Agents of Metal Part 1 Lasse Öörni 1 2 NaNoWriMo 2008. Edited later. Any similarities or references to actual above top secret organizations, operations and fnords may not be purely coincidental. Read at own risk. Many thanks to Lionel Gendre for co-creating the Agent concept and the Three Words! 3 4 1. Ian felt it just before Gwen, the spherical lead systems administrator and BOFH of the BOFHs, actually opened her mouth to exclaim. In the space of that fraction of a second, the atmosphere of the server room had changed to something that was markedly wrong. “Fuck!” That harshly shouted word snapped him completely out of his stupor, already expecting the weekend, and back into hardcore action mode. He swiveled around in his chair and saw her looking intently at the flat-screen monitor of her main workstation. But he could not yet deduce what had agitated her. “Cut the power,” she yelled. “What?” Ian could not quite follow. “The fucking comms rack!” Cutting off network access to the main servers and isolating each of the subnets in the building on their own was normally not healthy to even think about, no matter it was Friday. However, in the space of roughly five months Ian had known Gwen, he had learned that her judgment was better left unchallenged. It had never failed so far. He reached out and yanked the power cord. 5 The led displays of the routers and switches in the network equipment rack died, and their ventilation fans slowed down to a halt. The droning hum of the servers and the air conditioning went on, but the change was clearly noticeable: the server room simply was not supposed to sound like this. “We have a breach,” Gwen hissed. “Is it bad?” “Oh yes, my PFY, it most certainly is.” PFY was a computer folklore term, meaning “pimple- faced youth,” or a junior systems administrator. Ian hated it somewhat when Gwen called him that, but took the insult silently in his stride. Though the response was apparently intended to lighten the mood, there was no mistaking the solemnity of her voice. Ian let out a sigh as the initial shock faded. OK, some- one had rooted one or more of the servers, gaining unauthorized superuser access, and as a measure of damage control they had just shut the whole network down. The angry calls would soon start: they would an- swer them in a sarcastic manner while restoring from backups. It would be a long evening, but not much drama after all – Gwen had taught him the procedure, and he could theoretically do it all by himself. And that was exactly what puzzled him: she had to be a veteran of network intrusions, and certainly knew the drill much better than him, so why so severe a reaction? A repetitive whirring and hacking sound, which was quickly increasing in speed and intensity, jolted him out of his thoughts. It was coming out of the servers, in unison. That was the answer. This was not just an ordinary bad security breach. 6 Without warning, Gwen performed a cat-like leap across the room, her large form almost defying the laws of physics, bright-red dyed hair trailing behind her. She was going for the row of heavy-duty uninterruptible power supplies on the opposite table, delivering elec- tricity for the servers. She hit the table at speed: though her mass cush- ioned the collision somewhat, Ian knew it had to hurt. In a rapid succession she hit the circuit breaker on each of the UPS devices, shutting down the servers without advance notice. Then she turned to him, face in an un- decipherable expression. “Firmware hack. Set the hard disks to suicide,” she gasped. With just the air conditioning going on, the server room now felt positively eerie. As Gwen's words sunk in, Ian understood that this was another form of dam- age control, stopping the haywire drives before they could damage themselves beyond repair. But how they would proceed now was beyond him. Hatred surged through his mind. It was not that he especially cared for the company or its business, but the thought of someone being capable of such a mali- cious act awakened something deeply repressed within his brain. He was fairly certain Gwen felt the same way – she was a known nihilist and misanthrope, who most of the time understood machines better than humans, and had by example instilled a caring respect of the hardware in him. She had to hate it when someone did something that awful to shiny, innocent server equip- ment. “The night just became at least twice as long. Don't just sit there and stare at me, open up one the servers and pull out the RAID array,” she barked. 7 Ian set out to work, armed with a screwdriver sport- ing a star-shaped security bit. Meanwhile Gwen pre- pared her workstation for investigating the suspect hard drives up close. It was then the server room phone rang for the first time after the network going down. Gwen answered in a rapid-fire, but not yet very impolite manner. “It has to be the drive firmware. The sound was so deeply messed up, the shithead could not have done that by just hacking the OS to do out-of-control seeks,” she mused after finishing the call. “I didn't know that was even possible, to reprogram the drives,” Ian said through gritted teeth – one of the screws in the drive array case had been ridiculously overtightened. “Such a wonderful job, each day you potentially learn new ways how some asshole at a keyboard some- where far away can make your life more miserable.” Learning, though not in the sarcastic sense Gwen meant, was indeed what Ian had been doing a lot since starting at this job. He had practically known nothing of systems administration: growing his hair, practicing loud guitar playing and drinking beer had mostly occu- pied his time before that. However, either he had a nat- ural talent for this unsavory occupation, or was just very good at catching up on new things fast. It was not in Gwen's habit to offer any kind of praise, but he had on occasion seen a puzzled expression on her face after he had handled some task he theoreti- cally should not have been capable of handling yet. That expression was praise enough. Ian lifted the drive array onto the table next to the workstation. The second call came in. Gwen answered again and 8 explained the outage, this time more curtly. Then she connected power and data cables to the topmost drive and typed in a command, so that her system would reinitialize and be able to use the newly connected drive – she was not going to waste time rebooting. “Of course, it could –” She froze in mid-sentence, holding her breath for a few seconds, then sighed in relief. “Good. It didn't start to headbang again right away, which means it must be triggered by a program. I guess the fucker needed a way to test his attack but was too lazy to make it permanent – a 'final' version so to speak. So there might be hope of salvaging these drives.” “Headbang?” The word evoked Ian's curiosity. “That noise you heard was the read-and-write head banging itself to the extremities of its motion range, and even attempting to go past them. Very many times per second.” Ian nodded in understanding. If you let the hard drive do that for too long, it would be a dead drive soon. “Next step: we see if we can still pull data out of it.” Gwen clicked the mouse a few times, and a window showing hexadecimal raw data came up on the monitor. Apparently delighted, she gave the “finger” to the dis- tant adversary. “You sucker, you fail!” she roared. “That's 'yes' then?” “It just doesn't compute, that if you're going to do an attack like this, you don't do it all the way. Of course all normal operations, like reading data, should be ren- dered useless. But this guy, I find his lack of evil dis- turbing. It's not even evil, just annoying. If we can read data, I'm fairly certain we can restore the firmware too. Now, let's get to work so we don't have to spend all 9 night here.” While Ian set out to do the grunt work of reinstalling the original firmware to all of the afflicted drives, Gwen started going through network logs to find out where the attack had come from, and the kind of exploit used. And answering more phone calls. There were six main servers in the room – more were scattered throughout the building, but as they all had different hardware, they could not have suffered the same firmware attack. They would still have to be checked for intrusion, but their role was less important. They could wait until – tomorrow. Gwen looked up from her monitor. “Listen, the attack came from that old industrial complex a few blocks away. They've been renting the space for a lot of new small companies, but all those use the same network, so I can't pinpoint exactly who was responsible. In any case, it's heartwarming to know it's someone near you rather than half the world away.” “Nice to know we have evil neighbors.” “Just annoying and pathetic. How's the firmware re- install going?” “One array was hosed, but I'm down to the last of the working ones.” “We'll order a replacement.” Gwen typed intensely for a while.