Anderson turned around. He took a deep breath as he put his hands on his hips. Sara saw the NSA analysts in the back of the room had broke into a sweat but were now recovering.
“John, Sara we found something,” Mark quietly announced. Anderson and Sara walked over to the back of the room where Mark and J.D were sitting. Mr. Park also turned to his side to focus his attention on them.
Mark continued, “This cyberwarfare boss we told you about just did something not too long ago you should know about. NATPAC made a phone call to the same number in Beijing he had called before. Then the person in Beijing made a call right afterwards to Pyongyang. The same phone he had called several days ago. What was strange is that the number in Pyongyang then made a call through China to a phone in Seoul”
“Really?” Sara asked.
“What did they talk about?” Anderson asked.
“I don’t know. J.D. was not listening to the call. He was tracing the activity on the phone lines after-the-fact. All we know is that this chain of calls was made within the last hour,” Mark said.
Mr. Park got up and left the room. Sara took a look at his face. He was knitting his eyebrows.
“Does this mean that this NATPAC could have figured something else out? Could he have hacked us again?” Anderson said.
“No,” Mark said in a comfortingly firm way. “Although his lieutenant SLOTHMAN thinks he just hacked you, they have no additional information.”
“What do you mean SLOTHMAN thinks he hacked us.” Sara demanded.
Mark leaned back, “SLOTHMAN just tried to install a rootkit onto the SAD servers.”
“Rootkit? What’s a rootkit?” Anderson asked.
“A rootkit is something a hacker will try to install on a computer to give him access to the files and programs on that computer and servers. It would give him access as if he were a user or administrator. A rootkit also protects the hacker by modifying the code in the operating system so that his movements — what he’s looking at — goes undetected. The worst level of a rootkit is known as Ring 0, which means that the hacker has complete access to everything on a computer or network. We think that’s what SLOTHMAN was trying to get on your systems.”
“But what? He did not?” Sara asked.
“No. J.D had been monitoring your systems since we got here and—“
“Wait — how? Did we ever give you our Wi-Fi passwords or access to our server?”
“Uh — you don’t need to worry about that.” Mark said as he blushed.
“OK so you were saying that J.D. — “ Anderson said hurriedly.
“J.D. redirected SLOTHMAN to a honeypot.” Mark finished.
“What’s that?” Anderson asked.
“A honeypot is a computer that appears to be part of a network. It typically looks easily hackable. The hacker gets inside and starts looking around, thinking he’s hacking the network he was targeting. However he actually hacked a “fake computer” set up by someone as a trap. J.D. set up a honeypot that looks like a computer within your SAD network. But it’s really our trap, and SLOTHMAN is inside. J.D. will keep SLOTHMAN occupied for some time. The honeypot can also help us learn more about them. Once we do, we can figure out what they are doing. Maybe we can help you with that facility too.”
Sara turned to Anderson, “John — if you think about it, this doesn’t make sense. Why are they so focused on learning about us? Fine — Tom is in there, but if you take a step back, why us? First of all, China has nuclear weapons. If they want to help North Korea, why not just help them build those weapons? Or if they wanted to learn more about our nuclear weapons program, why aren’t they hacking Los Alamos?”
Sara had been thinking about this for a while. Los Alamos was where the US performed its classified scientific research.
Anderson looked at Mark, “Are they trying to get into Los Alamos?”
Mark shook his head slowly “No. We monitor it closely.”
Anderson looked down and said while in thought, “It’s true. It does not really make sense that this Cyberwarfare group is so protective of the North Koreans in general. Maybe you guys can figure that out.”
“That’s what we’re working on.” Mark said with a smile.
“I’ll be right back. I want to get some coffee,” Sara said. She was tired already from the day’s events.
“I’ll go with you,” Mark said as he got up.
Anderson turned around and went back to the middle of the room, staring at the screen that was jogging through dark woodlands.
Sara and Mark walked through the bright hallways towards the kitchen.
“I bet you didn’t expect to have such an exciting day when you woke up this morning,” she said to Mark.
“I did not. But I bet you didn’t either,” he replied.
Sara looked down as they walked.
“The one who really walked into something completely unexpected was Tom,” she said.
They both remained quiet until they arrived at the kitchen. Inside, Sara started filling up a cup for herself.
“J.D. seems to be unstoppable on his computer. He’s doing all of these things I never even knew you could do before,” Sara said.
“Yeah. He’s good.”
“Who is this NATPAC anyway? Do you think he can figure that out?”
“That’s what I’m working on.”
Sara paused. Mark was staring at the far wall in the kitchen.
“Why do they use usernames like that?”
“It helps protect their identities. If we knew who NATPAC was we would have an easier time dealing with him. We could watch him more closely.”
“Or do you think he’s helping protect others in the Chinese government?”
Mark paused. “You’re sharp. That could be a possibility too, now that I think about it.”
Suddenly J.D. appeared in the kitchen.
“Sorry guys. I wanted to take a break too.”
“No problem. Join us.” Mark said.
Sara continued her thought. “Mark, do you use a username or handle like NATPAC does?”
“I actually do.”
“You really have one too?”
“Everyone wears a mask out in the world, and some even like it. In our line of work, it is essential.”
“What is your handle?”
“DEMOCRITUS.”
“Where did you get that?”
“He was an ancient Greek philosopher. He united two separate philosophies that had existed in conflict with each other. Before him a philosopher named Parmenides argued that nothing around us ever really moved or changed. His idea sounded something like — if you build a house out of wood from a tree, that wood is unchanged after you have a house. It is the same matter, it just used to be a tree and now it’s a wall in a house. You modified it and it seems different to you but you did not really change the wood. Another philosopher named Heraclitus believed that everything around us was in a constant state of change — everything was moving. He famously said you could never step into the same river twice. Democritus solved the contradiction between the two philosophies by coming up with the idea of the atom as we generally know it even today. This idea reconciled the two philosophies because he argued that atoms do not change but the matter they created did change. This could explain both the wood in the house and the water moving around in the river.”
Sara thought about it, “So he brought together the idea of something moving and something staying still—“
“Exactly,” Mark replied with a smile.
“How do you know so much about the ancient Greeks and philosophy?”
“I studied classics in college.”
Sara looked at him wide-eyed. “But I thought you were a mathematics or computer science standout. I thought that’s what you would have been studying in school.”