Zero Day_ A Novel - Mark Russinovich [9]
“There’s more.” Jeff was never comfortable with this aspect of his job. He hated being the bearer of bad news. “I’m sorry to say that you’re going to have to unplug all the servers and every computer from the network. We have to assume they’re infected, even though you’ve detected nothing—which would mean that at this point they’re serving as a breeding ground, propagating the worm. That means your lawyers will lose their e-mail.”
Sue moaned. “Let me show you to your workstation, then I’ll take care of it.”
The IT Center was located in an undesirable area of the building. Windowless, with monitors, computers, and cables running helter-skelter, a dry static sensation in the still air, it was a copy of hundreds of other such offices Jeff had seen. Sue introduced him to her assistant, Harold, a short, nerdy young man wearing a Yankees baseball cap with the brim backward. He was playing a video game on what looked like a personal laptop. As they entered, he hurriedly put it away.
“What are you playing?” Jeff asked. His secret vice was action video games.
“Uh, Mega Destructor III.”
Jeff nodded approvingly. “I’ve got MD IV in beta. I’ll burn you a copy.”
The young man grinned.
Sue shook her head. “Boys.”
Jeff grinned. “What can I say?”
Standing with one hand on her hip, Sue explained the system, gesturing with her free hand. “Every lawyer has a desktop PC and a laptop. This is the server room with four blade servers. We use one as our Web server, another as a backup domain controller, and so on. The primary one, with our litigation records and accounting, is the one that’s down. We run a standard networking program, Active Directory, and are connected to the office PCs.” What she described appeared identical to other systems on which Jeff had worked. In theory that should make this job a bit easier than it initially sounded, he thought. But in reality? Jeff was too experienced ever to expect a free ride.
“All right. I’ll get started,” he said, looking for a place to set up. “Which one should I use?” Sue pointed as he reached down and opened his work bag, extracting a black CD case filled with a wide range of disks, which he referred to as his Swiss army knife. As he began, Sue left to inform everyone they were now off-line for the duration, at least at the office. Harold moved a chair over so he could watch what Jeff was doing.
“It’s good to get some action,” Harold said with a smile. “I’m pretty bored playing games.”
“Glad to have you. I’m going to need your help if we’re to get this fixed.” Jeff’s CD included the standard diagnostic and recovery tools used by everyone in his profession, but he’d added a collection of utilities he’d picked up over time. This was the disk that would allow him to boot and provide a minimal environment from which he could work, since the computer was no longer making one available.
As he slid the disk into the server’s optical drive, his first thought was that whatever had occurred here was caused by any one of the thousands of new variants of existing viruses that appeared routinely, as many as fifty a month. He hoped that it was a new version of an existing virus, set loose by some student hacker looking for bragging rights. Something like that could have crept under Sue’s radar. Even in that eventuality it could still be a difficult job, but one he could manage. There’d likely be full, or nearly full, recovery because the data the company needed would still be somewhere in the server.
But once his own operating system was running, the first thing Jeff noted was that he couldn’t detect any data on the hard disk. It was as if the disk had never had an operating system installed. Even the standard C: drive icon was