CyberStorm: An Apocalyptic Thriller

by Matthew Mather

“Iran’s military, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. It’s like a mix of the Communist Party, the KGB, and the mafia.

the US has no technical edge when it comes to cyber.

“The Iranians changed the rules of the game by attacking civilian targets using cyberweapons—the

But what you don’t realize is how important it is that someone admitted to something.

What is real? What is reality, anyway? I felt like I was hallucinating, my mind never quite able to take a firm hold of anything before skidding off.

Our situation was bringing my priorities into sharp focus. I was shrugging off any artificialities, cleaning away all of the unimportant things I’d seen as essential before.

This cyberwar felt like it had nothing to do with the future but was a part of the past, as if we were burrowing backwards into humans’ unending ability to inflict suffering upon one another. If you wanted to see into the future, you just had to look to the past.

getting warm bodies together in one room helped with heating. Each human body, he’d explained, gave off about as much heat as a hundred-watt light bulb.

We used less energy if we moved as little as possible, but we used much more, he’d whispered to me, if it was cold.

“You can try to lay blame, but the central reason the Internet isn’t secure is because we don’t want it to be secure.”

“You might think you want a secure Internet, but you really don’t, and that’s part of what makes this possible. In the end, a really secure Internet isn’t in the interest of the general public or software producers.” “Why wouldn’t consumers want a secure Internet?” “Because a truly secure Internet wouldn’t serve a common interest in freedom.”

privacy being the cornerstone of freedom. More and more of our lives are moving into cyberspace, and we need to preserve what we have in the physical world as we move into the cyberworld. A perfectly secure Internet implies a trail of information somewhere, always tracking what you’re doing.”

A completely secure Internet would be the same as a world with cameras on every corner and in every home, recording our every movement, but it would be even more intrusive. A perfect record of every interaction we had would give someone the ability to peer into our very thoughts.

“The problem is that we’re trying to use the same technology—the Internet—for social networking and to run nuclear power plants. Those are two very different activities. We need to make it as secure as possible without giving some centralized power all the responsibility,” replied Rory in a tired voice. “What we’re talking about is a balancing act, an attempt to make it difficult to abuse the rights of individuals in the cyberworld of the future. Even this”—Rory waved his

“Are you saying tech companies actively want an insecure Internet?” I said. “They want it to be secure from hackers,” replied Damon, “but they don’t want consumers to be secure from them. They hardwire back doors to update and modify software remotely—it’s a fundamental security risk they purposely create.

“They give us all that software for free specifically so that we aren’t secure from them—so they can watch us, sell our information.” Damon looked at his computer screen. “If you don’t pay for a product, then you are the product.”

“How does someone tracking my online shopping affect security?” asked Susie, perplexed. Damon shrugged. “It’s all the little loopholes, all the hooks and ways to track your activity and get inside your computer that are put there by software companies—that’s a lot of what hackers exploit.”

“Electricity and water, for starters.” “The government doesn’t own that stuff anymore. Not their responsibility.”

“In theory, yes, a nation’s military is supposed to protect its citizens and industry from other nations—establish a border and then protect it—but that doesn’t work anymore. Borders are difficult to define in cyberspace.” Rory took a deep breath. “Where the government and military used to be responsible for protecting a factory from attack by foreign national governments, now they’re asking private industry to take over that responsibility in cyberspace.” He shrugged. “But who’s going to pay for it? And can a private company really protect itself from a hostile nation? Can we as private citizens act as our own armed forces? And what happens when corporations are as powerful as nations?”

If you decide to use fire in battle, make sure that anything you need yourself isn’t flammable.’”

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

we’re about the most cyber-combustible country on the planet.”

With the collapse of government authority, responsibility for justice had reverted to the tribal groups we’d spontaneously created.

We were a nation of freeloaders, ninety-eight percent of us non-food-producers relying on the two percent who produced anything edible.

I was looking at a Chinese army base, right in the center of Washington.

all the lies and misinformation—it all made sense now. We’d been invaded.

Catfish in the Shenandoah could get up to twenty or thirty pounds.

Humans were violent. We were the apex predators, each one of us alive only because our ancestors had killed and eaten other animals, outcompeted everything else to survive.

Technology couldn’t revert, but humans could, and they did so with startling ease and swiftness when the trappings of the modern world melted away. The tribal animal was always there, hidden just beneath our superficial lives of lattes and cell phones and cable TV.

the body had two brains. One in your head, the one we called the brain, and the other circling your gut, what they called the ENS, the enteric nervous system,

I’d always thought it was the human brain that had enabled us to conquer the planet, but really it was our stomachs and our ability to eat almost anything.

What difference would it really make? China had become more Western, with its money and wealth of material goods, and the United States had become more like the Chinese, spying on our citizens. Maybe we’d reached a middle point; maybe it wouldn’t matter anymore who was in charge. “Chinese-American, or American-Chinese, huh?”

honey was a strong antibiotic.

The Chinese had been invited to set up a temporary camp in the middle of the city. It was only there for a few weeks, part of a massive international humanitarian relief effort to help the East Coast dig itself out from the “CyberStorm,” as the media had started to call it.

In any disaster, there is always a delayed reaction, a gap the collective mind needs to comprehend something never seen before,

From the cellar, I’d seen what I thought was a Chinese soldier, but in reality it was an Asian-American military man, of Japanese descent as it turned out. But my paranoid mind was only capable of seeing one thing.

I’d decided it was the Chinese who had attacked us, so my mind framed everything I saw to reinforce that prejudice.

The entire international community had rallied to support the United States once the scale of the disaster had become known, especially when facts about what had happened began to emerge.

To muddy the waters, they’d released it at the same time the Anonymous hacker network had started its denial-of-service attack against FedEx. Forensic network investigators in China were able to unravel a chain of events that included a splinter group of their own People’s Liberation Army unleashing a cyberattack on the US at the same time.

everything had started with a power failure in Connecticut, and they tracked this back to an attack by a Russian criminal group. The Russian gang had hacked into the backup systems of hedge fund firms in Connecticut, inserting a worm designed to modify backup financial records when the power at the firms’ primary locations went out. It was this criminal group that had initiated the first power outages in Connecticut in an attempt to siphon money from the hedge funds.

So to up their chance of success, they’d done two things—initiated the attack on Christmas Eve, when few people would be working, and issued a false emergency alert about a bird flu outbreak. The bird flu warning had been far more effective at creating havoc than they’d expected, and like the power outage, it had cascaded through the system. The Russian gang had been too successful, and had turned themselves from mere criminals into terrorists.

In the end, the CyberStorm was a swirling collision of simultaneous events in the cyber and physical domains. If it seemed a fantastic coincidence, it wasn’t. Millions of cyberattacks a day occurred all over the Internet, like waves rolling across an ocean. By simple laws of probability, a series of cyberattack waves had coalesced, the same way giant rogue waves appeared occasionally in the ocean, seemingly coming from nowhere to wreak havoc.

With communications down and the storms pounding the city, reporters had no way to learn what was happening in Manhattan. CNN and Fox and other broadcasters had stationed themselves in Queens and the outer boroughs instead, reporting on conditions there. But nobody knew how desperate things were deep inside Manhattan.

It was part natural disaster and part man-made disaster,

The Russian criminals had only been targeting hedge fund firms in Connecticut, but they’d brought down the entire system.

Compounding the problem was the loss of communications and computer networks—the rescue teams didn’t know where anything was, how to get it, or how to contact people, and the roads had been jammed up with snow and impassible.

It wasn’t just the cyberattacks—thousands of telephone lines, electrical lines, and cell towers had been brought down by the snow and ice. The main water systems had only been down for a week, but in that time pipes had burst everywhere because of the extreme cold.

the radar reports were artifacts from a viral infection of the air force radar computer systems at McChord Field in Washington State.

before the CyberStorm, the term “cyberwar” had more of a metaphorical quality, like “the war on obesity.”

Everything was interconnected, and big cities relied on intricate systems working perfectly, all the time. When they didn’t, people began to die very quickly. The loss of a few supporting legs created problems too big to fix, ending in gridlock with no graceful degradation to previous technologies or systems.