White-Hot Hack (Kate and Ian #2)(76)

Her only hope was that he would call before they reached the airport, because Kate had an uneasy feeling that despite what Zach had said, he planned to take her with him anyway.





CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

As the malware moved through each system, the wiper utility destroyed parts of it before linking it with the next. Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, went dark twenty minutes after Columbia, and Raleigh, North Carolina, followed moments later. If the outages continued, Virginia would soon be affected. Once the hacktivists finished taking control of the utilities’ networks, they wouldn’t be linked to each other but rather the botnet, which would leave them holding the key. It would be the largest denial of service attack in history, and if they wanted to, they could hold the grid captive indefinitely. The attackers would make their demands, and the United States would have little choice but to give in to them. Freeing Joshua Morrison from prison would surely be at the top of the list.

The mood of the war room turned frantic. Voices rose and fingers flew across keyboards as members of the Cyber Action Team worked to stay one step ahead of the attacks.

Ian had an idea, but he didn’t think Phillip would approve it.

The Pentagon most certainly wouldn’t.

The president wouldn’t be too keen on it either.

The Department of Homeland Security would probably have plenty to say about it.

But no one could deny the United States was woefully unprepared for an attack on the power grid. Until it actually happened, there was no way to put an exact protocol in place for how they would defend themselves. Currently a team of specially trained cyber experts were working frantically to deploy botnet-removal programs to scrub the infected systems and bring them back online, but that could take hours, maybe days, and the reactive solution did nothing to thwart additional outages. All they were doing at this point was playing catch-up.

Ian shared his idea with Charlie. “We don’t know exactly which substation or utility they’ll attack next, but we know where every single substation, utility, and power cooperative is located, right? And we have access to those systems?”

“Yes.”

“We need to take them offline ourselves. As soon as possible.”

“You think we should take the grid offline?”

“Not the whole Eastern Interconnection. Just everything between here and DC. If they take the system down, the malware stops certain processes from running and annihilates parts of the hard drive, which means we’ll have a mess when we try to bring them back online. But if the utility owners can power off their own systems at least there won’t be any damage left behind. If they’re already locked out, we’ll have to hack in and take them down ourselves.”

Charlie nodded. “That would stop the botnet from growing and give us time to catch up and scrub everything.”

“We’ll still be dark, but the overall outage will be smaller and more contained. And we’ll be in control of it.”

“Think Phillip will go for it?” Charlie asked.

“I don’t know. Let’s go find out.”

Phillip pondered the suggestion. “How many hours would we be down?”

“At least forty-eight. Maybe even seventy-two. We’ll have to remove the botnet and all the malware. Some of the older systems will undoubtedly have difficulty coming back online. If we get started as soon as possible, we might be able to reduce that.”

“I’d have to get approval,” Phillip said. “From… so many people.”

Ian cocked his head toward Charlie, and they opened their laptops. “We’ll just get started while you’re doing that.” If there was anything Phillip should know by now, it was how bad his two best hackers were when it came to following the rules and how hard it would be to rein them in.

Phillip sighed, the stress and exhaustion of the past twenty-four hours etched clearly on his face. “Shut these *s down. I’ll worry about the rest.”

“That’s the spirit,” Ian said.



For the next hour, everyone in the room worked without stopping. The agent running the map of the grid used blue lights to show the cities that were dark as the result of their defensive measures. Ian could no longer hear the din of the war room and was only marginally aware of the spike in noise level as substations in Norfolk, Richmond, and Alexandria went dark. But this time the lights were blue and the agents cheered.

Ian smiled and breathed a sigh of relief because he had more than one reason to celebrate. Kate should be somewhere in West Virginia by now, far away from the danger of a blackout and within an hour of connecting with her dad. As soon as they got things under control in Washington, he would go to his wife.

He pulled out his phone to confirm her location and stared at the app for a moment, forcing himself not to panic but trying to think of a single reason why it would say she was offline.

And no matter how hard he tried to come up with a good one, he couldn’t.





CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

“I bet this car can really haul,” Zach said, as if they were two friends taking a road trip. He revved the engine a bit, and Kate would have bet money he was wishing he could see what the car could do. She stole a glance at the speedometer as it hovered at eighty and then rose to eighty-five. Higher, she thought. Trip that alarm.

Kate scoffed. “I’ve driven much faster than you’re going.”