“Never got into it,” Peter admitted.
“Well, that picture you’re looking at is of a troll. A particular type of mountain troll that lives in a particular region of T’Rain, rather inaccessible I’m afraid. Which might help you make sense of the caption.”
“‘Ha ha noob, you are powned by troll. I have encrypt all your file. Leave 1000 GP at below coordinates and I give you key.’ Ah, okay, I get it.”
“Well, I’m pretty fucking glad that you get it, my friend, because—”
“And now,” said Peter, cutting him off, “if we check out the contents of the other file, troll.gpg, we find that”—miscellaneous clicks—“one, it is huge, and two, it is a correctly formatted gpg file.”
“You call that correctly formatted!?”
“Yeah. A standard header and then several gigs of random-looking binary content.”
“Several gigs you say.”
“Yeah. This one file is big enough to contain, probably, all the files that were originally stored in your ‘Documents’ folder. But if we take the message in REAMDE at face value, it’s all been encrypted. Your files are being held for ransom.”
Zula had brought up Corporation 9592’s internal wiki, and now went to a page entitled MALWARE. Several trojans and viruses were listed. REAMDE wasn’t difficult to find; it was the first word on the page, it was large, and it was red. When she clicked through to the dedicated page for REAMDE and checked its history, she found that 90 percent of its content had been written during the last seventy-two hours. Corporation 9592’s security hackers had been toiling at it all weekend.
“How is this possible?” Wallace demanded.
Upstairs, Zula was already reading about how it was possible.
“It’s not just possible, it’s actually pretty easy, once your system has been rooted by a trojan,” Peter said. “This isn’t the first. People have been making malware that does this for a few years now. There’s a word for it: ‘ransomware.’”
“I’ve never heard of it.”
“It is hard to turn this kind of virus into a profitable operation,” Peter said, “because there has to be a financial transaction: the payment of the ransom. And that can be traced.”
“I see,” Wallace said. “So if you’re in the malware business, there are easier ways to make money.”
“By running botnets or whatever,” Peter agreed. “The new wrinkle here, apparently, is that the ransom is to be paid in the form of virtual gold pieces in T’Rain.”
“So until now, this has been a technical possibility, but few people have used it on a large scale,” Wallace said, working it through. “But these fuckers have figured out a way to use T’Rain as a money-laundering system.”
“Yeah,” Peter said. “And I’m guessing, since you drove all the way down here and left, as I now see, eight voice mails on my phone, that your backup drive in the safe also got infected.”
“Yeah, it fucked everything it could reach,” Wallace said. “It must have passed into my system from that fucking thumb drive you handed me, and then—”
“Don’t try to make this my fault. I use Linux, remember? Different OS, different malware.”
“Then how did this fucking virus get on to my laptop?”
“I don’t know,” Peter said.
Zula did know, because she was skimming pages of technical analyses of the REAMDE virus. One of the ways it propagated was through thumb drives and other removable media. And Peter had borrowed one of Richard’s old thumb drives so that he could transfer something into Wallace’s computer. Richard’s machine must be infected with REAMDE; but he wouldn’t know or care, since he was protected by corporate IT.
“But it doesn’t matter,” Peter continued. “All that matters is—”
“It does matter for establishing culpability,” Wallace said. “Which may be of interest to him.”
“All I’m saying is, we have to address the problem,” Peter said.
“Brilliant analysis there, Petey boy. It’s quarter to three. I’m already forty-five minutes late. I bought myself a bit of time by sending an email with some bullshit to the effect that my car broke down in the Okanagans. But the clock is ticking. We have got to decrypt that file!”
“No,” Peter said, “we have to pay the ransom.”
“Fuck that.”
“It is not possible to decrypt the file,” Peter said. “If we had the NSA working on it, we could probably decrypt it. But as matters stand, you’re screwed unless you pay the ransom.”
“We’re screwed,” Wallace corrected him, “since this is all much too complicated to explain to him. He is not a computer guy. Has never heard of T’Rain, or any other massively multiplayer online game, for that matter. Might just barely understand the concept of a computer virus. All he’ll understand is that he doesn’t have what he paid for.”
“Then it’s like I said. We pay the ransom.”
Quite a long silence.
“I was hoping,” Wallace said, “that there was another copy of the file.”
“I already told you—”
“I know what you fucking told me,” Wallace said. “I was hoping that you were lying.”
“Is this all just another ruse to find out whether or not I am lying?”
“You’re just clever enough to be stupider than if you weren’t clever at all,” Wallace said. “This is quite real. I very badly want you to tell me, right now, Peter, that you lied to me earlier and that you have a backup copy of the file on one of your machines here.”
And then Wallace dropped his voice to a low growl and talked for about two minutes. During this time, Zula could not make out a single word that Wallace was saying.
When he was finished, all Peter could say, for a minute or so, was the f-word. He said it in about a dozen different ways, like an actor searching for just the right reading.
“Well, it doesn’t matter,” he finally said, very close to sobbing, “because I was telling you the truth before. There really is no other copy!”