Zero Day_ A Novel - Mark Russinovich [12]
Right now his only world was the one on the screens before him.
5
DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY, WASHINGTON, D.C.
DIVISION OF COUNTER CYBERTERRORISM
MONDAY, AUGUST 14
9:51 A.M.
“I don’t get the connection,” George Carlton said as he leaned back in his chair, eyeing with cautious pleasure the woman seated before him.
Dr. Daryl Haugen, dressed casually in jeans and a snug blouse, paused before responding. Slender and just over average height, with a fair complexion and blond, shoulder-length hair, she was stunningly attractive. The way Carlton eyed her while pretending he was not was a reaction she’d grown accustomed to as a teenager. A computer science graduate of MIT and thirty-five years old that July, she’d worked hard to be taken for what she was, much more than a pretty bauble on a man’s arm. Men such as Carlton, who acted as though they took her seriously when all they really were interested in was her butt, rubbed her the wrong way. But what she had to get across to him was too important for her to waste time getting angry over his juvenile chauvinism.
“We’ve come up with eight incidents so far,” she said, leaning forward to emphasize her point. “The most deadly was at a hospital in New York City. The computer glitch there appears to have caused four deaths from misapplied medications. There are similar reports out of several hospitals in other boroughs.”
“What about these other incidents?” Carlton leafed through the papers as if searching for something specific, then stopped in apparent frustration. “I’ve read your report. Frankly, I don’t see a connection between any of them, and I certainly don’t see a national security issue. As you know, during my tenure here we’ve made significant strides in combating computer viruses, especially when they target government or military computers.”
Daryl sighed to herself. Not that again, she thought. “I can’t be certain, but it looks like more than one virus. It’s odd, striking like this in so many seemingly unrelated places, and being so deadly.” She wrinkled her brow. “The viruses were also in systems that should have excluded them. We need to understand quickly why they didn’t. We have no idea how many of them are out there, or how they spread. If they’re commonly on the Internet—and this assumes we’re dealing with more than one and not a single virus with different manifestations—they’re going to cause a lot of trouble, not just in home and business computers but in government and military ones as well.”
“Well, that’s good,” Carlton said.
“Excuse me?”
“I mean that they are going after computers in which my department has a direct concern,” he said hastily. “Not that the viruses are good as such.”
Daryl bit her tongue. She needed this fool’s help.
“I’m saying that’s the kind of thing we are so effective at interdicting,” Carlton added, dragging his eyes away from her chest. He’d first met Daryl when she’d worked at the National Security Agency in 2000. She’d been assigned to liaison with his Cyberterrorism–Computer Forensics Department at the CIA. She’d been unexpectedly forthcoming, even providing some source data they’d lacked, which proved quite accurate. But the best part of the arrangement had been her drop-dead looks. He’d suggested drinks more than once, but got nowhere. Neither had anyone else in the department.
He’d been more than pleased when he learned that she’d left NSA and was now assistant deputy executive director CISU (Computer Infrastructure Security Unit)/DHS and head of a team at US-CERT (Computer Emergency Readiness Team), which technically reported to him at DHS, where he was now