Blake Schwendiman's Blog and Blook

Chapter 44

Saturday, 12 March 2022 – 11:15 a.m. MST

Bryan arrived back at his office in less than six minutes. His heart pounded and he was wet with perspiration from the top of his head down to his belt. He ran his fingers through his hair, drawing it away from his forehead and eyes then dried his hands on his pants as he pulled a keyboard toward him. He preferred a keyboard to any of the alternate input devices available as most didn’t work well for programming and the type of work he did.

He glanced at the time. Fifty-four minutes until he needed to contact Valerie again. The news of the network attack had so frustrated him that he hadn’t even taken the opportunity to notice how she looked. He decided that he would take the report back to her in person.

He started the diagnostic on the switches, choosing several switches inside the corporate network and several more on the outside. It would take some time. He turned in his chair and wheeled over to a small refrigerator and pulled out a soda. Caffeine and sugar. He needed both. He also grabbed a slice of pizza from a half-eaten box that he had ordered yesterday.

He wheeled back to his desk. On the various monitors he studied the ongoing results of the diagnostics. Initially nothing appeared to be wrong. He wondered if the corporate boneheads had simply overreacted to some transient network glitch. He waited.

Two slices of pizza had been devoured before Bryan finally saw something. First one switch, then a second showed some unusual activity. It wasn’t a catastrophic failure, but a subtle change. It was so subtle that Bryan almost dismissed it. He looked again, focusing on the two switches and running additional diagnostics. Just as he had nearly finished the test, both switches returned to normal activity.

“What the...?” Bryan whispered. He re-checked the logs. There had been a small glitch, but it was gone. Then three other switches caught his attention. It was the same problem. He started a new test on each. One returned to normal. Bryan stared in disbelief. This was not an attack from the outside. His heart pounded. His fingers raced over the keys as he tried to isolate the problem.

The next fifteen minutes were the most frantic minutes that Bryan had experienced. Every time he isolated a switch to test, he found that it returned to normal before he could complete the test. He slammed his fist down in frustration and called Valerie. Her face appeared in a call screen on a secondary monitor.

“This is Bryan,” he started. “We have a problem.”

“What is it?”

“I don’t know yet. But it’s not coming from the outside.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that it’s not an outside attack – a DDoS or a hacker,” he barked back. “I mean it’s coming from the inside.”

“Inside the company?” Valerie loathed the condescending way that nearly all information technology workers responded to questions, but she needed Bryan and didn’t have time to start a political war.

“No, inside the switches.”

“A virus?”

“Something like that.” Bryan was still frantically typing. “But I don’t see how...”

“Can we stop it?”

“I don’t even know what it is.” Bryan pushed himself back from his desk and spun in his chair. He turned the lock in a small office safe and pulled open the door, retrieving a ragged old engineering pad. As he turned back to his monitors, he knocked over an open soda and watched it drain over his side desk, soaking a pile of unopened mail and some comics that he had recently purchased at an online auction. He cursed violently.

“Bryan?”

“Sorry,” he called back.

“Can we stop it?”

“You’ll know when I know,” he shot. “I need to write a new test program and deploy it. Do I have your permission to deploy to a live switch?”

“What’s the risk?”

“The risk is I’ll screw it up and bring the switch offline.”

Valerie hated the thought of the public relations and customer nightmares involved in a technology failure. “Is there any other way to do the test? Can we run it inside our network?”

“It’s not happening inside our network. So far, it’s only hitting live switches on the outside.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“Do you want me to wait until I’m sure, or do you want me to figure it out now?”

Valerie glared through the display with a look that would have withered anyone else. “Do it. But don’t screw it up.” She ended the call and sat back in her chair for a moment to gain her composure. There were few things in life that truly aggravated Valerie. Bryan was one of them. She took a deep breath and focused on the bigger picture. They would get through this crisis. They would get through the next. And eventually this would all be in the past.

Bryan barely noticed that Valerie had ended the call. He had opened the notebook and was searching for the login and certificate information he would need to access and modify a production switch. The notebook was the only place he kept a recorded description of anything security related. It was filled with scrawled messages, dog-eared and marked with scraps of paper.

He finally found the information for the switch he wanted to use for his test program. It was the main telecommunications switch for Arizona State University. He used that switch as often as he could. He secretly hoped that he would bring that switch offline, at least for a while.

“Expel me for video voyeurism, huh?” he thought to himself as he uploaded the firmware changes. He ran the program. The switch remained online. The force is strong with this one, he thought out as he sat back to wait for the results. He smiled smugly to himself and cracked open another soda.