Zero Day_ A Novel - Mark Russinovich [19]
“She’s obviously dedicated. It’s the middle of the night. Could it be the same virus?”
Jeff considered what Daryl had told him. “It’s possible, except her virus didn’t crash the system. Just caused it to malfunction in a deadly way.”
“I guess we should be thankful no one’s died even with all the problems we’re having. This could be a lot worse. Any luck? You’ve been at this for some time, and I thought I worked long hours.”
Jeff grinned. “It’s why I get the big bucks. I may not solve the problem, but they can’t complain about the time I put in.” Jeff’s smile vanished. “What I’ve found so far isn’t making much sense.”
“Any guesses?”
“Unfortunately, a few.” Leaning back in his chair, Jeff folded his arms across his chest. “So far, whatever you contracted isn’t a known variant of a virus. It doesn’t look very sophisticated, since it killed itself, and in probability is a cut-and-paste job at its core. But it was plenty destructive. It wanted to replicate, which is bad news for other computers. It’s also encrypted and deeply embedded, which is making my job very tough. From how some of the code is written, I can speculate that the author may be Russian. If true, that’s not reassuring at all. The Russian Mafia is heavily involved in financial fraud through malware.”
Jeff stopped and thought about the implications of what he’d just said. In recent years the Russian Mafia had hired the best software engineers in the former Soviet Union to create new viruses and unleashed them on the cyber world. They were making hundreds of millions a year, and the more they made, the more aggressive and creative they’d become.
“I’m surprised the virus has been so hard to find,” Sue said, focusing his thoughts.
“They usually aren’t,” Jeff agreed. “Typically, I spend most of my time recovering information and rebuilding systems. But lately I’ve been seeing more and more of this kind of thing. A cracker gets into your system to do damage, not to steal information. Not long ago a guy was caught who hired a cracker to shut down the Web sites of his major competitors. These were Internet businesses; as long as he got away with it, everyone’s customers went to him.”
“That’s terrible!” Sue knew the Internet was used for scams, but she’d never before heard such a story. To her, the Internet should be benign, a resource to make life better, not a destructive force.
Jeff knew what Sue was feeling. He often felt the same way. “I hate to say it, but that’s only one of hundreds of ways to profit from cybercrime. In the good old days, hackers were geeks out to make a name for themselves. Now they can earn money, sometimes big money, with the same skills and malicious intentions. There are even Web sites where you can download malware. You graft on something you’ve cooked up yourself, and you’re off and running. One guy got into a bank’s system and had a tenth of a penny—that’s all, just a tenth of a penny—taken from every transaction over one hundred dollars and wired into an offshore account. The bank’s computer was programmed to round pennies up, so it kept covering the shortage.”
“What’s a tenth of a penny?”
“I have no idea.” Jeff shrugged. “I guess they break currency down as far as they can. He could have asked for a twentieth, or a hundredth.”
“What happened?”
“Within four months he’d made over six hundred thousand dollars. Even then the bank’s computer kept covering for him. I don’t know how long it would have gone on if he hadn’t made the mistake of not deleting all bank-employee accounts from his scam. See, these people knew the system, and a lot of them balanced their checkbooks to the penny. One of them spotted that the accounting system was skewing and checked the programming. He found the virus, and it didn’t take long to find the crook.” Jeff took a sip of coffee. That hadn’t been his case, but he’d cracked one like it, and it had felt very, very good. In some ways the satisfaction he took from his work was more important than the pay.
“I’m surprised our