by Al K. Line
This updated and incredibly complex botnet was going to change everything. In fact it already had, she just didn't know how yet. What it brought about was light years above and beyond what Ven or anyone else could have imagined. She wouldn't have believed you unless she was seeing it with her own eyes.
There was no doubt about it, she was responsible for the ruination of all she held dear: her husband Paul, casual friends, neighbors, family, very nearly Tomas and Bos Bos the dog at her feet. Even bloody Twitter.
Well, fuck Twitter, that was no real loss. It would be a shame to lose Instagram though.
Not all hackers were nerds, at least that is what Ven liked to think. She certainly didn't look like your traditional Cyber criminal. She didn't act like one either. She could afford a lot of what she wanted, as long as it was paid for with virtual currency.
But it wasn't enough, not by millions.
Everyone of Ven's caliber had a dream to build a botnet so damn clever and so viral that it could absolutely never be stopped, but she didn't do it for the fame or the notoriety. She messed up people's technology for one reason only — money.
She had plenty of it, virtually, but to pull off a spectacular change of life, and to get away with it, was taking her to the brink. ven.GEANCE, her Online hacker tag (which she had thought a really cool name when she picked it in her teens), a.k.a. Sarah, was at her limits. For three days straight she had been tweaking her botnet for the ultimate coup de grace. Even though she was in that very spaced out zone, and kind of on another planet, she still had her pride, so numerous mundane tasks still had to be completed to her very high and meticulous standards.
The house was immaculate, her make-up was done, and the dog had been walked (she thought). Bos Bos begged to differ, however.
Her botnet had begun small, built and tweaked over the years, and in the hacker realm it was already legendary.
She started years ago with just a very conservative 130,278 infected devices. More or less the same number she had maintained ever since. A number that kept it unobtrusive but constantly switching from peer to peer to remain hidden, and that made it impossible to stop. After this final update when she hit enter it mined and burrowed and became something more than its coding. Expanding, duplicating, infiltrating and infecting millions of computers. Making them part of her network simultaneously. All through hacking social media accounts and corrupting 'friends' devices if they dared click on one of the numerous links or images the botnet posted to the original 130,278 accounts. She had purposely kept her botnet relatively small to avoid detection, coding it to move from computer to computer to minimize the risk of discovery. Only now had she decided to let it loose, the aim being to compromise the vast majority of the world's connected devices over a few days.
With seventy-eight percent of all people connected accessing the Web daily via one device or another it wouldn't take long to infiltrate nearly every single Online user. This currently stood at nearly forty percent of the worldwide population, a little over 2.5 billion people. It was rising by the minute. Aiming to infiltrate so many devices was a lot riskier, the Mariposa Botnet, which infected twelve million systems and led to the prosecution of Skorjanc in 2010, stood as a warning for everyone in the game. Keep it under control unless you are sure that you will never be discovered.
Ven was the first victim of her massive virtual attack, if you can call a survivor a victim. Hacking was a way of life that opened up so many possibilities it was hard to resist for someone that had the brains, the complete lack of empathy concerning the loss of other people's stuff, and the willingness to lock themselves in a room staring at a monitor for days, sometimes weeks on end. Obsessively punching in code.
Ven was not quite, how would you put it, normal? No, that's not it, but something was certainly different about her. She had an obsession about always being the best, and having the best. She could dedicate a day to picking a dog collar, and she could dedicate a decade to becoming the best hacker ever.
She did, with a vengeance. Hence her rather juvenile nickname, that she had insisted she be called by Kyle and her family, and them only. If you met her you might sense there was something off-kilter. Something different, something rather intense and obsessive. Maybe you would think her a 'savant', but she could function normally and lived quite a regular life if you were looking in from the outside. There was a deep and vast pool of intelligence shining behind her dark brown eyes, her angular features a testament to her obsessive behavior and the resulting lack of keeping track of meal-times.
Morality was very fuzzy for her, she saw little wrong with taking other people's virtual money, if she could get it then it was hers, right? It takes a certain kind of commitment to learn the best way to access other people's private information, and to use it in the many nefarious ways Ven had over the years. But to her it was a way of making her mark in the world without anyone actually knowing it was her, or having to actually deal with people on more than a superficial level.
Part of her understood it as a cry for help, the rest reveled in the risk and the potential reward.
After they had adopted their dog Boscoe she did actually have an awakening about her activities — from the day they picked him up from the pound she donated ten percent of her nefarious earnings to various animal shelters around the United Kingdom. This was not an insignificant amount of money for many of the shelters — desperate for money to keep the animals alive and fed. But this was her one and only real moment of morality when it came to what she did. If truth be told her charitable donations spoke more about her love of animals than they did about her caring for the people she stole money from. It just didn't quite 'compute' with her that what she was doing could have any real world consequence for her victims. She saw it all as digital rather than real, it was just the way her brain was wired.
Her infamous botnet had been live for a long time, slowly gathering up virtual currencies from around the world and moving them from virtual bank to virtual bank via thousands of different accounts, all run by streams of activity she could no longer even keep control of. She had written it so well that there were countless ways her botnet could be used. Data mining, stealing passwords for Online banking, renting out the botnet for email spam, 'hacktivism' for those wanting to eliminate their Online competition, even Bitcoin mining, running on multiple hacked machines to gather enough processing power to generate this valuable virtual currency. It was all there in the programming, and with no centralized command and control it was impossible to stop. This gave Ven a lot of options in terms of monetization as the whim and fancy took her.
It was exhilarating and scary at the same time, she was not in total control any longer, and she was not used to being in such a situation. She had written it to be able to carry on no matter what, it was why it worked so well, but it did make her feel uneasy, she liked to be in control at all times. But if she wanted to pull off her largest Cyber attack yet, the biggest in the history of Online Warfare, then this is what it took. Playing it safe wouldn't get the results she wanted. But she was yet to realize just what the consequences would be when she let the botnet expand at the rate she had programmed it to do that Thursday afternoon.
The last three days had been spent in a fog of tapping on keyboards, shouting down for meals (never even sure if Paul was home or not), with a growing suspicion that what she was about to do was going to have way more repercussions than just messing with people's iPads — she was right.
Only a small minority of people really understand what is going on when they connect to the Internet, and fewer still are aware of just what goes on subconsciously when exposed to the endless streams of meaningless data they are totally addicted to.
Ven understood it all too well, and for a long time now she had been committed to, and totally dedicated to, updating her program so that it would exploit people's Online activity to the max. It was going to ultimately allow her to actually become richer than, well, anyone in the UK apart from maybe th
e Queen. She didn't plan on actually taking all the money she was going to steal, but she was certainly going to take enough to have a very opulent life, that was for sure.
Social media was going to do a lot of the work for her, along with hacked email accounts and a few other choice bits of code. The closer she got to unleashing her ultimate piece of work the more excited, and scared she got. Would it work? Would it get caught (no chance), and just exactly what was it really going to accomplish?
IRC channels were awash with the buzz. Funny how a digital atmosphere can change, even when no announcement had ever been made by Ven about the latest incarnation of the most infamous botnet of all time.
The botnet with no name, as this infamous piece of coding was known until things took a turn for the worse, was the de facto botnet used by thousands of paying clients worldwide for years now. It made Ven very rich, but in an abstract way.
Selling services from mass spam submissions, password capture for social media accounts for no more reason than to send mass Tweets attacking prominent media figures, hierarchical anomalies exploited at base level — all things she could do in her sleep.
This special grouping of 0's and 1's was infamous, used worldwide for all kinds of attacks on businesses, individuals and corporate entities both real and virtual, and Ven didn't care, or even think about, the damage it might do to anyone unlucky enough to be infected with the most powerful botnet the world had ever seen.
And then the real infection began.
How to Build a Botnet
Ven's digital contribution to the destruction of mankind was designed to work like this — the already infected seed devices, malware inserted and ready to activate at the simple push of a button, would execute a number of commands simultaneously.
Firstly the botnet needed to expand. It would infiltrate any account you had access to on your computer or mobile device. Social media, email, banking and more, it was all under attack. Additionally it had the ability to infect other devices by sending out simple links that, if clicked, would infect your machine. The Pirate Bay and other torrent sharing sites would also come under attack, nearly every popular song or movie and game would be infected with the virus, ready to pass it on to others sharing the downloads via peer to peer software.
Basically any Online device would have a hack attempt on it. At the same time as the infection spreading like wildfire the botnet was to place infected links pointing to randomly generated dummy sites. It would also stream the action via infiltrated advertising accounts, and anything else that could show a series of images. It was all designed to load and fire-off a large number of highly specialized images in extremely rapid succession that Ven had gone to great pains to find, and to morph for her own particular needs.
It would be repeated by any means necessary on infected devices, click a link — it played. Go to a Website carrying paid for ads — it played. Download an illegally shared video or game — it played. Follow through on a picture or link posted on Facebook — it played. Nowhere was safe, and all the while your connectivity ensured that you were responsible for spreading the virus, as well as being under attack from the subliminal imagery yourself. It was designed to keep on repeating in an endless loop, so if you didn't get caught the first time (maybe you looked away from the screen for a split second), then it would surely get you the next time around. This was overkill, but if you were going to do a job then you may as well do it properly — this was one of Ven's many mottos.
The subliminal messages were designed to encourage, if not make, people either sign into their existing Bitcoin account or to sign up for one and make a purchase. This was not to happen instantly but over the course of a few days — after all, Ven didn't want to crash the Bitcoin accounts.
The botnet would then follow through and all access data such as passwords, email address used, IP address, username and more would be harvested, hers for the taking. As soon as accounts were accessed the details would automatically be taken, and random accounts mined. Currency would be transferred out, go through thousands of holding accounts created automatically via smaller throwaway botnets, then be forwarded again through shell companies. Ultimately the virtual currency would be sold, maybe bought again, and eventually be loaded into real currency accounts, created under untraceable umbrella companies.
She would then have access to more money than she would ever know what to do with.
How many accounts she could access was always going to be up for debate, and how many people would be overcome by the botnet initially with the subliminal messages she was unsure of. So she did her best to make certain that it all went viral as soon as possible.
It worked just that little bit too well.
She had totally underestimated the number of users on various forms of social media at any given time. You couldn't really figure in natural surges in activity, which is what her interference created. On normal days, without any major world events or celebrity gossip, 500 million people log into Facebook and 4 billion views daily were the norm on YouTube. Her activities sent it all spiraling upwards and out of control for a short period of time — as the buzz lifted and the hashtags were abused. Very rapidly the numbers dropped off, as there were so few people who were connected to the Web actually left in any state to interact. The initial infection was huge, but over the course of just twenty-four hours entire continents were nothing more than a wasteland of death and destruction. With seventy-eight percent of the United States connected you were either infected or you were dead. The story was the same across much of Europe and Asia.
Countries like Iceland suffered even worse, with ninety-eight percent of the population connected via fiber optic cable the whole country was wiped out in less than a day, there was no-one left. Low-tech countries such as North Korea and Burma fared better in the beginning, but it caught up to them all pretty rapidly.
From Facebook, to Twitter, Pinterest, Digg, StumbleUpon and almost forgotten stalwarts like MySpace, nothing was left untouched. Links to, or the subliminal message itself, were posted on blogs, news channels, YouTube and millions of other social sharing sites. Within a day if you turned on anything that was connected to the virtual world there was a very high probability that what was facing you would be a data packet that would mean your death, and probably the death of those you loved and anyone else around you.
It was out of control, had taken on a life of its own. Very far removed from what Ven had initially designed by a large magnitude.
Her original work had been tweaked for the ultimate digital heist. But the end result duplicated and expanded in ways she didn't even know were possible. By the time the reality hit going Online was a very scary proposition. Social media was compromised, video streaming sites were off limits. Websites morphed into depositories of the subliminal imagery and all the while the botnet grew, expanded onto other devices, worming its way deeper in ever more duplicitous ways to ensure that it could never be extinguished. Click a link on any web page that existed and it could be the end of your reality.
In short nothing was safe. If it carried text or pictures then you were playing Russian roulette unless you could be very sure that you had some serious firewalls, ones that could defend against one of the best hackers the world had ever known.
Hubby
"Ven, are you seeing this?" asked a pretty bewildered Kyle.
They were sitting in her room agape at the trending #zombie on Twitter, before it imploded and the streams of millions of users worldwide they had access to slowly melted down into complete and utter nonsense.
Both munching on a limp sandwich, Bos Bos drooling enviously from the corner, they had returned to the screen to see just how many people's devices the soon to be infamous botnet had infiltrated. They wanted confirmation that Ven's hard work was paying off as it should. To verify how fast it could work.
Chomping away, looking at the screen, they both stared first in fascination, then with growing horror, at the results of her actions.
Facebook was worse. They were watching the world unravel before their very eyes. Ven, the ultimate friend as far as Kyle was concerned, had explained just what her botnet was about to do before she punched enter and destroyed everything.
It obviously wasn't working out as planned.
There was a never ending assault from the news, social media and other sources, of people going into total and utter meltdown all over the world. The botnet had infiltrated millions of devices and the viral imagery was out of control. People were dying, it seemed, and they were coming back and killing anyone and everyone in their path. From loved ones to strangers, it made no difference to the infected.
"This can't be happening, it fucking can't," Ven cried. "Zombies are not real, it's ridiculous."
"Well, look at the bloody screen Ven, people are deranged and they are killing each other."
"Yeah, but zombies? C'mon, if they are dead they are dead. How can you get up and move if your heart isn't beating and your blood isn't pumping?" she asked.
"Well, who would believe you could manipulate millions of people to access accounts without them wanting you to? It's what you were doing," said Kyle.
"That's a bit different to this, don't you think Kyle?" she replied curtly.
But the reality was that all over the Web there were countless reports of people seemingly dying and re-animating, although it was hard to get any real sense of what the truth was. Hysteria set in instantly. Once people were infected by the botnet it seemed they were either locked onto their screen performing mindless tasks over and over again, or were attacking and subsequently eating, anything living they could get their deranged hands on. From what they could deduce it was her coding that had been responsible for it all.
