Author Archives: deanwebb

Quick Start Guide

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Welcome to your installation of Secure All the Things (SATT). We thank you for your purchase of our product and hope your installation process goes smoothly. We believe that SATT is the most secure network security solution on the market today. Your commitment to security has brought you here, and we are ready to walk that journey alongside you.

Wow, that was pretty over the top for marketing-speak. Franz Zimmerman saw boxes and arrows further down on the page. Boxes and arrows promised more comforting tech-speak, so he persisted in reading the SATT quick start guide.

In order for SATT to be secure, it requires a high degree of secrecy. This is why you are reading this quick start guide at a SATT safe house.

Yeah, that was a weird requirement. Franz had to take a cab to the airport, where a black SUV picked him up to take him to the safe house to read the guide. These SATT guys were serious about security, from the looks of things.

Your first step in your SATT installation will be to utilize shell companies in the purchase of a property that will house the SATT management servers. Below is a checklist of the requirements for each shell company.

Huh? What? Shell companies? Franz looked over the rest of the quick start guide, which was a single, laminated card, standard page size, printed on the front only. The boxes and arrows were a flow chart, about setting up shell companies, from the looks of things. Where was the listing of how much RAM or CPU cores the servers would need?
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Writing InfoSec Fiction

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When I first started serious creative writing efforts back in 1997, I had no idea that, 20 years later, I’d be writing about how to write InfoSec fiction. Not only did I not even know how to write fiction, period, InfoSec was pretty much a matter of having an antivirus program and locking the doors to the server rooms. And firewalls, I remember we had just started to have firewalls back then.

Well, enough reminiscing and pondering about how I found myself to be where I am now. I have a purpose, best I get to it.

First off, let’s cover how to write well. It’s not all that difficult. Here are the rules of good writing, as they were taught to me by good writers.

1. Show, don’t tell.

2. Nouns and verbs always beat adjectives and adverbs.

3. Some things are better left to the reader’s imagination.

4. Dialogue should sound like dialogue.

5. Get rid of as many “to be” verbs as you can.

1. Show, don’t tell… that’s the toughest one of all, because we want to explain our thoughts in great detail. Well, that’s technical writing, not fiction writing. How many stories, especially science fiction stories, have gotten bogged down because the characters start explaining all. the. things. The readers will figure out how stuff works as it gets used, don’t worry. Saying “The zapotron ray carved a massive opening into the reactor core, yet none of the radioactivity leaked out” is preferable to the characters spending multiple paragraphs about zapotron technology and why it would be preferable in this situation as compared to, say, an unobtanium battering ram.

In that above example, did I myself go into those technologies? I did not. And yet, each reader now has an idea about them. Show, don’t tell. If I do any more here, I’m telling, not showing, and I’m not about to slide into hypocrisy like that.

2. Nouns and verbs… Rushing beats running quickly. The giant beats the really tall and really big guy. If you have to use an adjective or adverb, make sure it’s not with a plain noun or verb. The exception to this would be in dialogue, where if a person is likely to violate good rules of writing in his or her speech, then it’s good writing to have the character talk that way.

3. Leaving things to the imagination… what’s more scary, the huge hairy spider looming over your right shoulder or… that… THING! AAAAAHH! IT’S COMING FOR YOU! RUN! RUN TOWARDS THE SPIDER!

See what I did there? Consider this an extension of “show, don’t tell.” As I tried to make something scarier than the gigantic spider, I conjured up a notion of something so awful and immediately threatening that your best hope was to run towards the very thing I suggested was fearsome at the beginning of the comparison. And now, by telling all about how I did that trick, I took all the fun out of it. Show, don’t tell, that’s the moral, here. That, and run towards the spider if you’re in that situation, for God’s sake.

Imagination is best when you want to create feeling and mood in your reader. Sometimes, it means ending a story before they want it to end, but, hey, that’s life and good writing.

4. Dialogue… there’s external dialogue. Like my English teacher once said, “When other characters speak, they can reveal so much more with carefully-chosen words, which you want on your side when you fight against Godless Commies.”

Then there’s internal dialogue. One option is to just explain things, but in a dialogue-y way, where you bend words and stuff like that. Stuff that drove my ultra-right English teacher up the wall. Or you can italicize. How do I reconcile my relationship to my English teacher? I mean, she was brilliant, taught me all I needed to know about grammar and writing… but that shrine dedicated to Mussolini in the back of the room? Really? Mrs. Paganini was a complicated person, that was for certain…

Above all, dialogue needs to sound like people talking. Stylistically, if a new character speaks, start a new paragraph. Try to not have a character say too much in one go, it can lose readers.

“You think those ideas work all the time?” a reader asked.

“They’ve served me well,” I said.

“How do I know this isn’t more of Mrs. Paganini’s neo-fascist propaganda?”

I thought a moment. “I guess you can tell it’s not that because one, I’m not wearing a paramilitary uniform, and, two, not once have I spoken about the need to invade either Ethiopia or Albania.”

My reader nodded, satisfied in my answer.

5. Getting rid of “to be” verbs. Remember up in 2, where I talked about nouns and adjectives, how I said “beats” instead of “is better than”? Getting rid of is, are, will be, was, all those “to be” verbs will force you to use actual action words, and that moves the story forward in an interesting way.

***

OK, so those are the rules of good writing. I’d also recommend reading Socrates’ “Poetics” for some tips. It’s a short piece and well worth your time. It’ll also explain why that huge race sequence in “The Phantom Menace” was such a beat-down… put effects ahead of plot and character…

I’d also recommend reading things that help the InfoSec mindset. Look to Eastern Europe for fiction authors and look to trade journals for jumping-off points for stories.

My reading list will include films, but since I use subtitles, I’m still reading them, aren’t I?

Arkady and Boris Strugatsky – Roadside Picnic; Stanislav Lem – Everything he wrote, go for Cyberiad, Solaris, and Memoirs Found in a Bathtub; P.D. Ouspensky – The Strange Life of Ivan Osokin; Vladimir Savchenko – Self-discovery

For the films, go to the Mosfilm YouTube channel and watch Solaris, Stalker, Kin Dza Dza – those are the intro to Soviet sci-fi, which is much more cerebral and psychological than US sci-fi, which tends to resolve issues through violence and/or application of brute physics.

While you’re on Mosfilm, consider also Ivan the Terrible (Ivan Grozny), Ivan Vasilievich Changes Careers, and White Tiger (Belyy Tigr). The first is a pair of films that was Game of Thrones stuff decades before HBO, the second is a wild time-travel romp, the third is about a man who can speak with tanks in WW2.

Also consider the Czech film, “Tomorrow I’ll Wake Up and Scald Myself with Tea”. Why? It’s about things going wrong, and that’s what security is all about.

Once you’re paranoid and twisted in your thinking, you’ll read trade journals and start to get ideas about how things go wrong. You’ll read marketing materials from vendors that promise the moon and see holes in their logic that may deliver a shattered earth instead of a new world. You’ll see reports on outages and mentally explore what’s not reported, how much worse it could be.

Then, you’ll want to write that story.

***

We’ve gone from fiction writing to science fiction writing (briefly) and now we’re ready to deal specifically with InfoSec fiction writing. There are no rules for it yet, because as far as I know, there’s only a handful of people trying to write it, and I’m one of them. So I’ll go into my philosophy, and I’ll try to show instead of tell as much as possible.

The short story is ideal for InfoSec fiction. The short story in sci-fi takes a small concept, a gimmick, and toys around with it. The gimmick is the center of the story, so it won’t last very long at all. It’s not a character, so it shouldn’t be pushed all that far. There will be people and things reacting to, planning to use, and being affected by the gimmick, but the gimmick is the center of attention.

Consider a story about a guy using Internet-enabled footwear that’s also equipped with a flash drive and a toner-like device that can pick up signals from network cables. Fun will be had in the story, but it’s over as soon as he visits the coffee shop and uploads his stolen data to the highest bidder. Maybe it’s over now, but that’s how it goes with the gimmick. It’s a short story, but a merry one.

Writing a longer story runs the risk of getting preachy. If your characters are starting to launch into long dialogues explaining best practices, you are writing an editorial at best and a user manual at worst. If your tale has legs and it’s going to travel into the land of 10-40K words, you’re into novella country, and that demands a different focus for your writing.

Novellas have to be character-centered. This means the focus is not on the technology, but on a person using/affected by the technology. The exposition is about the character in relation to that technology, and the temptation to get preachy will try to overpower you. Resist. Stay with that character and his or her moral journey, as he or she struggles with A Big Decision. For it to be InfoSec related, the Big Decision needs to be related to that technology. A plot in which a jilted lover considers killing his former love becomes an InfoSec plot when he ponders the killing by way of a drone strike, homed in on the former love’s cell phone location… and then, to his horror, he realizes the drone strike took out an innocent because the former lover dropped the phone in the parking lot and the innocent picked it up to go return it to the nearby store’s lost and found. The actual strike and realization would be the climax of the story, unless we want this to be a psychological tale about the killer being caught and being sentenced to work out his problems with an AI counselor… that may have a few flaws in its code…

Novels are big things. If you’ve got the nerve to write an InfoSec novel, good luck with that. If you can keep from preaching and make it all about a group of characters dealing with a world changed by a technology, you’ve got a sci-fi novel. To make it InfoSec, those characters deal with a world changed by the *flaws* in a technology.

That’s the biggest part of InfoSec writing, in my view. We confront the promise of better living through technology and poke at the weaknesses in that premise. We ask what can possibly go wrong and then unleash that vulnerability on our characters. Sometimes, our characters are resilient and deal with the problem. In such cases, I’d recommend no neat and tidy happy ending. The characters dealt with the problem, but now they live in a patched world, and they have to be on their guard just in case the patch introduced a new vulnerability.

An InfoSec writer also has to face a decision whether or not the story will be hard science or more Hollywood in its portrayal of technology. My style leans mostly towards hard science. I want things to be highly accurate. My characters will never ping 10.800.1.1. My characters will never have a program with a GUI that looks like it was designed by a special effects company. My characters plow through huge logfiles, they run Wireshark and pore over the captures, and they get mandatory reboots of their OS at the worst possible times.

But, there are times where I want to go Hollywood. In these stories, I create a fantasyland where all is well, all is good, there is better living through technology for all… except, hey, what’s this little red button do? Ah, it reveals that the makers of this heaven were really humans and there are devils from our own day and age in those futuristic details! Here we are in the year 2877, but the world comes crashing down because the code is backward-compatible to run a DOS 5.0 program… in so doing, I’m able to point out the folly of assuming backward-compatible code is secure, but *without getting preachy*.

I just realized I was getting preachy about not getting preachy, so maybe I should leave the rest to your imaginations and end my essay here.

Or should I say “show, don’t tell” one more time? Where is Clippy to help me finish writing a story when I need him the most?

Matryoshka

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Tommy Mothersbaugh caught an anomaly. For the first time in over a year of scouring security logs, he found something that shouldn’t have been there. He took the report to his boss, Mary Jordan. He knocked on her open door.

“What’s up, Tommy?”

“I think I got something here, Mary. It’s not much, but it’s something.”

“Whatcha got?”

Tommy held out the report and pointed at a traffic flow. “That’s a printer in our Panguitch office. Trying to reach a TOR exit node.”

Mary lifted up her glasses to squint at the tiny print. “Huh. You sure about that? Double checked it and all?”

“Yes. Something’s up with that.”

Mary set the report on her keyboard. “OK if I keep this for my report?”

Tommy nodded. “Anything else you want me to do for follow-up?”

“No, no, that’s OK, we just file our reports and then things move upstairs… By the way, I wanted to ask you something and I’ve got a few minutes before my next meeting. You want to get the door and have a seat?”

Tommy shut the door and sat down.

Mary propped her glasses up, over her forehead. “How would you like to do a field assignment? You’ve been doing good work here in Analysis, so it’s only natural that you eventually sample other types of work… if you’d like to.”

“Sure, yeah. I mean, yes, that would really be cool.” Tommy’s surprise turned to excitement. “Where would I be going?”

“Well, wherever they send you. You’ll go through an orientation and then the officer in charge will let you know your assignment. But we can get you there as soon as you like. Tomorrow, even.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Dude. That would be awesome.” If Tommy was a puppy, his tail would be wagging wildly.

“Well, pack up your desk and make room for your successor.” Mary’s smile got Tommy to jump up, shake her hand, and then zip over to his desk with his good news.

A short, waited interval after Tommy left, Mary opened up SightsAndScenes.com and clicked the “helpful” button by Barry7711’s review of The Dinner Bell restaurant in Muleshoe, Texas.

Instantly, a minor official in another nation received an alert on his phone. The text on Gleb Ivanovich’s phone read, “Text ACCEPT to 495 697 03 49 to receive information on your prize!”

Any English-language text with the phone number for the Kremlin was serious news. Gleb brought up his browser and checked which review for The Dinner Bell got an additional like. Following the liked review back to that user’s home town indicated where operational cover had been blown. And that cover had been blown in… Panguitch, Utah? What and where is a Panguitch? Even after looking up information on the tiny town, Gleb couldn’t believe it existed. Why they had bothered to put a system there that we had bothered to compromise, Gleb did not know. He shook his head and sent a PDF brochure of Bryce Canyon National Park to another minor official.

Sofiya Olegovna glanced over the brochure in Gleb’s email and checked the traffic records for that system. After a few clicks and a few presses of Page Down, she had the data she needed to review. Hmmm… we haven’t done anything with that system in a long time, a long long time… and neither have they. Was this something some other guys were doing? Sofiya thought some more and became certain. This was definitely the doing of some other guys. Sofiya moved to make her report to those who needed to know.

Mere moments later, a spam campaign sent out 3.2 million messages proclaiming the virtues of all-natural Xenon Hexafluoride capsules. Most of the spams were either eliminated by filters or deleted by the fools still suffering without antispam measures. There were, however, 2 people who did not delete the spams, but, rather, accorded them the most urgent of responses. One of those people was in a very quiet office in a very quiet building in a very quiet part of Northern Virginia.

The TINCAN monitoring project was one of the most demanding of analytical jobs, but one that had also produced much valuable intel. Cracking the Spam Code was possible only because of the incredible attention to detail by the steganographers working for TINCAN, searching for meaning in the grainy background images of the spams sent by agents of the rival power. Of course, the meaning in the images was always encrypted, but the one-way pad in the hands of TINCAN’s director provided the key, every time. And now, the urgent response from the person in the very quiet office brought a collection of letters and numbers to the TINCAN director for his one-way pad to work its magic.

Director Andy Garfield ran the decryption protocol. He nodded and dismissed the urgent responder, then contacted his counterpart in Systems Monitoring via a scrambled line. Even if a rival power or those other guys had access to the phone system, they wouldn’t be able to break the encryption on the line. And, besides, what was so unusual about two intel directors talking with each other?

As it turned out, the rival power *did* have access to the phone lines. And, while it was true that the rival power could not decrypt the phone conversation, the rival power nevertheless deduced that this particular conversation fit a pattern that had gone along with its recent spam campaigns. Agents and administrators within the bowels of the rival power’s intelligence community put the wheels in motion to bring the spam campaigns to a close. One or two more actual messages would be leaked, and then disinformation until they didn’t believe us anymore. After that, the spam would have served its purpose.

Director Claus Niklaus of Systems Monitoring answered Director Andy Garfield’s call. “This is Niklaus.”

“Hello Niklaus. Garfield here. How ya doin’?”

“Doin’ fine, Andy, yourself?”

“Got my health. Can’t complain. This a good time?”

“Sure is. What’s eatin’ ya, succotash?”

“Well, Claus, it’s like this. You got a system in Panguitch that came up in analysis earlier today?”

“Yeah, just a while ago.”

“Well, I know all about it.”

“Ya don’t say… Huh. Thanks for the info, Andy.”

“Always a pleasure to help out, Claus. Hang in there, buddy.”

“Sure thing. Thanks a heap. See ya.”

“See ya.”

They both hung up and Claus leaned back in his chair. Only way Andy would have known that is if he’d intercepted and decoded a message from the rival power regarding the Panguitch system. Only way the rival power would know about that would be if they had a mole in his organization or a tap on his lines or a hack on his systems. Time to hire a rat-catcher, Claus figured.

The next problem Claus faced was that this wasn’t a direct operation of the rival power’s. Had it been, they wouldn’t have used the Spam Code that Andy’s TINCAN people were taking apart. That meant that the other guys were mixed up in this. The rat looked to the rival power for money and benefits, but the compromise on the Panguitch system could be laid at the doorstep of the other guys. Claus put in a call to Lauren Bishop, Director of Internal Investigations.

“Joyful Snow Pea Restaurant, can I help you?”

“Sorry, wrong number. I misdialed the third number.”

“OK, no problem, goodbye.”

Claus redialed, properly, and got Lauren on the phone and let her know about the mole, and how he may or may not be working for us or them, but definitely the other guys.

Meanwhile, the cashier at Joyful Snow Pea Restaurant knew exactly what to do, based upon Claus’ message. She placed an order for 2 dozen cans of Hunan-style water chestnuts to the trade attache at the Chinese consulate in San Francisco. The trade attache, in turn, sent an email to Shandong Huaye Tungsten & Iridium Tech Co., Ltd., requesting a quote for 600kg of pure tungsten rods, 100mm diameter. That email kicked off an alert that went straight to the head of Bureau Nine of the Ministry of State Security.

He wasted no time in getting up and moving as fast as he could without running to his boss, hoping to get there before the head of Bureau 8. The head of Bureau 8 had an unfair advantage, as his office was 10 meters closer than his own.

The head of Bureau 9 sped past the door of Bureau 8. He smiled. Those speed-walking classes had paid off a great dividend. He entered his director’s office and did his heel-toe, heel-toe walk right past the secretary, into the director’s antechamber. He pressed a button and waited.

Still no sign of Bureau 8. The head of Bureau 9 smiled as he heard the buzzer indicating the director was ready to receive a visitor. He walked in, normally this time, and said only, “Panguitch cover blown.”

The director nodded and dismissed the head of Bureau 9. The head of Bureau 9 nodded and exited. In the antechamber, he saw the head of Bureau 8 cooling his heels. “No need to see the boss now, I got here first.”

“Damn. Just my luck, I was in the water closet when I got the info.”

“You know it is Bureau 9’s job to protect this ministry from infiltration by foreign agents. Why do you always meddle in our matters?”

“You know damn well it’s Bureau 8’s job to handle counterintelligence. We have to keep tabs on you guys in Bureau 9 when you step into our territory.”

“Is that what you will tell the senior director? That we are in your territory?”

“No, this is a small thing, not worth a fight… but what might be worth a fight is your bureau removing our microphones. Your department is not above suspicion of counterintelligence.”

“Well if you want your microphones back, give us back our cameras! We have to be certain that our counterintelligence team hasn’t been infiltrated by foreign agents!”

The head of Bureau 8 thought a bit. “Two microphones for one camera?”

The head of Bureau 9 nodded in agreement. “Send the draft proposal to me today, I’ll sign off on it.”

Both men returned to their respective departments. The head of Bureau 8 then reviewed the budget for next year’s office supplies. He circled the amount proposed for printer toner and noted it should be reduced.

Three days later, Tommy Mothersbaugh was just outside Panguitch Middle School in Panguitch, Utah, wearing a brown shirt with a printer vendor’s logo prominently embroidered above the left pocket. His instructions were to remove a printer from the faculty workroom and replace it with a similar model. He was then to deliver the removed printer to the e-waste center in Hurricane, but was to get there by way of Orderville and Zion National Park.

Tommy also had instructions to park at Zion National Park and to go see the sights for ten minutes, leaving his vehicle unlocked.

Tommy arrived at Zion and parked his car near a bunch of tour buses loaded with Chinese tourists. They all debouched from the buses around the same time he left his van. Tommy walked away, glancing back at the mob of Chinese tourists. He went to the main office, figuring he’d use the bathroom while he was there. After using the bathroom, he walked around in the gift shop and accidentally bumped into one of the tour bus drivers.

“Oh, sorry! Please excuse me.”

“Not a problem, no worrying.” Tommy was struck at the thickness of the driver’s Russian accent. Then again, lots of immigrants got jobs as drivers, such was the nature of things. Tommy never was sure about what things he should ask questions about and what things he should just let pass without comment, so he guessed this was no big deal and forgot about it.

Tommy returned to his van and checked the insides. Nothing was stolen, and the printer looked like it hadn’t been touched. Tommy shook his head at the instruction that made no sense and drove on to the e-waste disposal center. This field work was just as boring as analysis work, but at least he got to see some beautiful countryside on this mission.

Meanwhile, back on one of the tour buses, the Chinese tourists were talking animatedly about a small piece of electronic gear they had removed from the printer as the bus driver nonchalantly checked to make sure the bus security cameras were running properly.

Shock and Awe

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Colonel Guaripolo was screaming into the field telephone in order to be heard. Bombs were landing all around and above his command bunker, even as Presidente General Trompeta was asking for a status report from the front. “So, Colonel Guaripolo, how are things going?”

Damn civilian in a general’s uniform! “Bad! Very very bad!”

“What do you mean, bad? How can things be bad? We have the finest weapons from the Estados Unidos! These are the best in the world! Those losers from San Teodoros have no idea how mighty our forces are!”

“With respect, sir, it is our own army of Nuevo Rico that are discovering the might of our forces!”

“What do you mean? Explain yourself, Colonel! At once!”

Colonel Guaripolo was tempted to stick his head outside so he could die a war hero instead of having to explain military matters to this buffoon. “Our air force uses GPS-guided munitions, correct?”

“Yes. Deadly accurate.”

“Only when GPS is working properly. We spent millions on the GPS bombs, San Teodoros spent hundreds on GPS hacking tools. Their facilities are all giving off false signals, so our weapons correct for that false signal.”

“That’s a shame. I knew some of those gringo arms salesmen were cheating us. Don’t worry, I’ll get our money back. Don’t you worry. We’re not getting ripped off on this deal.”

“Presidente General, with respect, those corrections made the bombs fall on our positions! We are bombing ourselves! The GPS hacking means we are bombing ourselves!”

The Presidente General’s voice condescended. “Stay calm, Colonel. No need to lose your composure. Be brave… wait a moment, can you please hold the line? Thanks.”

Colonel Guaripolo held the receiver in slack-jawed disbelief as the barrage began to abate.

Presidente General Trompeta clicked back over onto Colonel Guaripolo’s line. “Good news, Colonel. The aerial bombardment problem is taking care of itself. I just heard from Colonel Bodoque, at the Air Force. San Teodoros shot down our aerial tankers, so the planes have to return to base before they can deliver their full load.”

“Will we then go back to non-GPS guided bombs?”

“No, because all we have are the latest and greatest weapons. Looks like your securing of the Gran Poco region will have to be done without an air force.”

“Wait? No air force? But can’t they at least fly missions with what’s in their tanks without refueling?”

“Ha ha, you’re going to laugh when you hear this, but those clever little bastardos from San Teodoros have been in our military logistics network for some time. We thought those fuel tanks at the airbase were full up, but they’re actually close to empty. Can’t always trust the data being fed to your software, can you? Ha ha haaaaa…”

Colonel Guaripolo had no laughter for the moment. And then, suddenly, the unbombed Nuevo Rican tanks started to roll… backward. “Presidente General, sir, the tanks… are they fitted with autonomous operation software?”

“But of course! Finest tanks for us from the Estados Unidos! Even if all the people in them are dead, they can fight on!”

“Well, they have no people in them and they are in full reverse.” Loud crashes. “Some have collided with our artillery pieces.” Distant mechanic whines, dropping in pitch. “Others are on the main highway back to Ciudad Trompeta.”

“Really? That’s not what I ordered. The ones on the highway… log into every tenth one and delete its driving software! Morale only improves with a demonstration like that!”

Colonel Guaripolo’s head spun as he pondered for a moment how Presidente General Trompeta was trying to fight a cyberwar like a World War One field marshal. “Presidente General, we cannot even do such a thing – we’re still trying to set up our battle communication network!”

“The gringos said it could be done in minutes.”

“The gringos that dropped off the boxes of gear laughed at me when I asked how many minutes it would take. This stuff is worse than Swedish do-it-yourself furniture!”

Trompeta shifted into philosophy. “Ah, yes, Swedish do-it-yourself furniture… I lost, something like, 2 of my wives and 5 mistresses or so because of Swedish do-it-yourself furniture. Once, I lost a wife and a mistress on the same item! It was a chest of drawers, and you think those would be easy. Not so! There’s a step at the beginning where the drawing is very unclear and-”

The line cut out.

Trompeta became a tiny bit angry and felt a need to focus it on something. He pointed at an aide in the room. “Colonel Trivino!”

Colonel Trivino snapped to attention. “Sir!”

“Find out why the phones went dead. If it was because of hackers in San Teodoros, have Colonel Guaripolo court-martialed for incompetence in protecting our networks. If it was because Guaripolo hung up, have him court-martialed for insubordination!”

“Yes sir!” Colonel Trivino ran from the room, a barely-concealed sigh of relief punctuating the sound of the door closing behind him.

31 minutes later, Trompeta watched as a column of Nuevo Rican tanks rolled past the presidential palace… in reverse… A jeep drove up in the opposite direction and got in the left turn lane to enter the palace grounds. It had to wait a while for the tanks to finish their retreat to points as far away from San Teodoros as their hackers could drive them. Then the jeep turned up the palace drive and a uniformed man leaped from it before it even came to a stop, stumbling then rushing to the palace door.

A minute later, Colonel Bodoque was in Trompeta’s office. “Presidente General! The situation is grave! We have no air defenses! Communications are down, and with them, our ability to operate our weapons! We are wide open to a San Teodoros air attack!”

Trompeta pounded his desk. “Operate them manually!”

Colonel Bodoque dared to pound the desk back. “We can’t! We outsourced that task to an outfit in Taiwan!”

“What? I gave no such command!”

“Yes you did! When you ordered that private contractors would handle certain security aspects, just as in the Estados Unidos! A Taiwanese company put in the lowest bid and they’re in charge of our air defenses, except our connection to the Internet is down and they can’t reach our systems.”

Trompeta frowned.

Colonel Bodoque continued with his impertinent line. “It may be just as well. I heard that all those contractors were just kids that played a lot of video games. Nobody was checking quality or anything like that.”

Trompeta’s face began to darken with rage.

Bodoque did not fear Trompeta’s anger. “I would advise you at this point to get into your presidential jet and flee the country, but all our air traffic control systems are offline. Again, the privatization of government functions, as per your order.”

Trompeta slowly rose from his chair to regard Bodoque eye-to-eye.

He reached for the gold-plated pearl-handled revolver at his side.

Bodoque made no move. He only glared back at Trompeta.

Trompeta pointed his revolver at Bodoque. A quiet growl from the Presidente General: “Colonel Bodoque, I am relieving you of your command and then I am going to personally execute you for treason.”

Colonel Bodoque spoke just as quietly and forcefully as Trompeta. “You don’t have any ammunition in your pistol.”

Trompeta pulled the trigger. Click.

Bodoque continued. “My guess is that for the last few months San Teodoros has been intercepting our ammunition shipments. We keep saying we never got our bullets or bombs and our suppliers keep insisting that they’ve got the tracking information to prove that they arrived and were claimed. Probably more San Teodoros GPS hacking at work. But, as for me…” Bodoque pulled out his own automatic pistol. “… I ordered my ammunition on eBay.”

Trumped, Presidente General Trompeta dropped his pistol and raised his hands.

“Señor Trompeta, you are now under arrest, for crimes against the people of San Teodoros, and so on and so on. I, Colonel Bodoque, am taking charge in a coup d’etat.”

Bodoque had planned his coup well: his loyal soldiers had quietly acquired all the Nuevo Rican surplus military vehicles that lacked auto-driving functions as well as some powerful radio transmitters. As he rounded up the remaining Trompeta henchmen, a lone Nuevo Rican truck drove towards the San Teodoros lines, a white flag signaling the end of yet another brief Latin American border skirmish.

Bodoque was soon making a radio announcement, blaring from loudspeakers on the trucks in case the people were too busy trying to get to Instagram instead of patriotically listening to their radios. Bodoque followed the standard script for a successful coup, which one does after taking control of radio, television, and other telecommunications:
1. Say who is in charge
2. Say who is to be arrested
3. Order that everyone who is not to be arrested must report for work tomorrow
4. Announce the curfew

Bodoque didn’t want a mess like what happened when the Americans took over Iraq and forgot to make those announcements. While his mind was on the thought of American messes, Bodoque began to flip through a glossy arms catalog. He stayed away from the so-called “smart” systems at the back and focused his attention on the weapons that didn’t have anything to do with the Internet. The army of Nuevo Rico needed to re-arm itself, this time with weapons that couldn’t be hacked.

A Realistic Process for Dealing with Cloud Breaches

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Given how cloud breaches are becoming more and more common, I would like to present a realistic process for dealing with them. I say realistic because this is probably already what is going on, but is not documented. So, here goes:

It starts with a proper management reaction when the vendor informs the firm regarding the breach:

Then your management will then need to do this privately:

But this should be their public reaction to the vendor’s notification:

Your developers will do this as they inspect the code:

Your security team will do this as they look at how the breach was done:

And then do this after they’re told they have to help clean up the mess:

Next, your developers will work hard on a new solution:

The security team will look over the developers’ solution and offer constructive feedback:

So the developers will take that feedback and refine their solution:

The network team may have some concerns on what the developers are hoping they can do in the datacenter:

Management may also have to deal with increased budget requests to implement the more secure solution:

And all the former employees are doing this as they hear the rumors and read the headlines:

And that, my friends, is how we can realistically deal with a cloud breach! I thank you for your time in reading this and hope it helps. 🙂

The Internet of No Fun

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Little Bobby rushed in with the speed and joy that told the world he was five and a half years old and loving it. “Dad! A drone fell into our backyard! Can we keep it?”

Dad leaned out to the right to look at Bobby around his monitor. “Hold on there, sonny… have you done a VA scan on it?”

Bobby looked at the ground the way only a five and a half year old whose dreams were being confronted with harsh reality could do. “No…”

“What is our rule about bringing devices on to our wireless network?”

“No devices on the network until we’ve done a VA scan.”

“And?”

“And we’ve either patched or otherwise mitigated the vulnerabilities.”

“And?”

“And we’ve filed the change request documentation.”

“… And?”

“And we’ve got the change window scheduled, gosh, dad, you make all this no fun!” Bobby looked like he was ready to cry. Or update his resume and start looking for a new dad.

Dad knew that it was pretty much the same everywhere. Not wanting to see any turnover in the kid department, he worked on a consoling angle. “You think this is no fun? Then maybe it’s time I had you sit with me doing all the qualification testing so you’ll see just how much no fun this is for me, too!”

The shared experience reminded Bobby that he was in this together with everyone else. It’s not uncommon for five and a half year olds to express contrition and Bobby did just that. “Sorry, dad… I’ll go fire up the Kali Linux box…”

“There’s a good boy. Daddy has to go to a meeting now with Uncle Frank about next year’s family IT budget.” DAS integration service sounded a very reasonable idea.

“Are we gonna get a new firewall?” That exuberance again. Kids sure do bounce back, don’t they?

“Well, we’re still paying for Grandpa’s unexpectedly high syslog generation, but I think we might get a new firewall in Q2 next year.”

Bobby ran laughing down the hallway. “Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay!!!”

The meeting with Uncle Frank went well and Dad was happy that there were a few more goodies in the budget besides the firewall that he’d be able to announce at the family Q4 wrap-up meeting on 25 December. Dad had just enough time to type a few lines of code and then Sara stomped in the way only a 13 year old expecting to be disappointed could do. “Dad, can I go to a friend’s house now?”

“Did you finish ringfencing all your old wearables?”

Exasperation permeated the room. “Yes. Dad.”

“OK, did you also wipe the config on our old perimeter router like I’ve been telling you to do for the last three days?”

“Yes. Dad. I did it. It’s all wiped. Are you happy?”

“Sara, don’t take an attitude with me or you’re not going out.”

“Sorry.” Not very sincere, but a dad couldn’t expect much better from 13 years old.

“All right, that’s better. Which friend did you want to go see?”

“Veronica.”

Dad was concerned. He really didn’t want Sara hanging out with Veronica. Veronica’s family didn’t have very good change management processes and it was common knowledge around town that they weren’t necessarily up to date on their patch management. “I would be happier if she came over here.”

“Oh God, not this again.”

“Well, Sara, you tell me. If I try to RDP to Veronica’s family’s domain controller, am I going to get blocked, or am I going to get a login screen?”

“Dad, they have a really secure password on it!”

“That’s not my point, Sara. You know as well as I do that I shouldn’t even be able to reach that server, let alone via RDP. Now am I able to reach that server or not?”

“Fine. You win. I’ll just rot away here.”

“Sara, that’s not a win for me. I just want you to be safe, that’s all. Even if you left your cell phone home, your shoes are still exposed. As are your pants, your shirt, those earrings, am I right?”

Sara rolled her eyes with the wild, limbic-system fueled thinking so prevalent amongst the 13 year old set.

Dad tried to persuade. “And what happens to the rest of your clothes if the ones you’re wearing now are compromised?”

“Dad! That happened ONE TIME when I was eleven! Why do you have to keep bringing it up?”

“Well, you seem to be on track to have it happen again, when you’re 13. I’d rather not have to deal with another breach.”

“What. Ever.” Sara exhaled hard, but then had an idea. “What if I put all my clothes on airplane mode, will that be OK?”

Dad considered. That was reasonable. “OK. You put them all on airplane mode and you can go to Veronica’s. Get mom to take you, though.”

“She can’t dad. She’s on a sev one TAC call with the refrigerator vendor. There was a problem with our proxy and now the licensing on the fridge is all messed up.”

“OK, let me just wrap up this IPS signature modification and I’ll take you, just as soon as I get it into production.”

Dad was ready to get out and drive around for a while, anyway. Drive wasn’t really the right word, since the car did it all itself, but it was best to have a parent go with a kid, just in case. Gary Rasmussen’s daughter knew how to hack past parental controls on cars and could go pretty much anywhere unsupervised. Then there was that fight that Linda Hartford’s son got into where he and that other kid, Jerry something or other, kept hacking the speed governors on each other’s cars so they’d barely crawl. Having a parent ride along tended to keep those kinds of teenage shenanigans from happening.

Educational Technology and Other Oxymorons

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I.

1992. The dawn of the PC. But, even at this early stage, there was obsolete hardware. The folks at “Big Purple”, International Computing Business Machinery, ICBM, had thousands upon thousands of Model AA PCs that weren’t selling, now that the Model AAA was on the market. ICBM’s solution? Simple. Donations.

The first group of teachers to be trained on the Model AA filed into the crowded lab. They were all Math teachers because computers all used numbers, and that was math, right? Math was hard and computers were hard, so it just made sense to send in the men and women that had learned something hard to learn something else hard. Because math. Or something like that.

It’s not that the teachers were particularly good at math. Some of them needed staff development hours for the year and this training seemed as good as any. Some of them had been volunteered by their building principals. Only a few were actually interested in using computers, even if they were old Model AAs.

The trainer welcomed everyone but, before he could ask the teachers to say their names, what school they taught at, and something interesting about themselves, a hand went up. A very concerned young lady looked over the top of her glasses at the trainer.

The trainer asked, “Yes, is there a problem?”

Mrs. Bailey from Hall Middle School said, “Yes, there is. Are these things kid-proof? Am I going to have parts of these things scattered all over my classroom?”

“I’m happy to say that these are kid-proof. They’ll stand up to whatever your kids can throw at them.”

An “M” key flew straight up from Mrs. Bailey’s keyboard. The trainer cleared his throat. “Whatever you did, I’m sure the kids won’t attempt.”

Mrs. Bailey was no magician. She revealed her trick. “I took a pen cap and put the edge of it under the key and up it went. Now I also got a fun spring to play with. If I put my hand over the key when I pry it up, it pops up quietly and then I can also snap it back in quietly – with or without the springs under the key. I can then set about spelling three of the seven words you can’t say on television without anyone else knowing.”

“Well, this is where your classroom management skills are needed, so you can keep an eye on the students.”

“So I spend the whole class watching keyboards? What if I have to teach something or explain something to a student? Or take roll, as mandated by the state and local authorities?”

The trainer said, “How about we talk about that later?” but the damage was done. All the other teachers were buzzing with concern about what other cheap plastic the kids could pop off the AAs. The trainer struggled to finish the session.

Out of revenge, the trainer complained to the principal at Hall Middle School and Mrs. Bailey got reprimanded for her unprofessional behavior. But, later that year, the Computer Literacy classes degenerated into ad hoc Keyboard Reassembly classes when they weren’t Clear Stuff Out of the Floppy Drive classes. Or Reconnect All the Cables Properly classes.

One teacher in charge of Computer Literacy finally found a way to keep the kids from jacking with the PCs: he installed some bootlegged games on all of them. Problem solved.

II.

2002. By now, most kids knew how to survive Computer Literacy classes. Since the classes involved either playing the games already on the boxes or bringing some games from home to play on them, math teachers were no longer involved. Instead, either coaches that found history too hard or vocational teachers whose programs had been canceled ran the Computer Literacy classes.

Each classroom, regardless of subject taught, had 2 or 3 ICBM Model 10A PCs in it. Because technology. Also enhanced access to cutting-edge resources. And school of the future, don’t forget school of the future. So, in Mr. Hull’s World History class at Benson High School, 3 PCs sat on a table in the corner closest to his desk. He didn’t want the keyboards all over the room, so he kept them where he could watch them.

Mr. Hull used to let the kids use them for general research, but too many of them just plugged in headphones and listened to rap songs. Mr. Hull wanted to disable the sound cards on the PCs, but he didn’t have admin rights, so the cards were still active.

He wanted to let kids that didn’t have PCs at home use them to work on research projects, but most of them were kids that just listened to rap songs if he looked away. If he watched them, then they just did Google searches for “world history”.

Mr. Hull was ready to give up on research papers, anyway. He was sick and tired of having to give kids zeroes for plagiarism. Every time he assigned a paper, about one kid in ten turned in one that was straight up copied from a repository of doctoral dissertations. The dumb kids and really procrastinating smart kids were easiest to catch, since they turned in word-for-word copies. It was the diligent kids of average and above intelligence that posed the biggest threat, since they’d re-word the papers so that their origins would not be revealed by Googling the first sentence.

And so, the computers stayed mostly quiet in class. They got revved up on purpose if Mr. Hull wanted to settle a bet and told a kid to look up some obscure, but specific fact. One time, a kid insisted that drinking bleach was a great way to cure indigestion. Even though other kids in the class found three other medical web pages that spelled out, in no uncertain terms, that drinking bleach was 100% bad, the kid kept insisting that he was right and the rest of the world was wrong. So much for the Internet being the fount of information… hardly worth being a fount if the idiots weren’t going to drink from it.

There was that one time that Mr. Hull checked out the laptop carts from the library. 20 laptops per cart, and a wireless access point in each cart. He gave all the students a topic to research and away they went! In the first class, 5 people loaded a relevant website with information before another 24 got stalled because one guy had plugged in his headphones and was listening to another damn rap song, thereby killing the extremely limited bandwidth available on the wireless. During second period, all the laptop batteries died. They were supposed to have lasted 4 hours on a charge… by third period, Mr. Hull was back to oral lectures, writing on chalkboards, and assigning pages to read from the textbook.

At least the digital gradebook wasn’t half bad, as long as it didn’t crash. The digital attendance, however, drove him up the wall. If he had a nickel for every time a kid walked in within 30 seconds of being marked absent, Mr. Hull would have a very nice supplemental income stream. Once marked absent, a student had to be cleared with a paper slip. Mr. Hull hated those paper slips, they were a total pain to fill out.

It was really embarrassing whenever Mr. Hull made another kind of attendance mistake: marking someone absent because he or she was just really small and quiet. That always hurt when he goofed up a quiet kid’s attendance. He felt obligated to endure the pain of filling out the correction slip for those poor kids. He tried to minimize those mistakes by sitting the kids towards the front, but, even then… there were so many distractions, what with 30 or so kids in every class…

For a while, Mr. Hull would just fill out attendance at the end of class, when things were quieter, but he got chewed out for not having roll done in the first five minutes, which was some stupid local and/or state regulation. So now, Mr. Hull just counted everyone present, every day. No correction slips for kids actually there, and the front office didn’t push too hard to correct the actual absences, since the school got money based on average daily attendance.

III.

2012. The smartphone revolution had made teaching next to impossible. Ms. Sweeney at Mulvaney High was desperate to do something, anything, to shut those satanic machines off. The kids would either text and Facebook constantly when she taught or cheat and share answers constantly when she gave a test or a quiz. It was at the point where now Ms. Sweeney only gave oral assessments to combat the cheating, which also made some students pay a little attention. But she needed something more to close the gap.

And that was why she was looking at a certain web page that mentioned frequencies, effective ranges, and shipping prices from China. Yes, Ms. Sweeney was planning to purchase a device that, when used, would make her a felony violator of the Communications Act of 1934.

She had done her research: not only did she know which bands to jam and what radius would be least likely to bleed over into other classrooms, she also had her legal coverage handled through her union dues. She also had a ready defense: if anyone busted her for jamming mobile signals, she planned to play the anti-terrorism card and claim that the Homeland Security Act of 2002 superseded the 1934 law.

Ms. Sweeney picked out a very reasonable cell jammer with 6 meter range and 3 antennas, for taking out the major signal types. At only $29.95 with $5.95 shipping and handling, it was just right for her budget. Oh, her eyes did linger on the $1995 one with 150-200 meter range, but she knew she’d be crucified if she tried to get away with using that bad boy.

3 weeks later, the jammer arrived and Ms. Sweeney was ready to put it to good use. She set it up at her desk where she could hit the on button without it being too obvious. It took a few seconds to warm up and then, whammo! Her cell phone showed zero signal. While it wouldn’t do anything for kids playing games that ran on the local device, it would kill off anything running on cellular networks.

And, just her luck, the access point just over her door was out of commission. No guest wireless for the phones that couldn’t reach a cell tower. Although her students wanted her to get it fixed, Ms. Sweeney was in no hurry to call in a ticket. She had a wired connection, after all, so it didn’t impact her web access.

The only impact to her access was the damned proxy server, always blocking her access to YouTube. There were tons of legitimate videos on that site that could be used in class, but access to that site was blocked by district policy. Ms. Sweeney’s workaround was to use a video downloader and copy those videos she thought she’d need to her local hard drive. There was another process to fill out a bunch of paperwork to get the videos approved and an exception made for them in the proxy, but that process was just too slow. Much easier to pirate the things.

Speaking of piracy, since the district no longer issued laptops with DVD players, Ms. Sweeney had to get pirated digital copies of all the films she wanted to show for her class. She didn’t feel like it was piracy, since she already owned a copy of the movie. Thanks to both Kickass Torrents and The Pirate Bay, she was well-stocked and prepped for her needs.

And now, her digital empire was perfected with the addition of the cell jammer. She waited until the kids in her first class had started to use their phones and then she turned it on. It was hilarious to watch them mouth back and forth to each other questions like, “Do you have signal?”, “Is your provider unavailable?”, and “What the hell’s going on?”

Deshaun Williams asked, “Miss, can I go to the bathroom?”

Ms. Sweeney said, “If you leave your cell phone with me.”

Deshaun said, “Never mind…”

After the kids had pretty much given up and put their phones away, Ms. Sweeney turned off the jammer. Intermittent problems were much harder to triangulate and slap with a fine not to exceed $112,500.

Now that the kids’ technology was turned off, Ms. Sweeney felt like she could finally teach again.

A few months later, when the administration introduced a brand new technology initiative to bring up standardized test scores by pushing study materials to the students via a cell phone app, Ms. Sweeney decided it was time to leave teaching and to consider a career in network security.

And so she did, pretty much doubling her teaching salary within the first 2 years. A little premature for “happily ever after”, but a good start.

What Does It Mean to Be American? Ask a Sikh!

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We Are Sikhs

I have many friends who are Sikh and many more co-workers of that faith. If you know anything of the history of that faith, you know that they share many ideals with Americans. Read about them, get to know about them, and discover something beautiful in the world.

I know that being a good person is not a contest, but I also know that the actions of others can serve to inspire. There are some things that I’ve known Sikhs to do regularly that make me want to work harder to help other people that I know. Thank you for the inspiration, Sikhs.

How Could Things Get Worse for the USA?

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I’m glad you asked that question. As I read over the news today, which includes reports of massive feuding between Trump and GOP Senators, I thought to myself that Trump’s behavior is no different from that of a Russian spy whose mission was to infiltrate as deeply as possible into the US Government and then commence to sabotage everything. The endgame for this mission is to eventually get fired from the role, but in such a way as to question the legitimacy of the firing and to leave a question mark in the minds of many if the firing actually happened, thereby plunging American politics into chaos.

So, here’s how I see a potential nightmare scenario playing out:

1. Trump stays in office and alienates everyone, and I mean everyone. So much so that his own party is ready to cut bait on him and seek his removal from office.
2. Mueller eventually releases his report and/or Congress decides to impeach and/or Congress decides to invoke the removal from power clause of the 25th Amendment.
3. Trump pardons himself and everyone else named on Mueller’s rap sheet.
4. Trump goes on a state visit to some European country.
5. Congress removes Trump from power in absentia.
6. Trump shows up in Moscow and immediately starts propaganda that he is a victim of an elitist coup and that he is still the POTUS.
7. The 27% of Americans that are basically going to support Trump until you pry their MAGA hats off of their cold, dead bodies constantly throw a wrench into the political works with declarations that whoever is in the White House is “not their president”.
8. These deplorable nutjobs all in “safe” GOP districts, so they elect representatives with similar deplorable nutjob views, who then go on to undermine everything done by either party.
9. Eventually, Putin’s doctors become so concerned about his popcorn intake that they put him on a low-sodium diet.

We’re then left with Trump spewing Russian propaganda from Moscow instead of from Washington DC, where he currently spews Russian propaganda. And if anyone wants to debate with me whether or not Trump is spewing Russian propaganda, try me. Trump’s response to the Russians kicking out hundreds of diplomats is classic “Radio Yerevan” stuff.

The politics of safe districts coupled with legal corporate lobbying – corporate lobbying was illegal prior to the 14th Amendment – has left us with politicians who are mostly beholden to extremist primary voters and huge campaign donors. That, in turn, left the USA highly vulnerable to what the Russians set up in 2016. I was skeptical at first, but now I am convinced that the Russians picked Donald Trump as their winner and the GOP took that bait. They took it all, hook, line, and sinker.

What we have right now is pretty bad, I’ll admit. But it could be much, much worse, as I’ve noted, above. Given the pace of the current spread of this gangrene, I figure something like this will have happened by this time next year. That’s a realistic assumption, so I’ll cut that in half and give it six months to play out. Which means this all goes down in the next two weeks, possibly…

The American ISIS

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On 12 August 2017, a white supremacist showed us all that his movement is basically the same as ISIS when he drove his car into a crowd of people. I would rather be writing about something else on a Sunday morning, but I feel compelled to call out the alt-right for what it is: the American version of ISIS.

Its history goes much further back in time than ISIS’, but we can see when they had a caliphate of sorts during the time of segregation. People who opposed them were beaten and murdered as they sought to preserve their regime through violence. As segregation fell apart, they struggled on, even when the police forces they once controlled now started to investigate their crimes.

These segregationists, Nazis, and other groups collectively labeled the alt-right are emboldened in the wake of the election of a president who has always winked and nodded in their direction. This same president refused to disavow them or to condemn them specifically after this act of terror. This president is one of them.

His basis for survival depends upon the American ISIS and, as a result, he has become their imam, their fearless leader, their führer. If he abandons them, he has no support of consequence in any other group. With them and their threats of violence if the polls do not go their way, he can keep a grip on power.

Senator Flake of Arizona recently pointed out the Pyrrhic, Faustian bargain that the Republican party has made in his recent book. In the wake of this tragedy, I hope that other Republicans join with Senator Flake in denouncing the violence of the alt-right and specifically setting themselves up as enemies of that movement. We do not see that courage or conviction in our spineless, pandering president. Let us at least see that in the Republican party itself, if it is not to go down in history as the gate that opened to let these deplorables into power.

I’m disappointed by many of Ted Cruz’ positions, but I do applaud him for taking a stand: https://www.cruz.senate.gov/?p=press_release&id=3280 What disappoints me now is that I do not see a similar statement on John Cornyn’s page. Mr. Cornyn, where is your stand against terrorism?

I ask that question out of genuine concern. If a politician is not going to stand up and declare he is the enemy of the American ISIS, we have to ask why. We have to ask so that we know where our leaders stand. We have to know if our leaders will actually show courage or if they are nothing more than craven vote-counters.

Where do your representatives stand?

Where do you stand?

It’s not just enough to condemn the violence, the movement that spawned and justified the violence has to be condemned. A failure to even say a word is enough to give these murderers strength. We don’t have to engage them in arguments. We simply have to say that we do not agree with them and that we oppose and condemn the destruction of the American ideal.

We must condemn the American ISIS for what it is. Dignity demands it of us.