He leaned back and looked up at her face. Noticing for the first time that her blond bangs were cut at a cockeyed angle, at least an inch higher on one side than the other. Maybe some screwy new style he wasn’t aware of. Frank was no expert on makeup, but her blue eye shadow looked glopped on. More showgirl than FBI agent.
Angie was looking down at him, her eyes not meeting his, circling his face as if searching for a safe place to land. “I drove down to Turkey Point like you asked. Homeland’s guys missed something. A software bomb.”
“A software bomb?”
“Yeah. I defused it. It took a while. The guy that wrote it, and I could tell right away it was a guy from how it was done, well, it was pretty intricate.
“Turkey Point’s operating system uses a version of RuggedCom. The systems are deployed in harsh environments, heavy-usage applications like traffic-control systems, railroad communications, military sites, electrical substations. And in power plants. Beyond networking, these devices provide serial-to-IP conversion in SCADA systems.”
“And?”
“Thing is, RuggedCom is known to have an undocumented backdoor account with a factory-enabled password that’s dynamically generated based on the device’s address. A hacker like this guy who’s good with SCADA systems has to know about this vulnerability.”
“And this software bomb?”
She reached up with one hand and swished her hair awkwardly. Like a gesture she’d copied from a sultry movie star, then practiced in a mirror but hadn’t worked out all the kinks. “Software bombs have a trigger and a payload. The trigger for this one was a fluctuation in the electrical power. If the lights at Turkey Point flicker, even a little variation, this thing was set to go off. Pretty clever trigger.” Her eyes circled off as if she were watching an insect roaming the air.
“And what was the payload?”
“It’s set to delete files. You can delete so many it will render the entire system helpless. It’ll cause a general shutdown. But this code wasn’t written to do that. It was just set to delete some payroll stuff, some e-mails and general announcements. More like a paintball than a bomb.”
“So it was harmless?”
“Not exactly. See, I also found a signature. The guy’s nom de plume. And I did a search on him. I’d never heard of this guy before, but I’ve read up on him now. He’s been hacking for several years. Getting more sophisticated.
“Last couple of years he’s specialized in infrastructure projects mainly in the western states. I sent you an e-mail with a list of all I could find. Ports, railroads, oil refineries. But he really gets off on water-treatment plants. He likes to contaminate water supplies, run trains with chemical cars off their tracks into lakes, redirect sewage lines into reservoirs. A lot of his early cyber attacks were crude, then the last year or two, they got better.
“So you see the problem.”
“The guy’s gotten slicker.”
“That’s right, and it looks like he’s become so fanatical, once he gets inside a nuclear plant, and he’s gained administrative access to all the plant’s systems, well, to me it doesn’t make sense he’d leave something as simple and harmless as a software bomb that only deletes a few random files.”
“So you think there’s more malicious code you didn’t find?”
Angie did. She’d head back down there pronto and keep digging.
When she was gone, Frank said, “You’re sure she’s our best?”
“All I know,” Marta said, “some big shots at the National Security Agency keep trying to recruit her. Last time they offered her four times what she makes here, but she turned it down.”
Frank went back to his chair and sat, waiting his turn on the hot seat.
Five minutes, ten. Marta took a phone call. Listened, then hung up. “That was Angie. Back at her computer.”
“Yeah?”
“Some pipeline just blew up in the Keys. Water spraying in the air a hundred feet.”
“So?”
“She thought you’d be interested.”
“What was it? A bomb?”
“Cyber attack,” Marta said. “Angie’s on it. She’ll get back to you when she knows more. She said it had the hallmarks of our guy.”
“Call her back. Tell her to forget the frigging pipeline. Get her skinny ass back to Turkey Point on the double.”
“Those words?”
Before he could answer, the door beside him opened and Nicole McIvey came in, glanced down at him, held his eyes for a moment. “Wow, that hangdog look, Frank. I’ve seen that expression before.”