Cyber Knights 1.0

1

Shortly before its takedown by the FBI and other agencies, a small number of security researchers and law enforcement officials around the world had been noticing an unusual advert appearing intermittently in the services section of the Silk Road, the notorious criminal marketplace hidden deep within the Tor network. The advert was simple.

As it didn’t offer malware, credit card hash dumps, hard drugs, weapons, or child pornography, most researchers moved on to more tempting targets. Besides, it wasn’t a permanent feature, popping up a few days every month or two before once again disappearing. With other, more nefarious sorts to deal with, no one charged with policing the Internet who bothered to read it when it did crop up considered the character they dubbed “Sealion” to be much of a threat.

Despite being one of the smaller departments of state, everyone who worked in the unimposing building at the far end of Whitehall knew that the current minister was rather proud of his position. Therefore, violating any of the myriad of rules with which he ran his office was something none of his staff dared to do unless they were prepared to deal with the ire of his ever-vigilant gatekeeper, Terri Campbell, or the unbridled wrath of Edward Telford, the minister’s permanent undersecretary and attack dog. This was why the minister was quite taken aback when Bryan Morton, his director of communications and perhaps the most risk-averse member of his staff, paid no heed whatsoever to Terri Campbell’s effort to stop Morton as he rushed past her desk and burst into the minister’s office without so much as knocking.

Even before Telford, who had been preparing the minister for a meeting with the PM later that afternoon, could utter a single word, Morton had slammed the door behind him and started pacing back and forth in front of the minister’s desk.

For his part, the minister could only stare at Morton with an expression that quickly changed from utter shock to red-faced rage.

“We’ve got a problem,” Morton muttered as he spun about and retraced his steps without bothering to look up at either the minister or Telford.

“You’re bloody right we’ve got a problem,” Telford growled. “To start with…”

Coming to a sudden stop, Morton ignored Telford as he stared at the minister. “The Sun is about to run a story that’s going to make what Anthony Weiner did look tame.”

The minister’s earlier anger turned to confusion. “Who the hell is Anthony Weiner?”

Setting aside his surprise over the minister’s inability to associate that name to the scandal in New York that had put a quick and ignoble end to an otherwise promising political career, Telford glanced over at his political master. “He’s a former American congressman who was caught using a private Twitter account to solicit sex with women.”

When he saw the vacant look on the minister’s face, Morton assumed the man known to be something of a Luddite had no idea what a Twitter account was. Eager to show off his expertise when it came to enlightening the technologically challenged, Morton began to explain without bothering to wait for the minister to ask him. “It’s a microblogging service—”

He was cut short as the minister slammed his fist down. “I damn well know what Twitter is,” he snapped. “What’s that and this American got to do with me?”

Never having managed to develop the thick hide a member of the minister’s staff needed to withstand the scathing vitriol the minister often unleashed on those who were foolish enough to arouse his ire, Morton drew back. By the time he had managed to mentally regroup, he found himself facing two men who were on the verge of verbally skinning him alive. “I just got off the phone with a friend of mine over at the Sun,” Morton began quickly before either man had a chance to lash out. “He told me a journalist named Sue Oliver is working on a story that links the minister to a Twitter account used to post invitations to young girls.”

Frowning and without taking the time to think, the minister blurted out the first thing that popped into his head. “What kind of invitations?”

Shooting Telford a quick sideways glance, which was returned blandly, Morton hesitated as he waited for Telford to inform their boss of the obvious. When he saw the career bureaucrat had no intention of doing so, the young technocrat drew in a deep breath. “Invitations to have sex with him — I mean you, Minister.”

Dumbfounded, the minister blinked furiously as he gave his head a quick shake. “That’s preposterous!”

“That’s what I said,” Morton replied.

“Did this friend of yours bother to tell you how Sue Oliver managed to find these tweets?” Telford asked as the minister was recovering from Morton’s stunning revelation.

“There are no such tweets!” the minister snapped as he rounded on Telford.

Before responding, Telford took a moment to study the minister. Whereas the minister tended to think in terms of black and white, Telford knew they lived in a world composed of various shades of gray, a world where even a politician who strove to be as pure as the driven snow all too often gave in to the temptation to use tactics and his position to achieve ends that were less than honorable. Suspecting something was afoot, he turned his full attention back to Morton. “Get back in touch with this friend of yours and find out all you can about Sue Oliver’s sources and their reliability.”

Nodding, Morton looked over at the minister, waiting to be dismissed.

Telford sighed. “Today, Bryan, if you don’t mind,” he muttered.

“Oh, yes, right.” With that, the harried young communications director spun about and beat a hasty retreat.

“And you?” the minister asked as he turned his attention to his principal advisor — a man he hoped would help him in his bid to be promoted to one of the more prestigious departments.

Before answering, Telford came to his feet. “Whilst our eager young technocrat is running around, flapping his wings about like a headless chicken, I think it might be best if I kicked over a few rocks to see what I can find out about this Twitter account Oliver claims you have.”

“There is no such account,” the minister snapped. “Anyone who says there is one is lying.”

Knowing it was an exercise in futility to argue with the minister when his knickers were in a twist, Telford excused himself. Making his way to his own office, he retrieved the pay-as-you-go mobile from the locked drawer of his desk, one he used whenever he needed to make a discreet call. After informing his secretary he’d be out for a while, he headed for the door without telling her or anyone else where he was going. Whereas Morton would go about making his enquiries with all the finesse of a bull charging a red cape, Telford’s contacts understood the need for discretion.

2

Despite having spent far too much of his youth wandering around the damp streets of Belfast with hair down to his collar, a Browning pistol nestled down the back of his jeans, and a barely passable Irish accent, Edward Telford had never before set foot across the very unobtrusive threshold of the Special Forces Club. An elderly but still very trim porter with startling sapphire eyes greeted him with careful courtesy at the door and enquired after his business.

“I have a meeting with Andy Webb.”

“Ah, you’ve been expected, sir. Please wait here.” With a small smile, the porter vanished in search of Edward’s host.

Left with nothing better to do, Telford took to studying the black-and-white photos of SOE agents that lined the walls of the entrance hall. In pride of place a posed picture of a stunning young woman with dark hair and haunting eyes drew his attention. Beneath it, a discreet brass plaque gave little more than the beauty’s name, Violette Szabo, and then two simple letters, GC.

“I expect you know her story,” a soft-spoken voice just behind his shoulder mused, causing Telford to nearly jump.

After managing to settle himself, Telford turned and offered his hand to his old friend Andy Webb, a man who, despite his age, still had the ability to move with a feline subtleness. Telford concluded as he reflected ruefully upon his own receding hairline and spreading paunch that other than a few more lines at the corners of his eyes and a touch of gray around the temples, Webb had changed little over the last thirty years.

“I’ve heard some of the stories concerning her,” Telford admitted.

“She put our little adventures firmly in the shade,” Andy replied as he took a moment to glance at the photo with the sort of reverence a soldier affects when reflecting upon a comrade. After a moment of silence, Andy turned his full attention back to Telford, sporting a gentle smile that reminded him of some of the more entertaining instances of their shared past before he was gripped firmly by the arm and escorted into the bar.

Within a few minutes, the two men had settled in a quiet corner under the stern gaze of “Wild Bill” Donovan. Both took a moment to savor the large Bushmills in front of them before Andy decided to cut to the chase. “So whilst it’s always lovely to see you, Edward, what has led a senior Whitehall mandarin to seek me out in the middle of the day and honor me with his company?”

Telford toyed with his glass for a moment before posing his question. “I gather you’re now something of a specialist in dealing with cybercrimes and hackers.”

Andy stared for a moment before bursting out laughing. “Cyber? Do you mean that someone in Her Majesty’s government is actually becoming interested enough in finding out what it really means, rather than just trotting out the word cyber like some magic talisman with a budget attached?”

Telford failed to share Andy’s laughter. Instead, he paused uncomfortably, still staring into the depths of his glass. “My minister has a little problem we need some help with.” He paused, struggling to overcome the ingrained habits he had developed over the years to protect and serve politicians and senior government officials, often from their own miscalculations or stupidity. “It’s of a personal nature.”

The look on his old friend’s face abruptly stilled the mirth that had been bubbling in Andy Webb’s eyes. “Tell me about it.”

For the next ten minutes, Telford haltingly revealed everything he knew whilst Andy sat silent and still before him. When at last he came to a shuddering halt, he paused, gulped down the rest of the fiery liquid he had been cradling, and asked a question he was not sure he wanted to hear the answer to. “Is it feasible?”

Unsure, Andy asked a question of his own. “That he did it?”

“No! That he’s been set up.”

“God yeah!” Andy proclaimed louder than Telford cared for before launching into a description of the most likely attack vectors, stopping only when he noticed Telford’s eyes were glazing over. Pausing, he took a moment to recalibrate his pitch, switching to nontechnical phraseology he expected even a former Guards officer like Telford would be able to follow. Only after seeing his renewed efforts were still not gaining any traction, Andy sighed as he abandoned the effort and turned his attention instead to more practical matters. “If we’ve any hope of sorting this out, I’m going to need all his home computers, laptops, tablets, and personal phones. In fact, everything he touches that has a processor, every storage device, every login, and every password for every account.”

Telford frowned. “He’s not going to like that.”

Leaning forward, Andy locked eyes with Telford. “Got a better idea, mate?”

Telford’s shoulders drooped. “I’ll persuade him.”

“I also want a letter of authorization,” Andy added as his voice took on a more ominous tone while he was easing back in his seat.

“Why?”

“Protection. People tend to get a bit twitchy about ministers’ computers. There’s the Computer Misuse Act, RIPA, and a host of other bits of legislation that any god-fearing investigator can swiftly fall foul of, especially since the Leveson inquiry. I’ll send you a draft for him to sign.”

By now, Telford’s shoulders were slumped in utter defeat. Then a thought occurred to him. “I don’t want anyone else to know what you’re up to.”

“Sorry, mate. I’m going to need some help on this if you want it done right and you want it done fast,” Andy snapped even as he was holding his hand up to forestall the objection he saw forming on Telford’s lips. “You’ve no need to worry about Tommy. He’s cleared, and I trust him.”

Realizing he was in no position to object, Telford conceded the point before moving on to his next concern. “How fast can you complete your investigation?”

“Give me a week. Oh, yeah, and as to my fee, it’s eleven hundred a day and a future favor when I need it. Do we have a deal?”

Telford sighed as he nodded reluctantly, too battered to even try to bicker over the day rate. “Seeing as I’ve little choice but to say yes, the least you can do is treat me to another Bushmills, a large one this time, if you please.”

3

Edward Telford was not in the habit of visiting the offices of second-tier staffers. Whenever he had the need to discuss something with them, they trooped into his office like obedient schoolchildren summoned by the headmaster. So when, almost a week since his meeting with Andy Webb, he nonchalantly wandered into the cubbyhole Bryan Morton thought of as an office, the young director of communications knew he was about to be treated to a right royal bollocking.

After closing the door and settling into the only other chair in Morton’s office, Telford fixed the nervous young man with a stare that would ordinarily have caused him to fidget. He didn’t, however, for he knew why the minister’s chief advisor was there and was more than prepared to stand his ground.

“I’m not going to ask you why you chose to set up an interview for the minister with the BBC without first going through me,” Telford declared with a strained airiness.

Determined to defend his decision to talk the minister into launching a preemptive media strike, Morton drew himself up. “The minister happens to agree with me.” Wisely, the young man stopped short of adding, for a change.

“Sue Oliver’s story isn’t a story — not yet, at least,” Telford countered. “Even if her editors do decide to run with it, it won’t be on the front page. Oliver is a hack. She’s the kind of journalist who makes the paparazzi look good.”

“While that may be true, if we don’t get out there ahead of this before it’s a story, the opposition will hammer us once the Sun runs it. When that happens, we’ll be on defense, which these days, with 24-7 media and bloggers, is not where we want to be.”

“Respond is the operative word here,” Telford growled in the menacing tone he used to cow errant staffers. “We respond with the full story, one that not only provides the public with the facts but presents the minister as the victim of a vicious attack orchestrated by his political foes using a fraudulent Web account.”

“Is he an innocent victim?” Morton asked rhetorically.

Rather than answering him, Telford came to his feet. “Call whoever it is you’re talking to at the BBC and cancel the interview. While Oliver’s story might be printed in the Sun, I repeat, might be printed, you can rest assured an interview in which a minister claims he is the hapless victim of character assassination without a shred of evidence to support that claim will be on the front page of every newspaper in the country.” With that, Telford headed out of the room, stopping by his own office only long enough to let his secretary know he had some personal business he needed to attend to. He didn’t, of course, at least not personal business that was his. Like so much else he did, the personal business he took care of was the minister’s. In this case, it was running the source of the Twitter account to ground.

When he was once more alone in his cubbyhole, Morton took to brooding. Convinced his approach to the minister’s problem was the only way to handle it and determined to prove himself to the rest of the staff, as soon as he was sure Telford was gone, Morton called Jenny Jones’s production assistant at the BBC to confirm the time he needed to have the minister at the studio for his interview. And rather than run the risk of being interrupted by Telford, Morton decided to wait until he was alone in the car with the minister and heading over to the studio to go over the notes he was preparing for him.

On the other side of town, Telford once again found himself clutching a large Bushmills beneath the photo of “Wild Bill” Donovan. Only this time, Andy Webb had brought a colleague along. Whereas Andy was slim and unprepossessing, his colleague looked like a cross between a New York fire hydrant and a British bulldog, creating something of contrast to come to mind as the image of Little and Large popped into his head.

“Tommy, this is Edward. Edward, Tommy Tyler.” Andy made the introductions as Telford cautiously offered his hand across the table, only to find it brutally gripped in a grubby paw and pumped with all the finesse of a jackhammer whilst Tommy’s mouth took off with equal speed.

“Pleased to meet you, Eddie. Andy said the two of you served together in Ireland.” Then, without pausing, Tommy pitched headlong into the issue at hand. “Well, it seems your man’s been well and truly stitched. At first sight, he’s as guilty as sin.”

Baffled, Telford took a quick glance over at Andy before turning his full attention back to Tommy. “Excuse me?”

Whilst Telford was painfully aware that not everyone saw the need to gently open a difficult conversation as carefully as senior civil servants were wont to do, the speed of Tommy’s verbal tsunami left him shell-shocked as the stout little Welshman blithely ploughed ahead.

“I did say at first sight,” Tommy emphasized before pausing to catch his breath and take a sip of his beer. “All I can say is thank God for backups. At least your man did something right. Anyway…”

At this point, Andy placed a hand on his colleague’s arm in an effort to arrest Tommy’s runaway diatribe. “What Tommy is saying is that it’s just as you suspected. The minister was very professionally set up, after which the bad guys did a wonderful job of making it appear that they had never been there.”

“Can you tell me how you were able to confirm this?”

At the question, Tommy necked down the rest of his pint, set his glass aside, and grinned. “’Cos they’re not as good as me, that’s why,” Tommy proclaimed proudly. “Like I said, thank God for backups, ’cos they’d pretty much left his laptop cleaner than a pig’s whistle, apart from all the dodgy accounts and photos, of course.”

Sensing his colleague was about to launch into a deep technical description of his own cleverness, Andy quickly caught his attention with a crisp twenty-pound note and asked Tommy if he’d mind going to the bar for refills, hoping that whilst he was doing so, he could explain the basics to Telford in terms he would be able to understand.

Taking his cue, Tommy snatched up the note and left.

Andy explained, “The minister backed up his computer from time to time and then, thankfully, disconnected the backup drive. As a result, we were able to re-create previous states of his laptop. What we found wasn’t pretty. It all started with an innocent e-mail complaining about a planning application he’d received from a constituent who we’ll call Mr. Angry. Attached was a nice little PDF containing the local council minutes, as well as something a tad nastier. Just to be thorough, we tracked it back. Mr. Angry does exist, but he never sent the e-mail the minister received.”

“Anyway, he was well and truly rooted,” Tommy proclaimed as he barged back into the conversation even as he dumped fresh drinks on the table. “Rooted, key logger, control of the camera, microphone, the bloody works,” he declared with an almost childish relish.

“The works?” Telford asked as he turned to Andy for a translation.

Andy cleared his throat apologetically. “Let’s just say you might advise the minister not to sit in front of his laptop wearing nothing more than his vest and underpants in the future,” he said, even as he tapped a bulging brown envelope on the table, now dampened by Tommy’s beer.

“Show me.”

“Here?”

“On second thought, I can wait,” Telford mumbled as he struggled to purge a horrid image out of his mind and turn his full attention back to the issue at hand. “Who did it?”

“No idea, mate, but—” Tommy paused as if a stray thought had suddenly occurred to him even as he was ignoring the not-so-gentle jabs of his boss under the table. “Has he been pissing off the Syrians?”

Telford in turn snorted with laughter. “He’s not FCO, much as he’d like to be, and the Syrians don’t have any votes in his constituency. Why do you ask?”

“The malware we came across reported back to a C&C server in Cyprus that just may have links with the Syrian Electronic Army.”

Telford turned for a further translation to a decidedly uncomfortable-looking Andy.

“It looks like the attack was staged through Cyprus by someone with links to the Syrian Electronic Army who are a bunch of pro-Assad hackers,” Andy explained.

“And you know that because?” Telford asked warily as he and Andy turned their attention back to a suddenly blushing Tommy.

“I took a quick peek.”

“I don’t want to hear this,” Telford muttered as he squirmed about in his seat before sitting up sharply. “At the moment, all I’m interested in is clearing the minister of this excrement and stopping it from happening again in the future,” he snapped.

“Oh, that’s easy,” Tommy replied, paying no heed at all to Telford’s sharp retort. “Well, stopping it in the future, anyway. You need to tell your minister he needs to patch regularly, get a decent antivirus package like Norton, don’t open unexpected docs or click on embedded links, and, most importantly, don’t use the same password for everything.”

“He had antivirus,” Telford interjected. “He spent the better part of a day going about, bragging to everyone who would listen about how he downloaded it for free.”

Tommy snorted into his beer whilst even Andy looked on, making no effort to hide his grin. “You get what you pay for, Eddie,” Tommy added before taking a long pull on his pint.

“But it was still supposed to protect him from viruses and hackers!” Telford snapped.

“He wasn’t the only one attacked,” Tommy blurted, unaware he was digging an even deeper hole with his peace offering.

Even as Tommy opened his mouth to continue, a sharp kick to his shin put paid to whatever further comments he was about to make. Instead, Andy posed a question to Telford, ignoring the reproachful look of his colleague.

“It’s like this, Edward. Think of the Internet as a battlefield.”

Telford nodded cautiously.

“Like any soldier who’s switched on, it’s a good idea to wear body armor when you’re outside the wire. Right?”

“That makes sense,” he agreed.

“As Tommy said, you get what you pay for,” Andy concluded as a ghost of a smile tugged at the corners of his lips. “And even then, you still have to know when to duck,” he quickly added before taking a sip of his drink.

For a long moment, Telford considered this bit of military wisdom before returning once more to his goal. “I trust you have evidence to support all this.”

“We do.”

“Will it stand up in court if necessary?”

“We worked to legal forensic standards. It’s bombproof, unlike the minister’s laptop.”

4

Early the next day, having pieced together the plan he would use to dispose of the problem that Sue Oliver’s story had created by relying on the same care and meticulous approach he had always employed in such instances, Telford settled into addressing the next challenge he needed to deal with — the early morning traffic on the M4.

Ignoring the antics of the frustrated drivers around him, he once more went over just how things would play out. Avoiding a scandal that would bring a promising political career to a screeching halt would all come down to a simple matter of timing and wording. With the information Andy had provided him, Telford planned on crafting a statement exposing the fraud being used to sully the minister’s reputation that he would have one of his associates, someone who was not on the minister’s staff, release. By using another agency to put the word out, one the public expected to deal with such crimes, the minister’s name would simply be one of many mentioned in the statement rather than being the banner headline. Though he expected the press would ask the minister to comment on the sordid affair, Telford was confident that even an idiot like Morton would be able to handle that. The man, after all, was supposed to be the director of communications, a charter he had thus far demonstrated little of the sort of adroitness Telford expected from members of the staff he oversaw.

Satisfied all was in order, Telford checked the time, rebuking himself when he saw he had missed the top-of-the-hour news. Reaching out, he switched on the radio with the volume down and listened for a moment, just to be sure his teenaged daughter and her friends hadn’t fiddled with the stations the night before. Upon hearing the voice of the BBC newsreader, Telford turned the volume back up and settled back to listen while he slogged his way into the heart of London along with the countless others inching their way along the motorway sporting expressions better suited to the cast of a zombie flick than the entrepreneurs, investment bankers, solicitors, office staff, and government bureaucrats who ran the nation.

It took him several seconds before he realized what Jenny Jones, a political commentator and presenter for the BBC, was talking about.

“I imagine when you are covering a story like this, you must be careful, lest you do damage to the reputations of the people mentioned in a story, as well as your own,” Jones intoned in that voice people at the Beeb thought made them sound as if they were intelligent.

“That’s right, Jenny,” the woman interviewee replied. “I am a firm believer in the need to get a story absolutely right rather than being first out of the blocks with it.”

Unable to help himself, Telford scoffed. “Bollocks!”

“It was for that reason and the damage the minister’s reputation would suffer that I held back running with the story concerning the sexting messages he sent out to a number of young girls,” the interviewee continued.

The words minister and sexting caused Telford to involuntarily lurch forward.

“I wasn’t going to run with the story until I had an opportunity to chat with the two girls, a college student and a former campaign volunteer, who claim they had received sextings from the minister. Your interview with the minister in the last hour in which he denied he knew anything about the ‘Minister-O-Luv’ account, however, left me little choice but to come forward with what I already know.”

“Did these messages include photos?”

“Yes, a number of them, none of which show the minister’s face.”

“Then how do you know it was the minister?”

“The background. One clearly shows the entrance to the ministry along with its address, and the other was actually taken inside his office. Unfortunately, they are of such a nature that I cannot use them in my story.”

With nothing better to do as he waited for the traffic to move, Keith Richards took to looking around. To his surprise, the red-faced middle-aged man in the Volvo Estate next to him was furiously pounding on the steering wheel with both fists as he screamed at the radio. “While I don’t know what your destination is, mate,” Richards chuckled to himself, “I’m just glad I’ll not be there when you reach it.”

5

Before closing the door to the vacant cubbyhole that had been Bryan Morton’s office, Terri Campbell took one last look around. There was no trace left of the eager young man that she could see, just as there would be no memory of him once a new minister had been appointed and he got around to hiring a new director of communications. With a sigh, Terri closed the door and headed back to her office.

Her quest to extract vengeance on the minister for taking what he considered to be a principled stand against nepotism had not factored in the sort of collateral damage that transpired in the wake of the scandal she had set in motion when she had hired the anonymous Sealion. After years of government service, Terri Campbell should have known a self-assured young lad like Bryan would have jumped at the first opportunity that came his way to demonstrate to the minister he was a key part of the team by doing something like he did. “Oh well,” Terri muttered to herself as she entered the outer office leading to the minister’s and took a seat at her desk. “Maybe next time he’ll listen to his betters.”

“What’s that you’re going on about?” Telford asked as he was leaving the minister’s office with a crate in his hands.

After giving her head a shake, she looked over to where Telford was setting a box containing the last of the former minister’s personal items down.

“That’s the last of it. Finished with young Morton’s office already?” Telford asked.

Terri looked up at him through her lashes while sporting a sly little smile. “The wee lamb wasn’t here long enough to accumulate the odds and sods the likes of you and I surround ourselves with. I dread the day I’ll have to clean out your desk.”

“Never fear, dear girl.” Telford chuckled as he made his way over to the electric kettle Terri always kept warm and filled. He took to pouring himself a fresh cuppa. “I expect you and I will see many a sunset from the windows of our humble cells and a few more ministers passing through before that day comes.”

“I expect that’s what poor Bryan thought until the PM decided he had no wish to spend any political capital on our dear, late minister,” Terri ventured unrepentantly.

“The fool thought so too,” Telford replied distractedly as he flopped down in a seat across the room from Terri’s desk. “You would think a man who was supposed to be as switched on as the minister would have known that when it comes to a scandal like this, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men can never put poor Humpty back together again, no matter how hard they try.”

Putting her cup of tea to her lips, she used it to hide the grin that lit up her face. Perhaps the next minister would be astute enough to hire her son-in-law when she put forth his name to fill Morton’s post. And if not, well…

HUMPTY DUMPTY: THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY

The Internet has become what radio was in the 1930s and TV was in the 1950s — a vast uncharted media resource that has yet to reach its full potential. Nowhere is this more evident than in politics, where tech-savvy twentysomethings are being courted — or, more correctly, bombarded—with information concerning elected officials, their policies, and their activities via 24-7 news feeds, blogs, social media, and targeted e-mails. Used correctly, this new medium can ensure a politician’s future. Abused or misused, it can end the career of an elected official faster than a New York minute.

Americans will, no doubt, realize this story is loosely based on the trials and tribulations of former congressman Anthony Weiner, a man who brought his political career to an inglorious end, first by shooting himself in the foot by posting sexually explicit material on the Internet and then all but blowing out his political brains while running for mayor of New York by doing so again. His actions stand as the epitome of a self-inflicted wound.

We deviated from the facts of his story by creating a situation in which a bogus account attributed to a politician, a very British one, was planted for the express purpose of doing damage to that politician’s career. In this case, it was an act of revenge. There is nothing, however, that is stopping a politician, his surrogates, or rabid — if misguided — supporters of his from using the Internet to wreak havoc on his political opponents. As former labor secretary Raymond J. Donovan stated so eloquently in 1987 after being acquitted of criminal charges the media had all but found him guilty of before he went to trial, “Where do I go to get my reputation back?” The answer today, in an unfiltered media saturated world, is nowhere. Damage to a public figure’s reputation, deserved or not, is all but impossible to erase.

HAROLD COYLE

HUMPTY DUMPTY: THE TECHNOLOGY BEHIND THE STORY

The digital battlefield called the Internet changes fast, as was made abundantly clear when we crafted this story. At the beginning of the week, the criminal marketplace called Silk Road was fully functioning, but by the end, it had been taken down by the FBI and others with its alleged owner, Ross Ulbricht (Dread Pirate Roberts), under arrest. A few days later, a competing site, Black Market Reloaded, was also offline following a leak of source code. This victory proved short lived. At the time of writing, it has been relaunched.

The existence of such commercial sites on the dark Web, hidden deep within the encrypted world of the Tor network, shows just how out of balance the online war between law enforcement and criminal organizations has become. Many of these marketplaces operate with a slick efficiency that high street retailers would envy, offering escrow services, user reviews, and taking payment in virtually untraceable crypto currencies like bitcoin. The range of illegal goods and services offered is equally staggering, so it took no great leap of imagination to come up with the idea of “digital wetwork,” the assassination of an individual’s identity, reputation, or digital life for cash.

Deciding on the sort of individual who could offer such a service was also easy. There have been a vast number of very good books, articles, and research papers recently published about the people behind online crime and hacktivism. Such individuals with the requisite technical skills and lack of morals cannot be neatly pigeonholed. The same hacker may be a criminal freelancer, political hacktivist, and contractor for both organized crime groups and intelligence organizations, all in the same day. As a result, tracking and catching them across a global playing field becomes a gargantuan task. It’s a fascinating area that is only now being given the attention it deserves. For those who wish to know more, I would recommend Misha Glenny’s DarkMarket and Gabriella Coleman’s Coding Freedom as good places to start your own research.

The attacker’s technique to compromise the minister’s home laptop is something we in the security industry see all too frequently. A properly researched piece of bait containing a rather nasty digital hook is something even the most paranoid can fall for, and if one attempt fails, the attackers will keep on casting until they catch their target. This approach is often referred to as an APT, or advanced persistent threat, and whilst it started as a technique primarily used by foreign intelligence services, it has quickly become commonplace among organized criminals and others. Once attackers have a foothold on your machine, it generally doesn’t take long before your computer is completely under their control, or “rooted,” in hacker parlance. When they achieve that, anything you can do, they can do too, (and generally quite a few other things, as well).

It’s not all doom and gloom. Tommy’s advice in the story—“Patch regularly, get a decent antivirus package like Norton, don’t open unexpected docs or click on embedded links, and don’t use the same password for everything”—is pretty much it, although backing up your data to an external drive or a cloud service is also a good idea.

JENNIFER ELLIS