the flight control system and changed all the passwords to new ones only she could guess. That might keep the hacker from reestablishing control.
She shook her head. That had been too close.
She thought of setting back to work on her paper, but her hands were too shaky to key anything. She broke down and cried in her seat for several minutes. Then, she watched over the flight control systems until the plane’s wheels touched down at Reagan National.
As Ann prepared to debark, three men wearing dark suits approached. One said, “Ann Sashakovich? Hand me your computer.”
She looked at them. “Who are you?”
“Law enforcement. The computer. Now.”
She handed it over to one of the men. The other placed handcuffs over her wrists. He dragged her from her seat.
She was perp-marched off the plane.
CHAPTER 5
November 23, 2:38 p.m.
A studio apartment,
somewhere in Pennsylvania
The CypherGhost had shut tight the blinds on every window in the musty room. She looked at her notebook’s screen and frowned, not quite comprehending what had happened.
It had been difficult for her to maintain control over the aircraft. Now, it was too soon for the aircraft to have crashed. But one second, the screen showed it at 23,000 feet, dropping fast. And the next second, it had disappeared entirely. Had the aircraft broken apart as it fell from the sky? Or had the flight control systems somehow gone totally offline?
She scanned the passenger manifest, as if that might somehow contain the answer to what had happened. Did any of the passengers have the skills needed to reacquire control of the aircraft?
Midway down the list, she saw a name she had seen once before. Ann Silbey Sashakovich. She searched her memory for the identity of Sashakovich. Wasn’t she the girl who had saved her mother from a shooter in a Boston hospital a few years ago? The cover story was that the girl’s mother, Cassandra Sashakovich, had died. The CypherGhost now researched the Sashakoviches and found a deeper tale, interesting enough for her to dig even deeper. Both the mother and daughter were alive, and it looked like the girl was a budding hacker. Could she have been the one who saved the aircraft? But of course she was. The CypherGhost scanned the web page for Skylark Airline’s arrivals and saw the aircraft had landed safely just a few minutes before. All that effort for nothing. I should have had the aircraft do loops until its wings fell off.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck!”
If that hacker saved the aircraft, would she come looking for the hacker who had tried to crash it? But of course she would. Now, she worried that she might be discovered and hunted. Could that little demon find her? Of course she can. I wonder if I can scare her off?
She peeked out the window at the sleet falling from the sky. It was time for her to find someplace else to call her own. This motel room would soon be too dangerous.
CHAPTER 6
November 23, 5:58 p.m.
Sashakovich-Ainsley home,
220 East Kirke Street, Chevy Chase, MD
Cassandra Sashakovich had lived through more attacks on her life than she could remember. And her memory was nearly eidetic. She’d served as a hacker for a spy agency and had stolen tens of millions of dollars from terrorist bank accounts hidden within air-gapped computers at banks, meaning she had to break into the bank’s physical premises to do the work.
When her cover had been sold by a mole in her agency to the terrorist she was grifting, Cassie had fled the field, hired an army, and terminated the terrorists on their own home soil. She had then stolen nearly two billion dollars from an illegally maintained government account used to fund terrorism. After that horrendous year, she adopted Ann and married Lee Ainsley. Three years later, she birthed Evan. He was now nearly two years old, asleep upstairs in his bedroom.
Standing in the kitchen, Cassie inhaled the aroma of the roasting turkey in the oven. She had never before tried to cook one, but she’d once owned and operated a restaurant for several months, and she’d cooked ducks and chickens. Not exactly the same, but close enough for her to want to try roasting one today. She’d never felt secure in family life before, but now, having survived dangerous situations with Lee and Ann as her companions, the comfort of her current incarnation was how she believed “normal” people should live.
She turned from the oven to the stove and stirred a pot containing from-scratch barley mushroom soup. The smell of dill flavoring the soup made her mouth water.
When her cell buzzed, she thought of ignoring it, but since Ann was due to land soon, she rinsed and dried her hands before pulling the phone from her pocket. The screen blinked “Ann,” and Cassie smiled as she pushed the home button on the cell. “Hi, Ann, Avram should be there to pick you up.”
“He won’t find me at the airport, Mom. I’ve just been arrested by the FBI. I’m on the sixth floor of their downtown Washington headquarters building. The ‘Hoover Hotel.’”
Cassie almost dropped the cell in the soup tureen. “You what!?”
“Long story. Someone tried to hack the airplane I was in out of the sky. I hacked back the flight control system and rebooted it, saving us all. But as soon as the airplane taxied to the terminal, I was arrested and now I’m in an interrogation cell.”
Cassie took a few seconds, trying to understand what had happened. “Okay. I’ll be there as soon as I can. I’ll call Avram and tell him. And before you answer any questions, tell them you want an attorney. I’ll get you one before I leave.”
“Thanks, Mom.” The call terminated.
Cassie turned off the oven and the burners on the stove. Dinner would have to wait. Before contacting an attorney, she called Lee. “Lee? It’s Cassie.”
“Yeah. Just finished with the security line. I’m about to get on my flight.”
“Lee, our daughter was arrested and taken to FBI headquarters.”
“Holy batshit. Are you kidding me?”
“Not kidding. I’ll call our attorney to get her out. Then I’m out of here. I’ll be downtown as soon as I can get there. Can you cancel your assignment and meet me there?”
<
br /> “No. They just closed the aircraft door behind me.”
“Crap. Well, call me when you land.” She terminated the call and scanned the kitchen. The turkey was half-cooked. It would be ruined. She placed the tureen of soup in the fridge to cool, dumped the bird into the trash, took out the garbage, and talked with one of the compound’s bodyguards. One would ride with her.
In less than three minutes, they hit the road, barreling down the neighborhood streets. Cassie called the Swiftshadow Group’s corporate attorney, a man named Paul Marotta, and asked him for the name of a criminal attorney. Marotta said he’d get started on it.
The J. Edgar Hoover Building in downtown Washington DC is a square, squat building occupying an entire city block. Cassie found a nearby parking garage and took a ticket from the gate. She found a spot for the car and she and her bodyguard walked across the windy street, up the concrete steps, into the FBI building’s lobby.
They approached the security guard’s desk. Cassie spoke to the guard. “I’m here for my daughter. She’s been detained by agents. Her name is Ann Silbey Sashakovich.”
The guard pushed an electronic register across the desk. “Sign in.”
Cassie used the stylus to enter her and her bodyguard’s names.
Cassie scanned the lobby. Gray everywhere: walls, floor, doors. All gray. After they passed through the security barrier, they took the elevator—gray—to the sixth floor.
The ride was slow and silent, letting Cassie’s mind free to run through the possible list of charges Ann might face. She set her face in a frown and exited as the doors opened.
They waited for twenty minutes for their attorney, a short, bespectacled man wearing a blue suit and carrying an attaché case. “Ms. Sashakovich, Paul Marotta sent me. My name is Irwin Weisberg. I have extensive experience dealing with cybercrime cases.”
When the special agent in charge appeared with Ann in tow, Weisberg and the agent spoke quietly in confidence. The agent nodded and removed the cuffs from Ann’s hands. She rubbed at the chaffed skin, glaring at the man who’d been her captor. “Get me out of here.”
