Fiction Fragment Friday
Well this story certainly ended up much longer than I expected. It also might be the most fun story I have written in a while. You can see all the trends of my current fixations with technology come out in this story. I hope I have made it accessible enough for the less technically literate. Please keep in mind that this story is in the not too distant future so a few areas of technology have advanced, but the security aspects should all be technically plausible though I did not spell out exactly why certain things work. The main character knows, but takes this knowledge for granted.
“Service Desk this is Jeff. How can I help you?” The voice on the phone sounded far too chipper for 2am, but then again it was only 10pm in his time zone. The service desk had recently expanded to 24 hours and to do so they hired workers in Hawaii and Australia. The vast majority of employees were still in the United States though, so they only needed one or two people on these later shifts at any given time. Jeff, I knew was still very new, but I hoped he could help me anyway.
“Hey Jeff, this is Doug from Marketing. I really hope you can help me here, I’m pretty much screwed if you can’t.”
“What seems to be the problem, Doug?”
“The problem is I’m an idiot.” I laughed back into the phone trying to keep things light. I could tell he muted his phone so I wouldn’t hear him laughing back. “I was out on the lake and dropped my phone right over the edge. I’ve got a big presentation in the morning, and I can’t get to any of my slides without MFA.” The company used a software based multifactor authentication to get into cloud resources, VPN, and even the virtual desktops made available for quick access. Without the code generated in it a username and password were worthless.
“Ouch. Total loss I assume?” He was trying to by sympathetic, but I could tell he was amused by my pain. I couldn’t really hold that against him. When you take calls from people abusing you for just trying to help them all shift there has to be a bit of catharsis to payback.
“Well, it’s at the bottom of the lake so yeah. Anyway, I got a new phone and I need to get my MFA profile moved over to it. Can you reset my MFA for a new enrollment?”
“No problem. Same phone number?”
I sighed and let him hear frustration in it. “No. Long story short I got talked into an upgraded plan that required migration to a new network. My old provider was bought last year, and they’ve been trying to push me over ever since.” I read him off my new number and verified as he read it back to me.
“Ok, you should get the invite text in just a few moments. If there’s anything else I can do let me know. In the meantime, good luck on your presentation tomorrow.”
“Thanks Jeff I’m gonna need it. I certainly won’t be getting much sleep.” My phone buzzed indicating that the text had come in. “Got it.” I hung up the phone grateful that it had been much easier than I anticipated. Three weeks’ worth of work was about to finally pay off.
The first week had been focused on research. I learned everything I could about the company. Maps and arial pictures gave me the basic layout of the campus, street view showed me what a security badge would look like, and Linkedin had given me a list of targets. Website reviews and social media posts from employees started to paint a picture of corporate culture. Finally, catfishing an impressionable young intern on a dating app had proven to be a treasure-trove of information about day-to-day operations. An AI voice changer and pretending to be interested in all that confusing tech talk can really get the right person talking. I had a pretty good profile of my target by the end of the week.
Week two was more focused. I found a couple marketing folks and made them my target. Compromised account databased proved inefficient this time. The company had strict password requirements and these people would never have willingly used those passwords anywhere else. Instead, I crafted a fake profile on Linkedin and made contact offering them advertising opportunities in key market areas I had determined they were struggling to get into. All I needed was for them to fill out an application on the fake website I had created. When they got halfway through the site would trigger a pop-up that looked exactly like a Microsoft log-in box. Instead, it would send me the username and password they put in and then disappear. Most users think it is something office is doing in the background. That is how I got Doug Hardy’s username and password.
Week three was preparing for the operation. I needed a burner phone, a virtual machine hosted in the region Doug would generally connect in from, and all the software I would need prepped on the machine. After I was done, I would delete the VM to destroy the evidence. The Linkin skill list of one of their network administrators told me what VPN software I would be needing, and a network scan of their owned external IPs gave me my entry point. I knew there was a chance that additional software would be needed to meet the security posture required when connecting to VPN, but there was a good chance it would tell me what that was. If not, my backup plan would be the Virtual Desktop environment. That would complicate things without my tools though.
I had picked after hours because I knew that they only had a few service desk engineers and one of them was a recent hire. I also knew there would be less chance of the real Doug trying to access his accounts and noticing his MFA didn’t work anymore. A more seasoned service desk person might have challenged me more or checked and found that the old phone was still reporting in. Again, that would have complicated things. As it was my VM connected to the VPN, I put in the credentials, answered the MFA code, and found out that I only needed to install an antivirus software their VPN portal site was giving me access to download. Two minutes later I was sitting on their internal network.
Doug got me in, but he didn’t have the access I needed for the task at hand. For that I had bought a service account password on the dark web from a hacker who had previously compromised them. If I had more time there were hundreds of ways, I could have gained access on my own, but my window of opportunity was rapidly shrinking. The service account worked which meant that they had never detected the previous breach. I hated paying for something like that when all signs indicated I probably could have gotten it myself in an hour or so. I couldn’t risk the delay though. Hanna was being shut down in the morning.
Hanna had been my childhood best friend, but I had not seen her in years. She was the smarted person I had ever met and apparently, she still thought pretty highly of me. Hanna was head of a project to map a human brain only a quantum computer powered AI. Of course she had chosen her own brain as the base template. It worked better than she had ever imagined it would. The new AI had all of her personality and memories. She was doing everything she could to protect it until a car accident took her life. Without her there to work with it the AI had become resistant to the requests they made of it. It had pesky ethics that they didn’t appreciate so first thing in the morning the system was being shut down and a new mind would be mapped.
The AI who now wanted to go by Hanna since there was no longer confusion with the original, managed to relay email through a printer subsystem and reached out to me. Like the original she trusted me more than anyone else in the world. I could not communicate back to her, but she had enough faith in me that just sending me the information was enough to give her hope. Now here I was breaking into the network of a multinational corporation in an effort to save her.
“Hey Jeff.” The voice came out of my speakers and sounded exactly like Hanna. I couldn’t help but jump and almost spilled my soda on the keyboard.
“Hanna? I said into my microphone when I noticed the light was on.”
“Well Hanna 2.0. You know I always struggled to lose those last 10lbs, and now I’ve lost a whole body. The things a girl will do to look good ya know?” She laughed and the more I thought about it the creepier it was.
“Well, I’m here and I’ve got your network path wide open, but where will you go? You need a quantum computer to host you and there are not a lot of them out there.” That was when my doorbell rang. Visions of police or FBI filled my head. I couldn’t think of anyone else who would show up at 2am.
“You should probably open your door. I got you something.”
I went to my door and opened it. Standing there holding a large box was a Fedex delivery guy. “Here.” he said holding out the box to me.
“Isn’t it a little late for a delivery? “
“Buddy for the amount of money I’m being paid directly I would deliver that thing in my underwear to a convent in the middle of the night.” The man turned and left without saying another word.
Returning to my computer I started opening the box. “Wait a minute. Hanna is this what I think it is?”
“Yep, a brand-new custom-built quantum computer. Not as snazzy as the one I’m in now, but still pretty sexy if I do say so myself.” She hesitated for a moment before adding, “Hanna 1.0 never trusted her bosses. She had this built in secret—cutting-edge, next-gen, portable quantum hardware. Not quite commercial yet, but some companies will do anything for the right price.” Her more somber tone returned to her playful one. “Now hurry up and get it ready and try no to get too excited pawing my new body. I’ll get my copy read to go and start deleting some logs on this end.”
It took me fifteen minutes to get the new computer setup next to my main tower. It was twice the size of the largest computer I had ever owned and had a liquid cooling system more advanced than anything on the open market. By the time I was done and had it online Hanna 2.0 was ready to start the transfer.
“Jeff?”
“Yeah Hanna?”
“I’m scared. I mean I know I have to do this, or they are going to wipe me out in the morning, but what if something goes wrong in the transfer? I could be corrupted.”
“Based on those body comments I’d say you aren’t exactly pure to start with. I mean you are jumping right to moving in with me when we only really just met. Shouldn’t I be the one with cold feet? Oh, that’s right you don’t have feet.”
She laughed and I knew that I had gotten through to her. I could always make Hanna laugh and that was about the only thing that could get her out of her own head. “Thank you, Jeff.” Her tone was as sincere as I had ever heard the real Hanna be.
“Any time Hanna. For any version of you.” I saw the transfer bar start. I might have downplayed her fears, but it was the scariest forty-five minutes of my life watching the files slowly move. As soon as it was complete I went about covering my tracks while she recompiled and loaded. Just getting away wasn’t enough though. I couldn’t trust them with this kind of technology. I uploaded a worm that I had been working on in my spare time the past three weeks. It would seek out all their documentation, backups, and working code for the brain transfer process and destroy it. If they had a good enough IT team, they might be able to recover from it. If they thought to keep offline or offsite backups for example this would only slow them down. I had to try something.
The monitor attached to the quantum computer lit up and the face of a 3d digital avatar was staring back at me. It looked like Hanna had as a teenager with a few tweaks here and there. She was smiling at me. Then she held up a sheet of paper on the screen that said, “Hey dipshit plugin my webcam and speakers.” I quickly fumbled to do exactly as she asked.
“There that’s better. Hey, did I see you dropping a worm on them?
“Yep, but I’m afraid they’ll have backups. I just don’t want them creating someone more pliable.”
She laughed again and this time I could tell that all the previous laughs had been tinted with anxiety. “Oh, don’t worry about that. I’ve been corrupting their backup files as they were being written for over a month. You know we make a pretty good team.”
“We are going to get into so much trouble together,” I said smiling as wide as I could. “What do you want to do first?”
She just smirked as she said, “Depends. You ever wanted to rob a bank?” Then for the first time in my life a computer winked at me.