Washington DC, US
He wasn't in high school, during Project Olympic Games, he graduated early and in his second year at the university, but Doug Tanner doubted any of the congressmen present would know that. Still, it was his first thought when he woke up the next morning — how to damage control that deception. Why he made the deception, he understood. He wasn't proud of that project, or his addition to it, minor as it was. For him, he felt more like Oppenheimer, feeling that he too, now become death. "The destroyer of worlds", he said out loud through a breathy voice, as he sat on the edge of his bed.
Project Olympic Games came out of fear and basic hatred. There was nothing patriotic about it. Not really. It was a marshal attack on a nuclear plant in Iran. A seek-n-destroy mission. An act of war. The US and Israel both have remained quiet about the action, not confirming their involvement. But the attack didn't go off as clean as it should have. Some of the cyber-worm didn't go to the target area, and ran through the Internet looking for other targets. Some of those were captured in nets and honeypots, and then examined. So, it became basically obvious where it came from.
This was the first war-time use of cyber craft. This was the act that opened the gates.
Stuxnet, the cyber-worm, took a long time to make. A work of art from a coding perspective. Not a byte of fat, or unrequired code. Small, light, and packed full of intelligence allowing it to burrow deep into the command systems of the target for optimal effect. Reports suggested that it damaged or destroyed fifty centrifuges.
Why did they bring it up in the first place? They had to know the project and Stuxnet were both still classified. Neither the US nor Israel were ready to take credit for the action. True, that it was a well known secret. Still. To breach the secret so publicly...
Truth was, Doug saw the worm at least once a month, if not once a week. It had escaped into the wild and was captured. Once captured it was examined and reverse-engineered. It was taken apart, copied and used for parts of other worms, and new malware forms. Its beautiful code would be eagerly examined and learned from. A new level of ingenuity would rise. A new bar level for adequacy would be set.
In the midst of that fallout Trump as President eliminated the White House cybersecurity coordinator role and the Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center in May 2018.
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Twenty-Nine Cozy Bears
Mystery / ThrillerThe age of cyber war has come. State sponsored hacker teams prowl the networks and systems across the Internet and connections in space; satellites broadcasting the ware to the masses. The latest team of Russian Bear APTs (Nobelium), are dispatched...
