Mad Dog - First Strike Ch. 04

4 - Hacked:

When I left Bletchley meeting room the atmosphere in the bullpen, the bunker's open plan office, was different now to the way it had been earlier. The bunker was buzzing. Nervous tension made the air crackle with static electricity.

There was, to use a technical term, a flap on. People were rushing from one cubicle to another like headless chickens and having hushed but animated conversations. All the phones were ringing, and the large video monitors on the walls were showing the same low-def black and white footage over and over again.

Two buses, crosshairs superimposed over the one on the right, white-on-grey information framed the top, bottom and left hand edge of the screen. The video lasted a slack handful of seconds and ended with a bright fuzzy dot moving in on the bus on the right but falling some way short, followed by a bright bloom that momentarily blanks out the video.

And then the video starts all over again from the beginning. A never-ending loop of death and destruction. I mused if it was kill-cam TV, celebrating some jet jockey taking out the bad guys over in the sandbox. Was this the cause of the flap?

I stopped someone as they came past me, a young woman, an ex-RAF electronic warfare specialist, originally from Liverpool. Her name was Emma Black, but a combination of her bright metallic red hair and Scouse accent along with her surname earned her the nickname Cilla after the sixties singer.

"What's happened?" I asked urgently.

"We're not certain like. I mean, we've only just heard, apparently a British UCAV just carried out a drone strike in the States."

"The States Cilla?" I asked, "as in the United States of America?"

"Yep," she nodded.

"What the hell is one of our drones doing IN America in the first place, let alone carrying out a sodding strike?" I asked. "I mean, is it one we've made and the Yanks were testing it or..."

"It's one of ours as in belonging to the RAF, and I'm buggered if I know what it's doing in America," she shrugged, "now everyone's running round like their hair's on fire here. There's a rumour going that the drone was hacked"

"Now why doesn't that surprise me?" I raised an eyebrow. "Not the rumour, but the hack attack."

Drone hacking isn't new. A few years back the Iranian military hacked an American RQ-170 Sentinel UAV. They successfully took over the drone and landed it safe and sound back in Iran. It gave the mad mullahs in Tehran huge kudos in the Middle East.

"Oh, and before I forget, Dirty Harriet sent me to find you and VJ," Cilla informed me, "she wants to see you both, like ten minutes ago, she's in Colossus."

The meeting rooms in the Bunker were named after people, places and things that had been instrumental the development of electronic warfare and cyber-espionage in the UK. So it's a no-brainer that one of the meeting rooms would be named after the code breaking computer designed and built by Post Office engineer Tommy Flowers for code-breaking at Bletchley Park.

Most people just tend to assume that it was all done by Alan Turing's machine. Nope. Just shows how wrong you can be.

Unlike the meeting room VJ and I had been squatting in, Colossus had three glass walls. However, in a nod towards at least the bare minimum of privacy, vertical blinds had been installed. When I got there they were closed.

I let myself into Colossus and discovered that the meeting was already in progress.

"Bugger!" I hissed under my breath.

VJ tapped the seat he had saved for me next to him. I sat as unobtrusively as possible. Dirty Harriet didn't miss a trick. She gave me a brief but disapproving glance and raised an elegantly groomed eyebrow.

She was in her rightful place at the head of the table. Next to her was Kim, her PA, a tall, narrow woman with long steel grey hair. Kim was making notes using an iPad.

"Ah Michael, I'm glad that you've finally deigned to join us," she followed it up with an acidic smile. "And as I was saying before I was interrupted by your arrival, the RAF has a detached training flight of two BAe Taranis UCAVs in Nevada. Today was supposed to be a live fire exercise to test the drones ability to launch laser-guided smart bombs, that is, as opposed to the cruise missiles they were intended for. Annoyingly someone has hacked into the command and control systems and took over the sodding thing. Oh, and then launched a bomb that narrowly missed a school bus."

"Casualties?"

This was from Clive Braithwaite, a posh middle-aged black guy. I didn't know him that well mainly because he hadn't been with TSG long. He was manager of the Electronic Warfare Team.

"Fortunately no deaths, but five or six kids have been injured, we have no intel about how badly," Swann said. "As I just said. It was a near miss. It would seem that one of the drone's crew was able to access the fire control program and turn off the laser guidance."

"We've just had a bloody lucky escape," Braithwaite said tersely. "If it had been the new version, well, the upgraded Paveway has GPS backup, just in case the launch aircraft loses laser lock."

I let out a low whistle.

"So, is it actually possible to hack drones then?"

This came from Nikita Burton, a chunky young woman with a strong Yorkshire accent. She ran the Open Source Intelligence section, which meant her people spent most of their time trying to make sense of social media.

"It's been possible for years," VJ said. "A Russian firm, RedStorm, sells a program called Vortex Spark. You can buy it online for, I think, somewhere round thirty US dollars."

"Is that all?" Burton snorted. "I mean, thirty bucks and you can take over an RAF drone? It could only be worse if it could get it on Amazon."

"Ah, I hate to tell you this..." VJ said and shrugged apologetically, "but you can."

"What's the chatter from the American Alt Right?" Harriet asked while she had Burton's attention.

"I didn't have long to assess what was being said before I came to this meeting, but..." she tapped at the keyboard of the laptop before her, "...Stormfront has a bit of chatter in a couple of forums. There a few newbies, apparently from the American Alt Right, they've been fairly quiet until now. But they suddenly seem to be trying to stir up anti-British sentiment. My suspicion is that they're probably Russian bots."

"What sort of thing are they saying?" Swann asked.

"They claim that this is the first strike in an attempt to regain America for the British Empire."

"Hardly!" Braithwaite snorted, "we're having enough difficulty getting the wee jocks in Scotland to remain as part of the United Kingdom."

The Alt Right want to make America great again. Worryingly they believe that the best way to achieve this is with heavily armed militias. Because, as everybody knows, superior firepower in the hands of loud-mouthed white supremacists will convince the sensible but silent majority to return the US to its past glory. You know, a time when people of colour knew their place, governments were small, men were macho and women were grateful of it.

I tend to assume that this era has much in common with King Arthur's Camelot. That is, they're both entirely fictional.

"We have warned the crabs..." Braithwaite stopped when Dirty Harriet coughed and raised an eyebrow at his use of the air force's nickname. "...I mean the RAF, that their internet link at forward operations bases can be hacked. Now it looks like it's happened, with dire consequences."

"The CEO of RedStorm is Alexi Makarov," VJ used his laptop to bring up an intel report on the wall monitor, "and this report from MI-6 reckons that he started out with the GRU."

"Ah the GRU," I sighed, "the sort of people who go to a pizza restaurant in Salisbury and take along Novichok nerve agent because, let's face it, a twelve inch Tex-Mex meat feast with added jalapeños just isn't spicy enough."

Dirty Harriet glared at me and pursed her cupids bow lips in disapproval.

"Is he still a member of the GRU?" Braithwaite asked.

"The Russian intelligence services are much like the Mafia, once in never out," I told him. "And RedStorm isn't so much a software company as a cyber TOC..."

"A what?" Dirty Harriet interrupted me.

"A TOC, as in Transnational Organised Crime group." I explained. "An online criminal organisation thinly disguised as an IT firm. They almost certainly have to have links to the GRU, or they couldn't exist."

"Michael, Vikram, I want a report on RedStorm and this Makarov man emailed to me by first thing tomorrow morning," Dirty Harriet said, "Nikita kindly compile a report on what the chatter concerning this incident on social media is saying, Clive a report on how it was technically possible to hack into a secure RAF network, and recommendations about how this can be prevented from ever happening again."

She stood and swept out of the meeting room.