CyberStorm by Matthew Mather Read Free Book Online Page A

toward me.
    I wasn’t a security expert, but I was an electrical engineer and computer networks were my field of expertise. Just the day before I’d been having a conversation with a colleague in the security field about this topic.
    “Sort of,” I explained. “A ‘zero-day’ is a software vulnerability that isn’t yet documented. A ‘zero-day’ attack is one that uses one of these previously unknown weaknesses in a system. It’s an attack that has had zero days to be analyzed yet.”
    Any system had weaknesses. The ones that were “known” usually had patches or fixes, and the list of new “known” vulnerabilities expanded at the rate of hundreds per week for the thousands of commercial software vendors in the world.
    With a typical Fortune 500 company using thousands of individual software programs, the list of vulnerabilities often hovered in the tens of thousands at any given moment. It was an impossible game of catch-up against an adversary that only needed one hole to remain open among literally millions that an organization had to continually fix.
    While everyone, private or government, struggled to keep up even with the list of known vulnerabilities, against “unknown” vulnerabilities, or “zero-days,” the situation was even worse. They had nearly no defense, precisely because the attack vectors were, by definition, unknown.
    They both stared at me blankly.
    “It means an attack that we have no defense against.”
    Stuxnet, the virus that had taken down the Iranian nuclear processing plants, had used about ten zero-days to get inside the systems it attacked. It was one of the first public examples of a new breed of sophisticated cyberweapons. They cost a lot of time and money to build, so someone wouldn’t be unleashing these ones without some purpose in mind.
    “What do you mean, attacks that we have no defense against?” asked Susie. “How many of these are there? Can’t the government stop it?”
    “The government mostly looks to the private sector to protect this stuff,” I replied. “And nobody has any idea of all the ways we could be attacked.”
    CNN had switched to a discussion between four commentators and analysts . “The thing that has me worried, Roger, is that computer viruses, especially sophisticated ones like this, are usually designed to infiltrate networks to get information out. These don’t seem to be doing that. They’re just bringing the computer systems down.”
    “What does that mean?” asked Susie, staring at the TV screen.
    As if answering her question, the analyst looked straight into the camera and said slowly, “The only thing I can assume is that we’re being purposely attacked, with the only goal of inflicting as much damage as possible.”
    Susie brought one hand up to cover her mouth. Saying nothing, I sat down next to them and tried calling Lauren again for the dozenth time.
    Where is she?
     

5:30 p . m .
     
     
    “I’M SORRY.”
    Lauren was holding tightly onto Luke. When we’d retrieved him from the Borodins’, he was crying in great wailing sobs. I’d tried feeding him, but he didn’t want anything. His forehead was burning up.
    “Sorry doesn’t quite cut it,” I complained. “Come on, give Luke back to me. I’ll try feeding him again.”
    “I’m sorry, baby,” said Lauren quietly, speaking to Luke and not me. She held onto him fiercely, shaking her head and not giving him up. Her face was flushed bright red from the cold outside, her hair a tangled mess.
    “Why the hell didn’t you answer my texts for four hours?”
    We were back in our own apartment. Lauren was sitting on our leather loveseat across from me on our couch. It was dark outside. I’d spent the whole afternoon trying to get in touch with Lauren, but she’d been totally unreachable. At half past five she’d suddenly shown up at Chuck’s door, asking questions about what was going on, asking where Luke was.
    “I had my cell off. I forgot.”
    I avoided asking