“Yes, your honor,” Kravitz replied.
“We are adjourned.” The judge got up and walked back into his chambers.
“Okay,” Charles said to John, “the judge believes the evidence we presented today. It’s very unusual for the court to approve sanctions like this, so this is a major victory. You’re protected under free speech and freedom of the press. Start spreading the word.”
John opened his cell phone and punched in a number.
“We’re good to go,” he said. “Put everything back online.”
Once we arrived back at the cabin, John brought Tia and me into the kitchen.
“We won a battle today, but the war continues. We are going to need a bulletproof firewall for our website. Can the two of you work together and get that done for me?” John asked.
“How soon do you need it?” I asked.
“Yesterday,” John replied.
“No, I’m serious,” I said.
“So am I,” John replied. “Now that the lawsuit has failed to silence us, the cyber-attacks will begin, probably today.”
“How extensive do you want this firewall to be?” I asked.
“Let’s start with single wall, built so we can expand to double and eventually triple wall, with reverse trackers and Trojans from the beginning,” John said. “It has to be different from what you’ve done in the past because they are already familiar with that.”
Tia turned to me. “What’s he talking about, done in the past?”
I looked back at her. “I’ll have to explain later,” I said, “It’s a long story.”
“A triple firewall?” Tia exclaimed. “That’s what they use at the Pentagon. What is it you know about their firewall?”
“More than I’m comfortable with,” I replied.
“Comfortable with?” she said loudly. “Come on, Carl, you can’t leave it at that. Tell me!”
“Later,” I said firmly. “I promise, I’ll tell you everything.”
“Damn right you will!” she said with that fierce look on her face.
I turned back to John. “I’ve got a few ideas I’ve wanted to try.”
“Excellent,” John said. “Let me know as soon as it’s ready.”
Tia and I settled back into the computer stations in the communications room again. I started to map out what I wanted in the firewall, while Tia started to program the reverse trackers and Trojans. As we completed a section of code, we ran it through the compiler and corrected the errors it pointed out. Then we set it up in an emulator program where we could actually try the software out in near real world conditions. That uncovered issues we hadn’t seen before, so the source code was modified again, recompiled and run back through the emulator.
We broke for a quick lunch and later for dinner. The work was both exhilarating and exhausting at the same time. Around two in the morning, I noticed Tia had fallen asleep. I let her rest while I worked on. At four, my brain froze up and I had to stop. I stretched out on the floor and quickly fell asleep.
Tia woke me at a little after six in the morning. We went upstairs for quick showers and breakfast, then back to work. At seven, the phone at the communications officer’s desk started to ring. Alex wasn’t in yet so I went over and answered it.
“Hello?” There was a pause. “Carl?”
“Yeah.” It was John.
“Where’s Alex, my communications officer?” he asked, as the padded door to the communications room opened.
“He’s here,” I said as Alex walked in, “in the bathroom I think.”
“That’s okay,” John said. “You’re the one I need to talk to. Where are we on the firewall?”
“Making good progress,” I said, “we should be able to start beta testing some time tonight.”
“How about this afternoon?” John asked.
“Maybe,” I replied, “with a lot of luck.”
“We’re under serious cyber-attack and we have no idea where it is coming from or how to stop it. At the rate things are going, we will lose the website sometime this afternoon. We’re currently at forty percent functionality. I’ve got thirty computer techs here and they can’t keep up with the degradation of service. As soon as we fix one thing, two more things go down. We need that new firewall.”
“I’m on it,” I said. “As soon as we get close, I’ll give you a call.”
“Good,” John said. “I’ve arranged for a helicopter to fly you and Tia to the media center as soon as it’s done, so give me a half an hour notice to get the chopper to you. We’ll need the program on CDs to load it onto the servers.”
“Will do,” I said. John hung up. I looked at the phone and replaced it in the receiver. Alex stood in the doorway.
“Thanks for covering for me,” he said. “Family issues.”
“No sweat,” I replied.
Tia and I went back to work on the new firewall. At a little past noon, Alex brought sandwiches and coffee down from the kitchen.
“I thought the rule was no food in the room.” I said as he placed our lunch on a desk next to us.
“That’s the rule all right,” he said. “Anything else I can get for you?”
Tia and I laughed. “We’re good, thanks,” Tia said.
Just before four, I had Alex call John to send the helicopter. We ran one last test through the emulator, made a few small corrections, recompiled and linked everything into a final executable file. We heard the helicopter blades above us as we made the fourth copy on a CD.
John had a large section of the parking lot of the media center cleared so the helicopter could land. We ducked down as we ran under the moving blades.
“Here’s where we are,” John said as we came into the main computer room. “The website died about an hour ago. We unplugged from the T3 line, shut everything down and rebooted from emergency startup disks. There were so many viruses, worms and Trojans that we decided to wipe and reformat the hard drives and reload the operating systems on the servers. We have everything for the website on disks but none of it is loaded yet.”
“Perfect,” I said. “Let’s load the new firewall first, and then we can add the website.” I handed the four CDs to the computer techs, one for each of the four servers.
“Do we have a master console?” I asked.
“Over here,” one of the techs replied motioning us over.
I sat down and typed in the communications link I had programmed into the firewall program. Once the servers were up I activated the link.
“Okay,” I said, “this console will monitor the performance of the firewall and show us any intrusions, including source and location.”
The computer techs loaded the website back onto the servers and we activated the website. “Website is live,” one of the techs reported.
“Checking functionality,” another said. After a few minutes she reported back, “Functionality is 100 %.”
The computer techs cheered.
“Now comes the real test,” I said.
I sat at the master console watching with Tia standing behind me. After the website was up for five minutes the cyber-attacks started. The master console reported each of the attempted intrusions. So far nothing was getting through. A box at the top left of the screen displayed the number of attempted intrusions into the system, both current and total. A similar box on the upper right showed the number of successful breaches into the system.
The number of attempted intrusions climbed rapidly as the number of successful breaches remained at zero. Within two minutes the program began reporting the source and location of the attempted intrusions from the reverse trackers we had programmed into the system.