Zero days, p.19
Zero Days, page 19
‘And it wasn’t the first time the bug was used, was it Vika? Mountville Memorial Hospital, Washington DC. November the twenty-first last year. Tell me about that. Targeted a connected drug-infusion system hooked up to a Russian double-agent. Killed him, and fourteen others on life support. Innocent people.’
Vika stood abruptly, turning to leave. Drayton grabbed her arm.
‘Defeated some of the best cyber defences. And you know how I know that? Because they were my defences. I was there. Now talk to me Vika.’
She pulled her arm away, raising her fists. Bret jumped to his feet, placing his hands over hers, and for a few moments nobody spoke.
The silence was broken by a sudden sharp noise, high-pitched and repetitive. Vika’s laptop was quacking like a duck, the alarm that Dobberman’s phone was back online. Somebody had powered it up, and it had an internet connection.
Vika dropped to her knees in front of the laptop and opened the spyware console, Bret and Drayton were quickly at her shoulder. It opened with the map of downtown Bangkok, a blue blob showing where it had last been online, in the house where the creep had been under house arrest, and where he was killed.
But then the map started moving, whipsawing around at first, trying to get a location for the GPS data coming from the phone. It zoomed out and then began to move rapidly, flying across Cambodia and Vietnam, before the blue blob stopped moving and the map zoomed in on an island off the coast of southern China.
Dobberman’s smartphone was in Hong Kong.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Raymond (Dim sum)
Hong Kong, China
From a distance, the place looked like it had no right to be there. It clung precariously to the side of the mountain, defying gravity. Beyond its high walls Drayton could see the tops of buildings with large windows and balconies. It seemed more like a medieval fortress than a home.
‘Are you sure we’ve got the right place?’ he asked.
‘There’s nothing else up there. That’s where the blue blob landed,’ Vika said.
They were standing on a path, a viewing point on the Peak, Hong Kong Island, high above the harbour and lined with coin-operated binoculars trained down on the jungle of steel and glass on the waterfront below. Except for the binoculars in front of Vika and Drayton, which they’d swung round to focus on the slope above.
‘The phone was only online very briefly,’ Drayton said, sounding sceptical.
‘It was long enough,’ said Vika, impatient with the questions. ‘It was up there. In that house. Believe me. There’s nowhere else.’
They were swamped by a group of tourists, jostling for a place to pose for selfies, and Drayton winced as he was struck and prodded by out-of-control selfie-sticks. The noise was like standing in the middle of a chicken coup, and Vika and Drayton had to shout to hear each other.
‘There’s nothing else up there,’ she repeated.
They’d travelled to Hong Kong on the same crack-of-dawn flight, though with separate bookings on a low-cost carrier out of Bangkok’s smaller airport, because that seemed safer. Bret had dropped them at the airport, saying to take care and to be in touch if he could help.
Drayton told Bret he’d wave next time he was in a launderette.
They’d not had much chance to talk further, the tension still there from Grom’s killing and the conversation in Bret’s office. Some things were clearer, like the hack on the professor’s pacemaker, Dmitry’s grotesque field test of the zero day that had become Cerberus, the snarling three-headed dog.
But why had Vika gone along with it? Why abandon the business she’d run with her brother in Kiev to come to the Far East to work with Dmitry? She said she had no choice, but what did that mean? And where did the hospital attack fit in, an attack that came far earlier and was commissioned by Russia? Was Cerberus a Moscow front? For now, he put those questions to one side. They were back on Dmitry’s trail, and Vika was as hungry to track him down as he was, maybe more so.
He looked again at the building perched high above. He told Vika that Hong Kong property followed one simple rule. The higher up the Peak, the more expensive and exclusive. Home to Hong Kong’s richest and most powerful. And it didn’t get much higher than the place marked on maps simply as Delta View.
‘That must be a fifty million dollar house,’ he said.
‘Probably more,’ said another voice, which wasn’t Vika.
He turned to find a young Chinese man in a loosely fitting black T-shirt and jeans. Across the front of his T-shirt were the words, ‘Born to code. Forced to work’. He had short, straight black hair and square rimless glasses, a small rucksack slung over one shoulder.
‘Hey Dim sum’, said Vika. ‘Good to see you.’
Dim sum. The name immediately put Drayton on alert, another hacker handle from Milo’s list of those associated with Neo.
Vika introduced him as Raymond. Another old friend.
They followed Raymond away from the viewing point and onto another path, a walking or jogging trail that passed below and behind Delta View.
Drayton reckoned Raymond was in his mid-twenties, though he found it hard to tell for sure. He was nervous-looking, and when he spoke, he had the habit of looking at his feet, or maybe the Peak or the harbour. Just about everywhere apart from at Drayton.
They left the path and climbed a few metres to a small clearing out of sight of any passing walkers, where Raymond removed a small white drone from his rucksack, a four-engine quadcopter with a high definition camera hanging below it, together with a control console. He attached his smartphone to the consul and then launched the drone.
The drone buzzed like an angry bee as it soared into the air, Raymond controlling it using two small joysticks. He said he wanted to get it as high as possible, so that it couldn’t be seen or heard from Delta View. But not so high that he lost contact.
After a few minutes, the house appeared on the screen of the smartphone. It looked far bigger from above, and was more of a compound, a big compound. There were several buildings, a swimming pool and yard. A helipad too. There were delivery vans in the yard, people moving around, preparing for something. Two cars on the far side of the yard, one a sports car. Maybe a Ferrari, though hard to be sure, the other a Mercedes. A garden, a big lawn, nice flowers, part of the lawn covered by a marquee.
‘Looks like they’re getting ready to party,’ Raymond said, talking to the console.
He then manoeuvred the drone out to one side of the compound to give more of a profile. Most of the buildings were two or three stories. Vika asked Raymond to zoom in as tight as he could on the surveillance cameras, to get the make. On the cars too, to try and get the registrations. And on a tennis court, where two players were warming up.
Then Raymond brought the drone back, not wanting to leave it hanging there too long, landing it perfectly at their feet and saying the footage was all recorded, so they could look at it all in more detail back at base camp.
*****
The place Raymond called base camp was a houseboat moored in a marina on the south side of the island. It wasn’t in the best of condition. Not the sort of boat you’d want to take out to sea. But Raymond said it had the essentials, by which he meant broadband internet.
He told Drayton and Vika they could find somewhere to crash at the front of the boat, since it might be tough to get a hotel right now, there being a big tech conference going on, with lots of people in town.
Two other people sat at laptops at a wooden table on the boat’s covered deck, the table littered with empty Coke cans and half-finished packets of crisps. It had the feel of an internet café. They were both younger than Raymond. A girl wearing a back-to-front orange baseball cap and a large pair of earphones, and a guy, scruffy in a student sort of way, wearing a grey headband and dark glasses. They greeted Raymond with high-fives, telling him it had worked like a dream and the computer servers had been down for an hour.
Raymond smiled for the first time, looking at the laptop screen in front of the girl. The three then began talking fast, in Cantonese this time, laughing, slapping each other’s backs, before going down below deck to a living area, where they had bigger, desktop computers set up, leaving Vika and Drayton up top.
‘What are they celebrating?’ Drayton asked.
‘Seems like they’ve crashed somebody’s system.’
‘Anybody in particular?
Vika shrugged. ‘With Raymond, it depends on his mood. Could be political. He doesn’t like the Chinese government. Could be that somebody just pissed him off. Maybe just because he can. Or else he took somebody down for a laugh. For the lulz.’
‘Dim sum, that’s his hacker handle?’
‘Mostly.’
‘As in Hong Kong’s favourite brunch? Likes food does our Raymond?’
‘He likes Hong Kong.’
‘But he worked with you too – in Kiev?’
‘We’ve worked together on and off,’ she replied cautiously.
‘So what does he do, bombard computers with soggy dumplings and steamed buns?’
‘Not far wrong.’
‘So, tell me.’
‘Death by food. That’s what some people call dim sum. All the small portions invading your table, dropped cleverly by cunning servers with metal carts, so you lose track of what and how much you’ve eaten until you’re broke, bloated and then seize up. Hackers around here, they borrowed the term.’
‘For a denial of service attack? Blitzing a target until it crashes? That works for me.’
‘Raymond’s a bot herder. He commands a massive botnet. His zombie army is one of the best and the biggest,’ Vika said.
Which was more hacker talk, a botnet being a robot network, computers that have been secretly taken over and are under the control of a hacker known as the herder. The individual machines are called zombies, the idea being that they no longer have a mind of their own and can be ordered into action, all at once, when the herder wants to launch an attack, bombarding the target with messages or just electronic pings in order to cripple or crash it. Zombie armies can consist of thousands of hacked machines.
‘That’s an awful lot of steam buns,’ Drayton said.
‘Dim sum likes connected home devices,’ Vika said. ‘Especially TV set-top boxes. But fridges, kettles, thermostats and toasters too. The internet of things. Easy to hack, sitting ducks. Perfect conscripts into his zombie army.’
The thing Drayton always found spooky about botnets, is that you never really knew if your computer had been hacked and was part of one. Who your laptop or even your kettle might be working for. They were like an invisible army, and bot herders were the celebrities of the hacker underworld, hiring their botnets out through the dark web.
Only Raymond didn’t really look like the commander-in-chief of anything. Offline he was almost timid, joining them on the covered deck, asking if they’d like a drink and a snack. Drayton asked for a beer, but Raymond said they didn’t have beer. Just Coke. Diet Coke, Coke Zero or the regular stuff. And lots of crisps.
Looking at Drayton this time.
Drayton said he’d have a regular Coke. So did Vika.
Raymond said Hong Kong was under attack from Beijing, under siege. Then he looked out across the marina. Drayton followed his eyes, half-expecting to see Chinese landing crafts and attack helicopters surging over the horizon.
‘We’re talking cyber, Drayton. It’s the cyber siege of Hong Kong. Beijing’s attacking us with every possible cyber weapon. There’s a war going on.’
Like Bret, Raymond was smart and angry and fighting what he saw as tyranny. Bret’s tyrant was Big Tech; Raymond’s was Beijing. Bret was a disillusioned escapee from Silicon Valley, but he had retained that brash, pushy libertarian attitude that was a mark of the Valley. Raymond was a fidgety introvert. Until he got excited. Then he wouldn’t stop talking. He was wiry and earnest, his war powered by Coke, not Mekong whisky. He sat on a stool on one side of the deck, now a good deal less timid, shaking his foot nervously as he spoke in his machine gun-like bursts about Beijing’s cyber aggression. Perhaps, Drayton thought, Raymond could do with one of Bret’s punch bags to hammer from time to time. Maybe paint a picture of Mao on the front.
Drayton had visited Hong Kong while he was based in Beijing as a diplomat. Not often, but enough to see the way China was eroding the liberties it promised when the British left, none of which came as any great surprise to him. The Communist party wanted control, needed control. It was all the party understood. And when the people of Hong Kong demanded greater democracy, as they thought they’d been promised, hundreds of thousands taking to the streets, the party tightened the noose, not by sending in the tanks, but in just about every other way they could. And cyber was right up there among the weapons of choice.
Raymond was a veteran of those protests. Now he’d taken his fight online, part of a group of computer experts and hackers fighting back. ‘Hacking for democracy’, he called it. A fierce battle in the cyber shadows.
‘The computer we hit today, it was the web server of the tech conference. The big one that’s happening here this week. Blew it right off the net.’ He made a big sweeping gesture with his arm. ‘Do you know what they call the conference? Imagining the Future. Well, they’ll have to imagine it without a website for the next few hours.’
He said one of the conference’s main sponsors was a Chinese tech company developing voice and face recognition techniques for the police. That Western companies were working with them. ‘Collaborating with repression,’ he called it.
‘They say it’s cutting edge artificial intelligence. But you know what that means? It means spying. Mass spying. I don’t care really what they do in China, but we don’t want that in Hong Kong. China wants to lead the world in AI, and it probably will. You know why? Because it has no constraints. It can do what it wants, harvesting the data of one point four billion people, and lock up anybody with the courage to disagree. Anybody Drayton. The Communist Party doesn’t give a shit about privacy or individual rights. And you know what? Neither does Western Big Tech. So they’re perfect partners. And they’re lining up to work with Beijing. Big data meets Big Brother.’
He began to describe how he had a few more surprises before the conference was over, but Vika interrupted him, saying, ‘The drone footage, Raymond. That’s all pretty fucking outrageous for sure. But we need to look at the drone footage.’
Raymond connected the smartphone with the video to one of the laptops and they all gathered around. The images filled the screen. Vika asked him to zoom in on the tennis court, on the smaller of the two players warming up. The picture lost resolution with the zoom, but the way he moved, the way he stood, the aggressive and not particularly effective slashing at the ball, and the headband keeping his floppy hair out of his eyes. It was Dmitry. No doubt. And his taller opponent was his business partner, Ken Tsang; the moneyman.
The drive and garden were much busier than they’d appeared on the smaller smartphone screen. Trays of fresh food carried inside, large trays, crates overflowing with seafood. Then boxes of wine and champagne. Tables were being set up in the garden. A handful of smaller tents they hadn’t noticed earlier. Several large screens. A stage.
‘Whatever’s going on there, it’s big. And it looks like it’s happening soon. Maybe even tonight,’ said Raymond.
‘Well, whatever it is, we need an invitation,’ Vika said.
*****
Raymond would probably have relished the challenge anyway. To breach the digital defences of the mansion on the Peak. That was his kind of thing. But it got better with each additional piece of information uncovered by his little team of hackers. And by the time he discovered the owner of the place, he was virtually salivating over his keyboard.
Raymond had trawled through the records and found it had been built by a Hong Kong property billionaire, who’d sold it a year ago to a Chinese company called Pearl Digital. That company was fronted by a Chinese tech tycoon called Wu Hongwei, who liked to model himself on Apple’s Steve Jobs, right down to the faded jeans and black turtle-neck at elaborately staged product launches.
‘When he started out, most of his products were just bad rip-offs of those made by Apple,’ Raymond said. ‘Artificial intelligence and virtual reality are his big thing now. His company is beyond opaque. Pearl Digital is owned by something called Delta Digital Holdings, which is owned by another company and then another, shells within shells, which eventually lead to a company registered in the British Virgin Islands. A dead end.’
‘Which means what?’ asked Drayton.
‘Which means the ultimate owner is very private. It’s tough to say who that might be or where their money comes from. Though my best guess is the Chinese government. The Communist Party. Wu himself started life with the People’s Liberation Army, though he’s now scrubbed that from his résumé.’
Raymond was on a roll, but the thing that really excited him, the real icing on his hacking cake, was that Pearl Digital, Wu’s company, was one of the sponsors of Imagining the Future. The big conference now taking place in Hong Kong was billed as the biggest of its type ever held in Asia. In his eyes that was like painting an enormous target on the mansion on the Peak.
It didn’t take him long to discover that the preparations they’d filmed from the drone were also linked to the conference. A reception for what they called ‘global technology leaders’. And it was taking place that evening. It was a kind of welcoming party for the tech elite.
Raymond’s team again targeted the server of the conference organiser, not to shut it down this time, but to break in and sniff around. When they found the database with the guest list they added one Andreas Fischer, Technical Director of AF Global Digital Solutions. They gave Andreas a glowing résumé that made him sound like a cross between Steve Jobs and Albert Einstein, uploaded a head-and-shoulders photograph and printed out an official letter of invitation.
