SWM wrote:kenl511 wrote:Has the MAlign closed all the backdoors into the Mesan Government Systems? Well enough to convince experienced counter hackers they have no evidentiary value? The counter hackers I knew were usually able to geographically locate a hacker using "node and routing markers" which are harder to remove than most people seem to think.
Anton or Michelle's computer experts could probably do it easily.
What makes you think they had backdoors into the government systems? They used the front doors.
Jack McBryde, Scorched Earth, and his compromise of Mesan computer systems using the Mesan Alignment's backdoors into the Mesan government's couputer systems:
Torch of Freedom, Chapter 54 wrote:The explosion wasn't triggered until almost three seconds after McBryde spoke the final words, and during those three seconds, the sabotage programs from his chip had time to upload themselves out of the Center's computers. Not many of them, compared to his original plans, but one hell of a lot more than any of the Alignment's cybersecurity teams had ever imagined might come at them from inside their primary firewalls. Or might carry with them so many perfectly valid access and authorization codes.
Once the first tier of the network started going down, watchdog systems sprang into action, of course, but not quickly enough to prevent some fairly awesome destruction. Very few of the major subsystems escaped altogether unscathed.
The military was much less severely affected, for several reasons. First, because by the very nature of things the military preferred standalone systems wherever possible. Second, because Alignment Security was very carefully partitioned off from the official Mesan secret services and the star system's official military forces, which meant access points were strictly limited. Third, because in the case of the military, the gateways which existed were under the control of the admirals of the clandestine Mesan Alignment Navy, and without much more time to work with, McBryde's cybernetic saboteurs were unable to wiggle their way through. Fourth, because McBryde had possessed nowhere near as much access to the MAN's authorization codes. And, fifth, because there simply wasn't time for his programs to get through before the Gama Center—and its computers—ceased to exist.
But there were far more links from Alignment Security's primary net to most of the other, openly maintained civilian intelligence agencies, and those were under the control of the Alignment, not the agencies which didn't even know they'd been penetrated. Indeed, they were specifically set up to allow Alignment Security to sneak in and out of the "official" databanks tracelessly—to co-opt those banks' data without anyone outside Alignment Security's ever being the wiser. The people who had designed the system had always realized that all those backdoors hopelessly compromised the official agencies' security, but since the Alignment was the one doing the compromising, they hadn't lost much sleep over the thought.
As it happened, it still took precious time for McBryde's programs to squirm through, yet they got through much more quickly than they had in the military's case. Not only that, but he'd prioritized his attacks carefully.
Only one attack fully succeeded, even so, but it was the one upon which he'd lavished the most care and effort, and he wasn't taking any chances on simply erasing the data he was after. Oh, no. His attack came equipped with the specific security codes for the computers in question, triggering the command sequence which reformatted their molecular circuitry itself. Turned those computers' memories into solid, inert chunks of crystalline alloy from which Saint Peter himself could not have recovered one single scrap of data. And because the man who'd prepared that attack came from so high inside Security itself, he'd known where all the backups were maintained . . . and how to reach them, too.
In that one successful attack, over ninety percent of all Mesan records concerning the Ballroom—those of the "official" agencies and the Alignment's alike—simply vanished. And since Mesa still considered Torch an extension of the Ballroom, all the Alignment's data on Torch went with it.
All gone, except for whatever scraps survived in partial form in other locales. No doubt there were enough of those scraps to reconstitute much of that data in the fullness of time, yet it was a task which would take literally years . . . and never be anything remotely like complete.
The day after Scorched Earth, Jeremy X himself could have walked openly down the streets of any Mesan city, giving DNA samples at every corner, without anyone being the wiser, unless he was spotted by one of the very few Mesans who'd encountered him personally and survived the experience.
* * *
Among the other cybernetic systems which were damaged were those of Mesan customs. The damage was . . . odd, and seemingly quirky.
E.D. Trimm stared at the main screen in her operations center, unable to believe what she was seeing. All the many ships were still shown. They could still track any of them, whether approaching or leaving or in orbit. Presumably, if they scrambled furiously, they could open up manual lines of communications if any of the ships was in danger of colliding with another.
But the rest of the information was lost. Gone. Vanished.
"Which ship is which?" she half-wailed.
"I can still figure out tonnages," said Gansükh Blomqvist. "I . . . think."
"Oh, wonderful. My day is complete."
Italics are the author's, boldface, underlined and red colored text is my emphasis.
