Ghost in the Machine

"The code. Give me the damn code..."

The voice in my earpiece was panicking. With maybe thirty seconds to go until every alarm in the building went off, I didn’t blame him, but I was still trying to make sense of his words.

“What code?”

“The console’s asking for a code and you didn’t give me any code.”

“I don’t have any code...”

There was nothing for it but to dive back into the network. It was always a risk to interface directly with the machine, but I was down to less than twenty seconds and the firewall slowed down my reactions too much.

spectre@ghostinthemachine ~/tools $ DNI

The string of curses which started as was typing slowed to a single elongated drone, the room melting into a virtual environment. It was the only way that I could hack six different systems and still have time to run the shutdown commands on the alarm.

The first hack was the backdoor I’d found all those months ago, the way I’d found the floor-plans and inventories that the ground-team had based their plans on. In front of me, the legitimate traffic from the security firm we were trying not to tip off showed as lights winking in and out of existence as data was sent.

As the next packet moved from yellow for standby to green for transmission, I triggered my attack. A simple man-in-the-middle, my server suddenly stepped into the stream, listening in. With a single command, I had the legitimate requests getting plausible data and my own terminal taking its place.

Now inside, I sought out a vulnerable process on the security server and set it to a memory overflow, flooding the RAM with garbage. The system slowed as the programs inside were shunted to slower memory. That should buy me another minute or so, even if it would slow me down too.

I’d been inside for five seconds, but the remaining twenty had just been quadrupled.

With a word, I had the DNS records switched; more data started flowing into my server on its way out of the building. I’d already set it up to exclude the alarms, letting everything else through to avoid suspicion.

Not bad; three down, three to go. The alarms were isolated from the outside world, but that wouldn’t stop an eagle-eyed security guard from calling the police or the alarms turning the entire building into a suspicious-looking light-show.

The emergency lights were the next to go, just about the last automated system which could draw attention from outside. It was a simple matter to set the lighting system into a set-test mode; five minutes long, it forced the system offline and locked the lighting state.

I hesitated now, wondering which one the final tasks to go to first. Lock out the phone signals or the internal alarms...

Though it would leave me locked out for an intolerable period, I went with the Faraday cage. Simple enough to do, but it meant dropping into real-time. I sent the command and then quit the DNI executable.

“..even listening to me, you piece of--” continued the tirade.

“Yes, but it’s being dealt with...” I interrupted.

On my screen, I watched the two timers ticking down. Ten seconds until the alarm, five until the Faraday cage blocked off all radio signals.

“Radio’s about to die, necessary evil...” I said. The reply was obscene, but was cut off almost immediately.

I was back into DNI with four seconds to go.

I couldn’t brute-force the alarm system, locked to three attempts as it was, so I did the next best thing; I logged into the system running it, crafting a command line from DNI before dropping out and reaching for the enter key.

secur421@alarmsys ~ $ shutdown -h now

Half a city away, a control-panel switched off, leaving my team safe from outside interference and I decided that I had earned a cup of tea. After all, with the Faraday cage enabled, it’s not like they could call me back...