Cyber Warfare
The briefing that had stretched until four in the morning finally drew to a close, and time continued its relentless march.
In the hours that followed I received a brief course of maid training from the head maid, then continued my studies under her guidance. Once the morning had passed I met with Yulia and spent the time in all manner of play—sometimes simply enjoying ourselves, other times carefully researching the many practical applications of her unique ability. Evenings were reserved for meetings with the people of Leviathan, during which I steadily absorbed the knowledge of this world until I had mastered most of its basic common sense.
And so Sunday arrived at last.
With the underground war between shadow organizations—known as the Merger Period—looming just ahead, I launched the program I had received from Leviathan’s administrator.
The moment I connected to the program named Leviathan-Sonar, the encrypted line prepared by Leviathan let me see the people who were even now preparing for battle.
Those classified as the combat force were divided into two large groups. Half of them were fortifying Leviathan’s secretly relayed headquarters, ready to fight a defensive war if the need arose. The other half, acting on intelligence obtained in advance, were already moving toward designated points for a raid on a rival enterprise.
I was watching everything through a screen, yet the sheer scale alone made it clear how serious a matter the merger war truly was. The estimated number of troops committed was roughly company-strength. This was no ordinary private security outfit run by a civilian firm; it was the kind of force one expected to see only among the mafia. They were properly armed with real firearms, and a number of villains capable of fighting a hundred men each were mixed in among them. All told, the strength was staggering.
So these people are going to strike a rival company’s headquarters directly. Heh. They sure don’t do mergers half-heartedly.
I decided it was fortunate I had never visited the headquarters myself. According to the administrator, it was located in Vladivostok, Russia—and of course I had never once dreamed of traveling there from Korea. If Leviathan lost this merger war, everyone at the headquarters would either die, be sold into slavery, or be handed over to the police. Being able to participate remotely from the safety of the mansion was something I ought to count as a blessing.
Almost eleven o’clock.
The time difference with Vladivostok was only one hour, so according to what I had been told the corporate battle was about to raise its curtain.
“This will be the final briefing. All personnel, move to your assigned positions and act according to the plan laid out during the earlier briefing.”
The assault team of the combat force had chosen a Chinese enterprise called Gonggi as their first target and were about to begin operations. Gonggi was an illegal firm that dealt primarily in narcotics and information inside China; the fact that they had managed to run an organized drug-trafficking operation in that country without being caught was almost impressive. Distance made swallowing their headquarters whole impossible, so Leviathan’s goals were more modest: seize the Chinese branch for their own use, gather intelligence, and expand the scale of their site.
“Laplace, prepare the security systems.”
[Understood. What security type would you like to configure?]
“For now… let’s respond according to the situation. If we activate every firewall at once we might get caught.”
Even though my computer was fairly high-end, it still struggled to handle Laplace’s processing load. I had therefore infected random machines across the world and turned them into zombie computers, but if the processing volume grew too large the police could snatch us up before we ever got the chance to act.
Time flowed on steadily. With every minute and second that brought the hour closer, conversation in the conference room dwindled. Even the assault units—who still had a grace period until the hackers finished neutralizing the security systems—eventually found themselves staring only at the clock.
Then eleven o’clock arrived.
The instant it became noon by Vladivostok time, traffic on the site surged at a frightening rate.
A DDoS?
A surprisingly ordinary attack. Among hacking methods it was one of the easiest to attempt, and because no defense could ever be perfect it was used in all sorts of places. Yet that was all it was. Against an opponent who had prepared properly, a DDoS rarely displayed much real power.
“What the— DDoS incoming?”
“Boring. Starting with cheap tricks already?”
The hackers hired by Leviathan did not seem particularly alarmed either. Had they failed to prepare in time the servers would certainly have gone down, but they had already taken every precaution against a DDoS. Moreover, with daily users numbering in the hundreds of thousands, ordinary traffic volume could never hope to damage Leviathan.
In fact, an attack of this sort might even leave us an opening to exploit.
“I’ll handle this one.”
Through the microphone, not the soft voice of a young girl but a mechanical tone distorted by a voice-modulation program, spread across the channel. The others looked as though they thought the manual procedures would be enough and wondered why I was in such a hurry—but that approach would only stop the attack. To shut a DDoS down completely, one had no choice but to counterattack the aggressors and neutralize their means of assault.
“I’ll use cross-site scripting against every account whose traffic generation exceeds the threshold. First priority is identifying the attackers.”
I intended to plant a virus inside the Leviathan site and seize control of the accounts carrying out the DDoS. Under normal circumstances writing the code alone would have taken time, but that did not apply to me. Blowing open zombie computers that lacked any real security measures required almost no effort at all.
“Laplace, how long to write the code?”
[If I have site editing privileges, the work can be completed within thirty seconds.]
“Start right away.”
“Yekaterina. May I edit the site code?”
“Hmm. Well, as long as you don’t do anything strange… Still, wouldn’t a normal defense be better?”
Yekaterina’s tone was less a rebuttal than a test. It was a warning and a piece of advice rolled into one: do it if you wish, but the responsibility will be yours. I, of course, was confident.
“I’ll guarantee the result.”
“I’m a complete amateur in this field… What does everyone else think? Anyone want to speak up?”
At her words the hired hackers merely glanced at one another and stayed silent. Then a light flared on one side of the remote conference room and a figure with a hood pulled low over their face spoke.
“It’s quite a departure from ordinary countermeasures… but I believe it’s possible. It might even be more effective than the usual methods.”
“Then why hasn’t this method been used much until now?”
“Because it’s illegal. What he’s proposing is a counterattack against the accounts that launched the DDoS—something that could never spread widely. The only real concern is whether he can write new code in time to match the window.”
“The code is already finished. All that’s left is to apply it.”
“What? Unless you prepared it in advance, that shouldn’t be—”
He stopped there, apparently deciding the matter was no longer within his area of interference, switched off his microphone, and returned to his own duties.
“If no one else has an opinion, we’ll leave it to Lucifer for now. Considering he was the one who hit Leviathan in the first place, we can expect a certain level of skill, yes?”
“Just hand over the editing rights.”
The tone might have sounded a little arrogant, but I judged that a high-handed manner was necessary to keep my real-world self separate. In the underworld, showing even a hint of weakness was forbidden.
While I’m at it, I might as well increase the number of zombie PCs a little.
The number of zombie PCs—machines infected with malware so they could be pressed into service at any moment—was essentially a measure of a hacker’s power. The more zombie PCs one possessed, the greater the data-processing capacity and the larger the scale of attacks one could launch. In my case, of course, the learning speed and processing power of the artificial-intelligence program Laplace would rise sharply as well, producing a steep upward curve of strength that ordinary hackers could never hope to match—until my hacking ability reached a level no human could even dream of pursuing.
At present the zombie PCs under my control numbered roughly three thousand—some of the visitors who had accessed the post when I hacked Leviathan’s advertising board. One of the reasons I had targeted Leviathan in the first place had been to secure zombie PCs, not merely for the publicity.
They really should have taken security more seriously.
Because I had seized the devices of people who were already on the dark web, I even had the convenient justification that I had not touched ordinary civilians. Still, three thousand was only the bare minimum required for hacking. For Laplace’s true worth to shine, far more zombie PCs would be needed.
I don’t know how many zombie PCs were used in this DDoS… but one thing is certain: this opportunity will let me improve Laplace’s capabilities by a dramatic margin.
Less than an hour later, the dark-web group Glare that had led the attack on Leviathan was thrown into emergency. Nearly a million zombie PCs used for the DDoS had simultaneously slipped out of their control, and their hacking capacity had plummeted. For the next three or four days they would have to devote themselves entirely to damage recovery. The surprise assault that had aimed for the opening hours of the Merger Period ended in complete failure.
And I, in turn, obtained several hundred thousand zombie PCs. After confirming that no further hacking attacks were incoming, I began preparing an assault of my own—against the dark web, and against Gonggi.