Operation Red Dawn and the Siege of Europe

Grid Attack

Neven Jackson had found a way into the Chinese exoskeleton operating system and placed a zero-day malware protocol in place to disable them at the worst possible time, during an invasion when many thousands of soldiers would be wearing them. Now he had been given the task of supporting the NATO counter-attack in Germany against the Russians.

Neven was a gifted hacker, something of a prodigy. He also got bored quickly if he was not challenged, so his superiors had dreamed up a new experiment for him. He was to hack into the Russian air defense system and bring it down. He had two days and an unlimited supply of energy drinks and M&Ms to accomplish this task. In just five hours, he had found his way in. It was complicated at first, but once he found out who built the system, he looked around until he found a supplier to the air defense company who did not have a very good IT security structure but still had access to the systems. He had hit pay dirt with this one. Not only did the supplier have access to the defense contractor, it had nearly unfettered access. This was almost too easy.

He quickly navigated through the various security systems, ensuring that he was covering his tracks with each successive move, deleting logs and digital footprints as he weaved his way through the net. After spending nearly an hour looking through the various programs and projects with a Russian linguist sitting next to him, they found the specific program they were looking for. With a few clicks of his mouse, he was in. Neven alerted his supervisors, “Hey, I’m in. What do you want me to do now?”

His boss had thought this project was going to be nearly impossible, but somehow Neven had managed to break through the system in less than six hours. Now they had to coordinate with a few others and determine what in the air defense system they wanted to attack and when. It would do no good to take the system down if the Air Force and Navy were not ready to exploit the vulnerability.

The intelligence at hand revealed that the Russian air defense system for the country was broken down into various sectors, so they were able to develop a more precise cyber-attack. The goal was not to take down the entire Russian air defense; this would cause the Russian government to go into a panic, and potentially escalate the war from a conventional one to nuclear warfare, which they wanted to avoid. Instead, they would take down the air defense zones covering Germany, and then place backdoor access and zero-day malware in every other air defense zone across Russia. When the time was right, they could shut down an air corridor for aircraft or cruise missiles to fly through, undeterred. However, that attack would have to wait.

On the morning of the NATO offensive, Russian air defense operators all across Germany suddenly saw their computer screens go blank and then turn back on to show massive air armadas flying in from across the North Sea and Denmark, and then across Southern Europe. Just as the operators were scrambling all available aircraft to those locations, their screens flickered again and the images were suddenly replaced with a photo of David Hasselhoff, shirtless, laying on the ground with a bunch of puppies. The Russian operators did not know what to think or do.

The cyber-attack against the air defense grid had worked marvelously; it took the Russians nearly sixteen hours to get their backup system up and running. In that timeframe, the NATO air forces had mauled the Russian armored units all across Germany, destroying numerous enemy air bases and shooting down hundreds of enemy aircraft. The air campaign had been a huge success, making it possible for Field Marshal Schoen’s Army Group and the 2^nd AD to punch a massive hole through the Russian lines and secure a new line that stretched all the way to Leipzig. This forced the 1^st Shock Army to have to fall back to the Potsdam area, sacrificing months’ worth of gains they had previously made.