Zero Day_ A Novel - Mark Russinovich [31]
It was as if a piece of an especially difficult puzzle had fallen into place. “I haven’t seen the name under any spelling, just the disguised words from the song ‘Super Freak.’”
“I was at Mercy when when you called,” she said, talking more rapidly. “But they didn’t lose some billing or litigation records. Like I told you, four patients were killed. The program modified their medicine records and instruction. Jeff, I think we’re investigating the same virus. Did you hear about the death at a Ford assembly plant?”
He shook his head.
“I can’t be certain, but it appears the plant’s robot software picked up a virus that sat there, waiting. The virus took over without warning, causing the robots to perform in nonscripted ways. We think that’s when the worker was knocked onto the assembly-line railing. In response, the company powered down, then unplugged the robots. Their server was fried. They installed a replacement and are reloading the software. It looks like they’d be all right except for the death, of course, and the loss of about two weeks’ production. The financial cost to them will be in the tens of millions.”
Jeff was puzzled. “I thought industry networks were off-line for security purposes.”
“They mostly are and this one was. I talked to the IT manager again this morning. They traced the original virus to a software engineer’s laptop. He was in the habit of downloading whatever he was working on, then taking it home with him. He picked up the virus there when he used the same laptop to access the Internet. When he hooked it up at work, the worm latched onto the company’s software, planting the virus.”
Jeff thought a moment, then said, “Back to the 787 incident. Is it possible what we’re dealing with could be crafted for avionics software?”
“I don’t know,” she said, looking surprised at the thought. “It seems unlikely, but it highlights one of the problems we’re having. We don’t know what the virus is doing and what it isn’t doing. For that matter there could very well be any number of incidents about which we know nothing. The world is so computer-dependent you can’t always make the connection to one of the viruses when something happens.”
“So what’s Superphreak? Do you have any idea?”
“Not yet. I’ve got my team working on it. It could be almost anything. It could be a word left by a script kitty. It could even be the cracker’s name.” Daryl pushed away her water bottle and started drumming her fingers on the table. “It looks to me as if whoever wrote this used old code, copied and pasted to create this one. I don’t think he realized the word was there. I found parts of Superphreak in three places.”
“I think he’s Russian,” Jeff speculated. “I can’t put my finger on it, but the way some of the code is written just has that look. And, given their track record, this could well be an economic attack of some kind by Russians.”
Daryl stared at Jeff, impressed. “Good guess, Mr. Holmes. I found the word Moscow written in Cyrillic in the code not long before I ran into Superphreak.”
“So that’s it then.” Jeff experienced a moment of elation. Russians. Just as he’d thought. It felt good to have been right. “Do you have any idea how widespread this is?” He wasn’t in a position to know, but Daryl was.
“When I left for the office Monday, we had seven reports that looked suspicious. We’ve picked up more than fifty since then.”
Jeff was astounded. “It’s spreading pretty fast. Who’s working on detection and a fix?”
“I think I can safely say none of the private security companies are at this point, though they’ve been alerted and we’ve given them all the code we have. They report a higher-than-usual flood of former viruses and variants that require their attention. Superphreak hasn’t appeared in any of their honeypots and we can’t prove a connection, so they think we’re overreacting. It’s very frustrating. We’re assuming we won’t be able to figure out the vulnerabilities these things use to spread right away, or get the software companies responsible for them to release fixes anytime soon. So we were hoping to get them