Cyber Warfare and the New World Order

Don’t Forget to Turn out the Lights

Neven Jackson and his partner in crime Milo had received a lot of congratulations from the bosses at the NSA for their successful hack of the Chinese exoskeleton suits during the PLAN beach invasion of Oceanside. The Chinese had still captured Camp Pendleton and San Diego, but they had suffered horrific casualties and lost the ability to use their exoskeleton combat suits until their programmers could figure out how to remove Neven’s malware and get the suits operational again. Neven and Milo had even been invited for lunch with President Stein as a reward for a job well done.

Meeting the President was not something high on either of their minds. As hackers, their natural inclination was to have little respect for authority figures, let alone the President. However, after their lunch, they both walked away with a better understanding of Stein, and may have even started to see him as a real person. For a politician, the President had a very strong grasp on cyber warfare and cyber security, something neither of them expected from any president. They also felt a renewed purpose to not let the country down after seeing how their direct efforts were affecting the war.

Colonel Jeff Blount may have been a little jealous of Milo and Neven’s facetime with the President. He walked into their little hacker fiefdom on a mission, and with barely any gesture to politeness, bluntly asserted, “Ok gentlemen, sorry to disrupt the joyful reverie of your ‘lair,’ but it’s time for you to launch your next malware attack. We need you to move against the Japanese Fleet off the Pacific Coast of Mexico.”

As the drone feed was directed to their large screen monitors, they could see that the naval battle between the joint Chinese/Japanese fleet and the Americans was well underway. They saw the missile swarm heading towards the Americans and thought for certain the fleet was finished. To their surprise, they saw hundreds and then thousands of enemy missiles being destroyed, reducing the swarm into a manageable flock.

Several bright flashes could be seen as multiple American ships were hit. Then numerous large explosions occurred.

“What was that?” asked Neven, as he began work on another screen.

Colonel Blount was almost callous as he responded, “That was 291 people being killed. Those ships just blew up.”

As the missiles converged on the battleships and carriers, it seemed that they were all but destroyed.

The Colonel walked to the front of the room, standing in front of the monitors. Then he announced, “Now it is our turn. I need you guys to go in through your established backdoors and turn the Japanese ships off. We know you cannot access the Chinese ships; our fleet will handle them. Disable the JDF ships and let’s finish this battle, bringing the war one step closer to victory.” Then he walked to the side of the room to let the hackers do their work.

Neven pulled another Rip It out of the fridge near his work station, turned on his favorite music and began to type away. Neven was working on three different twenty inch monitors while reclining in a soft leather chair with his headphones on, and Milo was setting up the malware that would jump from the JDF fleet to the PLAN and begin to bog down their communications system with a concerted DDoS attack from every IoT device in the JDF fleet.

As Neven moved from folder to folder, system to system within the carriers and battleships of the JDF fleet, he began to activate a series of viruses and crypto-locker protocols that would shut down the carriers and battleship and then summarily lock them out of their systems when they tried to reboot them. The ships would effectively become dead in the water, unable to move or defend themselves when the American fleet started to carry out their counter attack. It was going to be a bloodbath.