Cyberstrike by James Barrington (best memoirs of all time TXT) 📕

The final stage in the operation had been for Ganem to create a suitable internal email, the kind of routine message that every company employee would receive on a daily basis. Many of these were what might be termed housekeeping messages, reminding employees that deep cleaning was scheduled to take place in a particular part of the building or that the parking spaces in the garage were going to be repainted or that the air-conditioning might need to be taken offline to allow it to be serviced. They were the kind of messages that people read and instantly forgot, which was really the point. They were also the kind of messages that employees always opened to read, just in case they were affected by something going on in the company, and also because if they didn’t open them they would remain in their email inbox marked as unread.

For each of the target companies, Ganem tailored a different internal email which shared only a single characteristic: each message contained a brief piece of text and an attachment, something that was innocuous, like a not very important survey form about some aspect of the business, or a notification that the company had been entered for some kind of an industry award, or a flyer relating to something an employee was planning to do. Ganem had gone for forgettable but worth reading.

And, again, it wasn’t the contents of the attachment that mattered but the left click of the mouse when the executive opened it. As they were then already logged on to the company intranet, another small piece of code that Ganem had created extracted their username from the system along with their password. And as soon that had been completed, his software created an invisible email that would send these details directly to him.

As soon as he had this information to hand, he could log in to the company’s intranet pretending to be a particular executive, and once he was inside he could do whatever that executive could do, which could be everything from simply scanning the person’s emails and the company website to creating a backdoor to allow him unrestricted low-level access to bypass the normal system security checks.

Obviously not every executive opened his phishing SMS message or the email or the attachment, but enough did to ensure that he was usually successful. The only real variable was how long it took.

The one thing that had puzzled Ganem about the operation was that once he had managed to breach the security systems of one of the target organisations, Sadir had given him very specific instructions that didn’t really make sense. In Ganem’s experience, once he – or any other hacker he’d spoken to, for that matter – had gained access to an intranet he would always begin looking for information that was saleable on the Dark Web, things like customer names and addresses, credit card details and other financial information. Or alternatively he would create damage of some kind by defacing the site with changed images and altered messages, that kind of thing.

But the Iraqi had told him to navigate to the various system control modules on the intranet and then to begin detailed searches looking for control circuits linked to very specific components. Once he had identified them, he was to analyse the language used to control them and prepare sets of alternate instructions, as specified in detail by Sadir, and hold them ready to implement. Ganem thought he could see the thrust of the Iraqi’s plan, what he was trying to achieve, but what he still didn’t understand was why.

When he got back to his studio flat early that afternoon, he used his VPN, the virtual private network that he’d found to be both reliable and secure, to access one of the anonymous web-based email addresses that he used for his hacking activities and discovered that his small program had identified a further five sets of log-in details from one of the three companies that Sadir wanted him to attack.

And that was good news, because it meant he had another five ways to access that particular company website. And that, perhaps, meant that they were one step closer to achieving their goal. Whatever it was.

Chapter 31

J. Edgar Hoover Building, Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington D.C., United States of America

‘You can’t arrest a man for sitting at a cafe and drinking a cup of coffee. Nor for associating with three other men you don’t happen to like the look of. It’d make our lives a whole lot easier if we could, but we can’t. We’re stuck with due process and probable cause and all the rest of that crap.’

It was early afternoon and the debrief was going more or less as Grant Rogers had expected.

The FBI attracts people who want to make a difference to American society, a bigger difference than they could make if they became police officers, and they regard themselves as members of one of the most elite of American law enforcement organisations. Some of them also tend to regard the law as having a certain degree of flexibility when in pursuit of criminals or suspected criminals, their view being that the end in many such cases is more than sufficient to justify the means.

Grant Rogers didn’t agree with this attitude, mainly because as the agent in charge of the operation he would be signing off on the case and everything he and every member of his team did would be scrutinised, checked and double-checked by the desk-bound upper hierarchy of the Bureau, the seat-shiners. If any corners were cut or the correct procedures not followed Rogers, as the ASAC, the assistant special agent in charge, would be the one facing a disciplinary hearing. And although he had been told that the operation had to remain entirely covert, he was personally convinced that putting a little pressure on the subjects might actually be a good idea. If a target knows he’s