Spider’s Web
Part 3
Moyra Kelly’s grandmother Isibéal continued to record and assist in analyzing UN broadcast communications, while Moyra worked on solidifying the resistance’s infiltration of the UN network and stabilizing the communication platform.
The primary news channels continued broadcasting highly sanitized news the day after the UN’s hold on Jefferson was consolidated. Even the most stoic of broadcasters reported on their “approved” news stories with such sardonic tones that little could be taken seriously. Every rah-rah-UN story was accompanied by subtle derision by those voicing them. The camera crews ensured that the armed goons “off-screen” were frequently visible during those broadcasts.
The UN forces started deploying into suburbs, Moyra’s included, while they “set up camp for their visit,” as the broadcasters put it. Reports started coming in of residents being dumped on the street while UN troops commandeered complexes, but the UN quickly put a stop to the “resident reporting” block so popular on many of the channels. Bowler Hat cheerfully received the list of bureaucrats who made those decisions, and the ground networks started reporting about bounties.
Moyra quietly closed and relocated her mother’s office, taking the door sign with her, along with the other items that the UN might find interesting. The office building was commandeered two days later. When they made the choice to use the in-situ wiring, without verifying the lack of data taps, Moyra felt torn between hysterical laughter and braining whichever idiot made that decision, out of sheer industry loyalty.
The choice to live in a relatively dilapidated complex helped protect her from the forced relocation, but she held her breath while the UN forces “decided” where to put their new base. Thankfully, they chose the other, more industrial side of town, to take advantage of the sturdier roads the plants had built for their use.
A week later, sister stations were frequently mentioned on all of the news channels, and that these sister stations were broadcasting “new entertainment channels.” Word of mouth assisted in disseminating the decryption module design for baseline entertainment units. Moyra’s black-hat hardware team ensured the modules were easy to fabricate from off-the-shelf parts, and the software to run them readily available, discretely advertised on the software marketplace as “personal weather stations.” Not all infosets were compatible, but the team was working on the largest market share first.
Paper media found a quick resurgence in popularity. Difficult to track, difficult to stop, a careful balance of useful information and compromising information had to be maintained. Naumann and his team provided clearance as to what information could be sacrificed. Some, Moyra fed to Braknck, knowing he would eventually decide to “abandon ship” as soon as the UN started offering sufficiently large bounties for information themselves. The last thing she wanted was her identity of Hespera to be compromised. He remained unaware of Samantha Peterson or Moyra Kelly.
Moyra found herself doing as much management of “operations” as any active hacking on her part. The response from all divisions within the information-security sector overwhelmed her pessimistic hopes. She supposed that being semiofficial helped, as well as her and her mother’s reputation in the communities.
With a stabilized and improved communication platform, thanks to the hardwired back door in the satellite network, her key personnel free-formed most responses to developments on the UN side. Every “freelancer” team that made contact was assigned a handler. Every “freelancer” knew their handler as “Dear Beth,” and the idea that Dear Beth was in fact an AI was encouraged. When voice communications were required, voice fuzzing turned the deeply masculine DalesOP and Damocles into middle-aged women, and Moyra about died laughing the first time she heard it. The freelancers quickly outstripped her available supply of handlers, and she reached out to a select few of those “displaced” by the UN in the neighborhood.
TripleShot smuggled his important equipment out of Jefferson, and made for one of the rendezvous points that Naumann provided for Moyra to direct important personnel to if they had to evacuate. From there, he was installed in an area still controlled by the rebels and provided hardwire lines to get back to playing matador with the UN information teams.
DalesOP worked closely with a PsyOps team, having a sadistic streak a mile wide when angry. And he was angry. TripleShot looked up to him as kind of a brother, and hearing how despondent the boy was over the confirmed loss of his sister left him raging. Jenkins fed information to DalesOP, culling targets for both Bowler Hat and DalesOP’s team.
Damocles resumed his military position, acting as Naumann’s primary link with Moyra. The sheer volume of communication required for Moyra to maintain the ebb and flow of activity kept both Damocles and Moyra tied up significantly. Thankfully, Sa1amander worked well with one of the BGs Moyra had tapped, and that team was furiously providing software updates to several hundred applications. Every single one had to be adjusted, ever so slightly, to permit it to get “upgraded” into a two-way communication point. That team had been doing the same thing Moyra’s had with software: It was already funneling SOME information to their databases. Now, it had to be functional two ways.
The UN lagged on deploying their own satellite network for communication between bases, and continued to leverage the Freehold network. With the covert channels, Moyra had access to every unencrypted file possible. AI tools, filtering the yattobytes of data into useful information, alerted her to a personal, unsecured server, which one of the bureaucrats insisted was necessary for “other purposes.” She handed the task off to one of the best hackers on the planet, Dmitri Kozlov, from a long, proud lineage of “capitalistic subversives,” as his grandfather was described when he fled Earth.
Kozlov reported back that the system was tied into a guest section of the UN network. The bureaucrat emailed between both the personal server and the official UN military servers. Kozlov leveraged the account to execute the most basic of social-engineering attacks. Having a list of active email accounts enabled easy targeting, and endpoints were compromised within divs.
From there, the first significant breakthrough on exploitation of the UN network started small. A personnel database, pay and leave, was…adjusted. A randomly selected record would be zeroed out, swapped with a separately selected record, or be flagged as “deceased.” Personal information such as family connections were also compromised, resulting in several UN soldiers receiving automatic notifications of their approved bereavement leave, changes in marital status, or the addition/subtraction of dependents. The game of whack-a-bug, comprised of semirandom errors, was designed to be irritating and difficult to track…and very distracting. Moyra noticed communications complaining about the “glitchy” systems, with some questioning if the mismatch between Earth and Grainne time might have an effect.
Branching out from there, as fastly-slow as could be managed, the team involved in takeover of the UN control network reported a significant jackpot. The automated convoys and drones in use were on nonupgraded, known vulnerable systems, for which standard exploits existed for the past several years. They were unpatched. In the interest of protecting their new asset, the team deployed corrected patches, which maintained their access without permitting a secondary takeover.
Moyra tasked Jenkins with determining the UN’s activated drones versus those held in inventory and reserve.
Naumann personally contacted Moyra to express his glee at this development, and provided a list of extrapolated and known “freelancers” who needed gear that might be on those convoys first. She made the command decision to leave the entire drone fleet alone for the moment. The convoys, however, were rerouted.
Moyra provided information to Kozlov, and let him pick the best matches for estimated locations versus the convoys’ patterns. She alerted the military, who acknowledged.
She watched the video stream as the first convoy diverted course, and kept an eye on UN communication traffic to see if they noticed. This convoy followed in the tracks of a previous one, and so as part of the takeover, Kozlov had the convoy repeat previous grid coordinates instead of actual.
The convoy halted near the anticipated location. Kozlov had it honk once as it halted. A militia element appeared from the wood line. Kozlov released all of the hatches. The freelancers looted the convoy, leaving it empty.
Moyra confirmed they were clear. Kozlov latched the hatches back down, and put the convoy back on course. He purged the recording banks and other sensor information as it rejoined its original path.
* * *
The third convoy resumed course after being redirected.
:: Peterson, :: Dmitri Kozlov pinged, :: that convoy’s back on its track. ::
Moyra frowned at the screen. :: Hold on. :: She flipped over to another system and started a search query against the email index. She pulled up a recent message, and sighed. :: They’ve gone to manned convoys with drone support. Message didn’t get flagged by AI. ::
:: Well, hell, :: he responded. :: Time to hit the drones? ::
:: Not yet. But have a few more convoys try the same thing at the same general time into the trip. Make them think there’s a hack they haven’t fixed. Diversion. Get creative. ::
:: Gotcha. ::
While she had little choice but to rely on the AIs for filtering, teaching the programs what was legitimately of concern in this scenario proved tricky. She fussed with the logic code, and reran the queries against existing data. The results were fuzzier, but that allowed for a wider net of information.
Curating the information between managing team interactions became a mountainous task, and Moyra always felt a shred of relief when she went off her (irregular) shift to hand over operational control to DalesOP.