Zero Day_ A Novel - Mark Russinovich [21]
“Then what?”
“I taught at Carnegie Mellon, but like almost everybody who isn’t a suck-up, it became clear I wouldn’t get tenure. I went to work for the Cyber Security Division at the CIA, in 1998.”
Sue lit up. “A spook, huh?”
“Hardly,” Jeff said, eager to discourage any romantic notions about his CIA work. “I worked in a crummy office just like yours, only buried in the basement at Langley. Technically I was head of a three-man team called the Cyberterrorism Unit, but my two assistants were always off doing standard IT work for the division.”
“What’d they have you doing, or can’t you say?”
“No, I can talk about my duties, within reason,” Jeff said. “The only danger is I’d bore you to death.”
“I’m listening.”
“Trust me, it wasn’t glamorous.” He filled her in on his years at the Company, telling her he’d held no illusions when he was recruited for the position. “Government work is government work. But I figured it couldn’t possibly be worse than academia. I was wrong.”
Though the threat to the Internet was real enough, at that time it was considered to be largely abstract. The Company budget was allocated primarily to the traditional physical threats. When it came to computers and the Internet, the threat was generally perceived as the possible physical destruction of facilities.
As their primary mission, Jeff and his truncated team worked on recovering data from computers seized from suspects and known terrorists. But they were also responsible for tracking the use of the Internet for terrorist activities and for potential threats.
During the years of his employment, as the Internet grew and spread its tentacles into every aspect of American life and the world community, the potential for a cyber-terrorist attack rose exponentially. The safety of the Internet, and of those computers connected to it, was dependent solely on the security of each individual computer that formed part of the network.
Jeff had certainly seen the threat. He had reasoned that as more government agencies conducted both external and internal business through the Internet, as more banks came online, as nuclear power plants continued linking to one another, and as the U.S. military came to increasingly rely on the Internet and computers to conduct its operations, his unit would receive greater resources and command more attention. He’d been wrong.
The irony was that the Internet had originally been developed as a national security system. In the 1960s, the Department of Defense had been concerned about the vulnerability of its mainframe computers—back in the days when all computers were mainframes—and of its increasingly computer-linked communications system. Several well-placed ICBMs, or even one at a critical point, could potentially cripple America’s ability to defend itself. The air force was especially concerned about maintaining real-time control over its nuclear missiles.
What then emerged was a government-funded system of interconnected computer redundancy. The idea was that even if several computer hubs at key installations were nuked, the system, the actual Internet, would reroute itself around them. In theory, like the multiheaded Hydra of Greek mythology, it would be impossible to defeat. It might be slow, it might electronically hiccup, but the system would function. Jeff wasn’t so sure. The designers had only considered outside threats. They’d never contemplated the ultimate digital universe they’d created, or that the real threat to the Internet might well come from within.
Although the Internet had proven itself enormously popular with the worldwide community and had become increasingly vital to the lives of individuals and the welfare of Fortune 500 companies, interest in safeguarding it wasn’t as high as it ought to be. Jeff was convinced that it would take a significant failure of the system or a coordinated cyber-attack to awaken everyone. Just as it had been impossible to put the United States on a proper war footing before Pearl Harbor, the same fate seemed