Operation Red Dawn and the Siege of Europe

Smart and Bored

Neven Jackson was a twenty-three-year-old computer hacker who worked for the National Security Agency (NSA). He was not here by design; he had hacked the FBI database as a prank when he was a freshman at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and he had been caught. He thought he had shielded his activities, but he had missed something, and as a consequence, he was arrested and given a choice-either work for the government as a paid hacker, or go to prison for a very long time.

Neven, preferring a life outside of barred walls, had chosen to go to work for the NSA, and he had spent the last several years playing defense against Russian and Chinese hackers who were becoming more and more sophisticated in their attacks. Since the start of the war, he had been transferred to the “Red Team” and been given full permission to hack in to any sector of the Chinese economy and military systems and cause as much havoc as he could. This opportunity was like a dream come true. During the first several months, he had successfully shut down the power in two provinces for several days, caused the ATMs in one city to empty all of their money, and completed a number of other malicious activities.

Today, however, was a special day. Two weeks ago, he had been assigned the task of infiltrating the Chinese exoskeleton combat suit program, and yesterday he had successfully found a backdoor in to the source code (it was too bad that the Russians used a different operating system, or else they would really have something going). He had spent the better part of the day writing a zero-day code to be placed in the exoskeleton suits’ operating system. Once the update was sent out by the program developers, this code would be dispersed to all of the combat suits that received the update. The code would then lie in wait, ready for it to be activated. Upon sharing his discovery with his superiors, they had worked with him to develop a special surprise. The next time the PLAN infantry attacked the Americans using these suits, they would suddenly find that the entire left or right side of the suit had been essentially disabled. This would confuse the ranks, making them think that the suits were experiencing mechanical problems, and throwing the scent off away from the real issue of a software problem. When the PLAN infantry did attack, their entire attacking force would suddenly find themselves stuck in malfunctioning exoskeleton suits at the worst possible moment. Of course, this attack could only be used once so finding the best opportunity to use it was going to be critical.