“Dead.”
“Dead! Khorrendous losses indeed. But! Eritreans won war.”
“Yes.”
“You, here, in nice country—a victory of a kind, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Russians, after Stalingrad, marched to Berlin. DO YOU UNDERSTAND POINT, Wallace?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You said that these two, Peter and Zula, could solve technical problem and win our little battle in spite of khorrendous losses, yes?”
“Yes, we were working on it but—”
Ivanov held up his hand to shut him up. “Wallace, do favor and go through door.” He gestured toward the plastic-lined room.
Wallace didn’t move.
“Just that door,” Ivanov repeated helpfully.
“Can we just get this done quick and simple?” Wallace asked.
“Not if you sit on couch. Quick and simple depends on how fast you move. And on what information I get from Peter and Zula. Now, go wait.”
Wallace, watched curiously by Sokolov, stood up and tottered into the adjoining room. One of the men in there stepped forward, moving carefully on the slick plastic, and closed the door behind him. Through it they could hear the screech of a length of duct tape being jerked off a roll.
“Mr. Ivanov,” Zula said, “Wallace is innocent.”
“You are beautiful girl, smart, I guess you know of computers. Convince me of this,” Ivanov pleaded. “Make me believe.”
ZULA TALKED FOR an hour.
She explained the nature and history of computer viruses. Talked about the particular subclass of viruses that encrypted hard drives and held their contents for ransom. About the difficulties of making money from ransomware. Explained the innovation that the unknown, anonymous creators of the REAMDE virus had apparently come up with. Ivanov had never heard of massively multiplayer online role-playing games, or MMORPGs, so she told him all about their history, their technology, their sociology, their growth as a major sector of the entertainment industry.
Ivanov listened raptly, breaking in from time to time. Half of the time this was to compliment her, since he seemed convinced that any female who did not receive a compliment every five minutes would stab him with an ice pick in his sleep. The other half of the time it was to ask a question. Some of these were keenly insightful, and others betrayed a disturbing lack of technical understanding.
Once these preliminaries were out of the way, Ivanov began to drill down on the question of Wallace’s culpability. Was the infection chargeable to any carelessness on his part? How, in other words, did the virus spread?
Zula told him what she’d learned, which was that REAMDE was actually spread through a security hole in Outlook, an extremely popular piece of software that, among other things, managed calendars, contacts, and whatnot. In order to do anything significant in T’Rain, you needed to run a reasonably deep vassal network. Coordinated group activities thus became an essential part of game play. Which meant that several of the players in your feudal hierarchy had to be online at the same time, to transact business and conduct war parties, dungeon raids, and the like. Those activities had to be scheduled around Little League practices, dentist appointments, studying for final exams, and so on, and so a stand-alone scheduling system, existing only inside of the T’Rain app, didn’t really serve. A third-party add-on had been created that built a tunnel between T’Rain and Outlook. Most T’Rain players used it. The add-on worked by sending messages back and forth, consisting of invitations to participate in group raids and the like. Most of these were pure text, but it was possible to attach images and other files to such invitations, and therein lay the security hole: REAMDE took advantage of a buffer overflow bug in Outlook to inject malicious code into the host operating system and establish root-level control of the computer, whereupon it could do anything it wanted, including encrypting the contents of all connected drives. First, though, it sent the virus onward to everyone in the victim’s T’Rain contact list.
There was another detail, mentioned on the internal wiki, that she did not share with Ivanov: the security hole in Outlook had been known for a while and most antivirus programs were hip to it. But hard-core gamers were still vulnerable since they ran T’Rain in fullscreen mode and so were oblivious to the increasingly hysterical warnings being hurled onto their screens by their virus-protection software.
Another detail she elected not to share: Wallace had almost certainly gotten the virus from Uncle Richard’s computer, spread via the thumb drive.
“So Wallace used this add-on,” Ivanov said, using air quotes, “and got infected by this virus.”
“Completely innocently, yes,” Zula said. During the first part of her lecture she’d been surfing on a burst of energy that had carried her most of the way through, but in the last ten minutes or so, exhaustion had come over her, and she had slowed down and begun to mumble her words and to begin sentences she didn’t know how to end. Now, she dimly realized that the upshot of all she’d said, in Ivanov’s mind, might be that Wallace had screwed up and deserved to be punished. This now left her almost paralyzed.
To her own considerable surprise and then shame, she began crying. She leaned forward and put her face in her hands.