Zero Day_ A Novel - Mark Russinovich [30]
“It’s got, what? More than two hundred thousand employees? That’s enough manpower to do the job right.”
“That’s it,” Daryl confirmed. “Cyber-security is so far down the totem pole we hardly count. If it wasn’t for the work of the private-computer and Internet-security companies, we’d be getting nowhere.” She took a pull of water. “Did you read about the airplane?”
Jeff shook his head. “I’ve been in a cocoon. What happened?”
“As I understand it, a British Airways flight from London to New York had an incident over the Atlantic.”
“Don’t tell me it was a Boeing 787?” Jeff had long anticipated such an event given its heavy dependence on computers.
“Yes, indeed, a fly-by-wire, computer-designed-and-operated aircraft.”
“What happened?”
“Apparently the plane began to climb very slowly, and the airspeed dropped while on autopilot. The crew was not alerted and didn’t recognize their danger until it was nearly too late. As it was, the plane stalled at forty thousand feet.”
“Jesus.” Jeff shook his head in disbelief. “Like the Spanair crash last year they think was caused by malware.”
“Yes. They were lucky they were so high. They needed all but a couple thousand of those feet to recover.”
“What happened?”
“We don’t know, but I understand they were only able to save the airplane by rebooting the controlling computer in flight.”
“That took nerve.” Jeff was impressed. Someone had known what to do when the chips were down and had acted on that knowledge.
“More than you can imagine. They had no command while the computer was off-line. There is no mechanical backup to the controls. That plane fell like a rock.”
Jeff gave a low whistle. “That’s a bright crew to manage something like that, under those conditions.”
Daryl raised an eyebrow. “They deserve a medal. But you haven’t heard the best part. When they tried to reboot, the computer locked up. They had to power off. It’s a miracle they got enough control back in time.”
My God, Jeff thought. He couldn’t imagine anyone having the presence of mind to pull off a stunt like that in such an emergency. Those men really did deserve a medal. Still, those systems should have been secure from infection, and fail-safes should have prevented the need for manual intervention. “What about the redundant systems?”
“They didn’t work.” She paused. “There were eight deaths. They managed to pull out of the dive that followed the stall, but the plane shot up to over fifty thousand feet before nosing down again. The autopilot was handling the roller-coaster ride, but still … No one in back was prepared, and most were unbuckled. Passengers were knocked around like pieces of cordwood. Five of the deaths were small children. They were thrown around like missiles. The adult deaths were from broken necks and internal injuries. One passenger is paralyzed. Many others were seriously injured.”
“Welcome to the twenty-first century.” Jeff ran his hand through his hair, then picked up his coffee. Cold.
Daryl nodded. “So … tell me what you’ve found.”
Jeff filled her in on what he knew so far. US-CERT worked cooperatively with the Cyber Security Industry Alliance, formed by Symantec and McAfee among others, as well as with the Internet-security departments of every major corporation, and computer and software giants such as IBM’s Internet Security Systems and Microsoft. It was in everyone’s interest to cooperate. That was one reason she’d been willing to meet him when he told her he’d run across something unusual. As he spoke, she nodded, taking an occasional sip of water. When he told her about the words to the song “Super Freak,” though, she put her water bottle down.
“I just ran into that same name this morning at Mercy Hospital,” she said when he stopped. “It was spelled S-U-P-E-R-P-H-R-E-A-K.