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

recruited were established in their alternate locations, places that they had prepared well ahead of the operation but had not visited for the last six months. They were in locations well outside DC, one of them in Woodstock and the other two at opposite ends of Harrisonburg, out to the west of Washington.

Sadir hadn’t followed the same path as the others because his function in the final part of the operation was very different. Instead, he had headed in virtually the opposite direction, north-east towards Bel Air, and was at that moment sitting in his Honda outside the house in Fairview between Bel Air and Jarrettsville, using his burner phone to contact each of the other three men in turn.

Once he was satisfied that they were all in place and ready to act, he checked the local weather forecast through the Internet. It probably wasn’t going to be the hottest day of the year but it was certainly going to be very warm, which was exactly what he had hoped and expected.

Then he glanced at his watch. He was waiting for one very specific piece of information that would determine what he did next, or to be precise when he would do it, because the plan was in every other respect ready to implement. He did nothing for a few seconds, then composed a brief text message that he sent to a mobile phone number that he rarely called.

The message read: ‘Estimate?’

About half a minute later his mobile emitted a double tone to indicate receipt of a message and the equally brief reply he was waiting for.

The SMS text read: ‘ETD 1330.’

That was later than he had hoped, and later than he had originally planned, but because he was in overall control of the operation he could still make it work. In fact, there was no reason for there to be any delay in starting the attack. Once the operation was in progress it would be unstoppable, and the longer the first phase lasted the more confusion and chaos would be caused in Washington, and in some ways the longer that went on the better because it would ensure the highest possible death toll.

Rather than calling the other three men he composed another text message and sent it to each of their phones simultaneously.

That simple and unambiguous message read: ‘Implement immediately. Acknowledge.’

He didn’t need to say any more than that, because each of them knew exactly what they had to do. Less than a minute later he’d received confirmation messages from all three of the men.

The operation, the product of nearly a decade of research, recruitment, planning and scheming, was finally running.

Karim Ganem sent the acknowledgement text on his burner and looked at his watch. Then he opened up the laptop computer that he had brought with him in his backpack, plugged it in, switched it on and logged on to the building’s Wi-Fi network. He opened up his VPN to hide his traces, then opened TOR, The Onion Router, which would provide a further layer of protection against people trying to identify his location. Then, using the backdoor access that he had created, he entered the intranet of the first target company.

There’s a standard tradition in the world of computer science that the software engineers who build systems, and especially those who design the security protocols, will frequently include a backdoor, a way of getting into the system in the future without having to go through all the tiresome business of being an authorised user and then using verified log-in details to gain access. It’s much simpler, quicker and more efficient to sneak in without anybody noticing and particularly without leaving a trace on the access register. These backdoors are not used for nefarious purposes but simply provide a way for the engineer to gain access to the source code of the system to find and fix some problem. But of course, this form of access is also the Holy Grail for a hacker, and Ganem had created several of them.

As he began his work, he knew that his actions were being mirrored by Talat Wasem and Jamal Halabi in their separate locations, their targets different power companies. Ganem’s first task was to insert a software patch into the master control program in the operations room of the first of his three targeted electricity-generating companies. Its presence would not be detected easily because all it did was to disable one of the alarm circuits, which would ensure that the staff on duty would be unaware of a particular fault.

Then he accessed one of the utility programs and adjusted settings that would begin disabling certain air-conditioning circuits at the times he specified. He also accessed the circuits controlling various thermostats and coolant pumps and changed the timing and parameters of the cooling equipment. Those actions, Sadir had explained to him, would inevitably cause overheating on certain generators. That, in turn, would cause circuit breakers to trip and generators to shut down, failures that the operators would initially be unaware of from their instrumentation because of the patch he’d created and installed. They’d only realise something was wrong when the calls started coming in, and that would just serve to increase the confusion.

Load shedding would begin but as his manufactured faults would affect most of the generators, the likely outcome would be a cascade effect as one generator after another failed, either because of the manufactured internal faults or because the demands of load shedding would exceed its capacity.

And then, as surely and as appositely as night follows day, blackouts would begin spreading across much of Washington D.C.

Of course, turning out the lights and the air-conditioning units in America’s capital city by day could hardly be classed as a terrorist attack, but it was only intended as a precursor, as an enabler. The blackouts would begin in about half an hour and certainly create chaos. Things that people take for granted on a daily basis, things like escalators, lifts, traffic