Blackwood International, Part 4
When I arrived at Blackwood headquarters, I could feel the chaos in the lobby the moment I stepped inside.
I walked up to the reception desk.
"Hello."
"What can I do for you?"
Given the situation, there was clearly no warm welcome for visitors.
"I’d like to see Chairman Peter Taylor."
The employee looked at me in surprise.
With everything already in disarray, he probably wondered why anyone would be asking for the chairman now.
"Do you have an appointment?"
"No, I don’t."
He refused me at once.
"Then please make one and come back later."
"I don’t have time for that. I need to see him right now."
"Leave your contact information, and we’ll call you. Please go back for now."
"I’m here to tell him how to solve this ransomware incident."
"Pardon?"
"I said there’s no time. I need to see the chairman immediately."
At the employee’s startled gesture, several men in suits began closing in around us as if to surround us.
One of them asked me, "What is this about?"
"Who are you?"
In response to my question, the man silently flashed a badge.
Oh. FBI.
Then he asked me for identification.
"And who are you?"
It made sense that they’d be suspicious when I showed up at a company that had just been hit by ransomware and claimed I was there to fix it.
I handed over my business card.
"I’m with Continue Capital."
After they verified our identities, we were led to a meeting room.
While we waited, Sid looked bored enough to open his laptop and start a video. Curious, I glanced over and saw that it was a drama about zombies.
……
Why did he like zombies so much?
Even back in my first life, Sid had been famous for loving zombies. Hell, hadn’t I even funded the production tools for Zombienado just to make him happy? I’d had VR and CG software developed for it and everything.
I asked him casually, "Why do you like zombies so much?"
Sid’s eyes widened.
"Hyung, you don’t like zombies?"
"Ah! Of course I like them."
That was a lie. I didn’t like them at all. No, I hated them.
I honestly had no idea why anyone would want to watch walking corpses.
Sid thought about it for a moment, then said, "Well, zombies don’t think. I guess that’s why I like them."
……
Genius tastes were impossible to understand.
Sid put on his headphones and kept watching his drama.
I went back over the materials David had sent me on Blackwood International’s CEO.
As the twenty-first century began, Blackwood International ran into one problem after another.
The hotels it had already built were aging, and service quality was slipping. To make matters worse, the financial crisis hit, and demand for luxury hotels fell sharply.
The Blackwood family, struggling to stay afloat, brought in a professional manager.
That man was Peter Taylor.
The new CEO launched a sweeping reform. While other hotel chains tightened their belts, he chose to make massive investments instead. With customer numbers down, he judged that this was the perfect time to renovate the aging properties.
He also acquired RichCalton and folded it into the company as a subsidiary, making Blackwood even larger.
As expected, once the financial crisis ended, the global economy entered a rapid recovery, and travel demand exploded.
Thanks to his focus on upscale branding and convention business, Blackwood hotels became the venues of choice for all kinds of international events, even summit meetings, and their reputation only grew stronger.
He also handled the digital transition quickly and successfully, and last year he had even been named one of Forbes’ ten CEOs of the year.
Thanks to his strong management, the stock price more than doubled, earning praise from shareholders as well. It had since fallen back to its original level because of this incident, but still.
Before long, a white-haired man in his mid-sixties appeared.
He might have been old, but he was a giant, well over six feet tall.
I greeted him.
"Good afternoon, Chairman. I’m Han Miru, co-CEO of Continue Capital."
Chairman Taylor looked at me and said, "I was under the impression the representative was David Lockhart."
"He’s my co-CEO."
He glanced toward my side. Sid, apparently unaware that anyone had entered, was still wearing his headphones and watching his zombie drama.
"Ah. You can ignore him."
"Ahem."
After the introductions were done, we sat down.
Chairman Taylor said in a blunt voice, "What brings you here?"
He certainly didn’t seem happy to see me.
That made sense. Continue Capital had exposed the ransomware attack before Blackwood could even issue an official statement, sent the stock price into a nosedive, and reaped massive profits in the process.
As much as $25 billion in market cap had vanished.
He had probably been sweating bullets while trying to explain it to shareholders.
Even if it hadn’t been us, the ransomware would have come to light eventually and the stock would have crashed. But it was also true that Continue Capital had brought it to light sooner and made the drop even steeper.
From the CEO’s perspective, he had every reason to grind his teeth.
"As you may have heard, we came to help you resolve the ransomware."
He looked at me as if I were unbelievable.
"You came here to help us? And you expect me to believe that?"
"Is there any reason not to trust us?"
Chairman Taylor’s voice turned angry. "Didn’t Continue Capital publish the story in the press and make a fortune through short-selling? You’re not going to deny that, are you?"
I answered honestly.
"I can’t exactly deny it. But even if it hadn’t been us, wouldn’t the truth have come out anyway?"
"So now you’re saying you did nothing wrong?"
"Did we say anything false in what we reported? We only told the truth."
At that, he nearly shouted, "Didn’t you spread rumors that customer data had been leaked?"
"We never said directly that Blackwood International’s customer data had leaked. We only said that there had been several cases like that when companies were hit by ransomware."
"What?"
I made myself look apologetic.
"Well, I suppose people who read the article could have misunderstood it that way. I do feel badly about that."
Chairman Taylor stared at me as if he couldn’t believe what he was hearing.
"Let me ask you one thing. How in the world did you know it was ransomware? You didn’t plant a spy in our company, did you?"
I said lightly, "You’re not seriously suggesting we’re connected to the hackers, are you?"
He would already know which group had done it. By now, they would have announced themselves and demanded payment.
"I’ll decide whether I’m suggesting it after I hear your answer."
"As you know, Continue Capital is the largest shareholder of Snow Crash. CEO Lucas looked into the situation and told us it seemed like ransomware."
"And that was it?"
"That was it."
He looked incredulous.
"And you acted on that alone?"
"Yes."
To be honest, what we were doing was pretty risky.
If anything had gone wrong, we would have lost money and ended up arrested for spreading false information to manipulate the stock price.
I asked him, "Which hacker group attacked the servers?"
"You think I’m going to tell you?"
"The media seems to be pointing at Great Net."
"……"
Once the truth came out, several hacker groups were named.
There were plenty of ransomware crews out there, but fewer than ten had the capability to pull off a crime on this scale.
Most of the press was pointing to Great Net. That was because they were the hottest target around these days.
Not long ago, they had hacked a telecommunications company’s servers and brought communications across Maryland to a halt. Because of that, they had been designated a state-sponsored terror organization.
That was probably why the FBI and NSA had both shown up.
"How much are they demanding?"
"Why ask? You’re not paying it for us."
"I’m just curious."
Thinking it would be public knowledge soon enough, Chairman Taylor answered frankly.
"Three hundred million dollars."
……
It was hard enough to get a million-dollar ransom for a kidnapping. But if you kidnapped data, you could demand an obscene sum like that.
What kind of business was this, where the margins were this good?
After hearing the figure, I finally understood why ransomware was spreading so aggressively these days.
If Somali pirates heard this, they’d probably feel so miserable and humiliated that they’d quit piracy on the spot and enroll in a computer academy.
Still, even if three hundred million dollars was an absurd amount, paying it was better than losing the data.
In fact, most ransomware cases ended with the ransom being paid.
You might think the obvious solution was to negotiate the amount down and pay it right away, but there were three problems with that.
First, Great Net had been designated a terror group. Handing them money would effectively amount to supporting terrorism.
Maybe it would be unavoidable, but the company’s image would still take a hit.
Second, there was no guarantee they would actually decrypt everything properly.
Even in the last incident, Great Net had used the ransomware release as a chance to steal the cable tunnel maps. If the ransomware was solved but customer data leaked in the process, that would be the end of it.
Third, even if you got the key, restoring the servers still took a long time. Last time, decryption had been done in two separate half-size batches, and the entire process had taken a full week.
"The payment will naturally be made in cryptocurrency. But is there any guarantee that they’ll actually unlock the ransomware once they’re paid? And if they take the money and refuse to hand over the key, or demand more, what then?"
Chairman Taylor said bitterly, "Then what are we supposed to do?"
I held up three fingers.
"What does that mean?"
"Give us three days."
He looked at me in confusion.
"What are you saying?"
"We’ll solve this problem within three days."
"And how, exactly?"
I answered as if I had been waiting for the question.
"At Continue Capital, we have CEO Lucas, the world’s best programmer, and Mimir, the world’s best artificial intelligence system. We have more than enough capability to handle this."
Given how much interest he had in digital transformation and cloud infrastructure, he had probably heard Sid Lucas’s name before.
As expected, Chairman Taylor showed interest.
"You mean you brought CEO Lucas with you?"
"He’s here with us."
"What?"
I pointed at Sid, who was still watching his drama beside me.
"Wait. This young man is Sid Lucas?"
"That’s right."
His expression made it even clearer that he didn’t believe us. From the way he looked, Sid was just an ordinary young man you might see anywhere.
"If all the experts in the world couldn’t solve it, how is one more person supposed to make a difference?"
Well, that was a perfectly reasonable reaction.
"We’ll bring Blackwood International’s servers back to normal within three days, no matter what."
"And if you fail?"
"Then we’ll pay the three hundred million dollars ourselves."
"……What?"
He looked as if he thought he’d misheard me.
And honestly, I couldn’t blame him. The terms were one-sidedly favorable to Blackwood.
In business, there was no such thing as a proposal that was one-sidedly favorable for no reason. If someone offered you something like that, you had to question their true motive.
And yet he couldn’t reject it, because it was simply too good an offer.
Not only would they save three hundred million dollars, but they would also avoid the stigma of paying money to a terror organization.
On top of that, criticism was already piling up around Chairman Taylor’s personal responsibility for the incident. People were saying that while pushing digital transformation, he had failed to pay proper attention to security and put the company in danger.
He probably wanted to cry inside, even if he wasn’t saying so out loud. There was no way he could throw out the people offering to help.
Chairman Taylor frowned as if annoyed by the whole thing.
"Ahem! I don’t know what you’re plotting."
"There’s no plot. We’re only thinking about how to solve this crisis."
"I don’t understand it. You shorted our stock, and now you’re saying you want to help. The lower the price falls, the more you profit. The higher it rises, the more you lose."
"That’s true. People don’t usually do things that hurt them."
I handed him a document.
"So if you look at this, I think you’ll believe me."
"What is it?"
Chairman Taylor took the papers out of the envelope.
It was the transaction record.
His eyes widened when he saw it.
"As you can see, Continue Capital has closed out all of its short positions and bought Blackwood International shares and call options."
If we successfully resolved the ransomware attack, the stock would soar. If we didn’t, it would crash.
Looking Chairman Taylor straight in the eye, I said, "I’ve staked everything I have on being able to solve this ransomware. At this point, don’t you think that’s enough to trust me?"
……
Chairman Taylor said nothing.
After all, people can lie, but money never does.