6 | THE WHITE HOUSE
No matter how deep you dug, Sam thought, there always seemed to be a level deeper. The more you knew, the more you realized how little you really knew.
The real Neoh@ck Con was held somewhere inside the White House. One of the most secure networks in the entire world. Just the idea that there was a bunch of hackers so powerful, so skillful, that they actually held their meetings within the White House without anyone knowing was mind-blowing!
And if he made it, according to Skullface, it was going to rock his world.
He arrived home just after noon. His mother had made them some sandwiches, and even though he was desperate to get on with Neoh@ck, he sat down in the kitchen with her and politely ate a couple. It was an unwritten rule in their home to eat what meals they could together. You’re always so busy nowadays, his mother would say. It’s the only time I get to see you.
She must be lonely, Sam often thought. It had been just the two of them since his father left, but that had been so long ago that he had no memories of him. His mother worked nights as an ESL teacher, and what with his school and other activities, she was spending more and more time each day on her own.
Fargas had headed off home, suddenly having remembered he had some chores to do.
Sam suspected he was really going home to play Neuro-Doom and wondered if that might be something to worry about. Game addiction was a huge international problem, and they said that neuro-games were far more addictive than normal computer games.
He resolved to give Fargas a call later and see what he was up to.
He finished lunch and closed the door of his room.
The White House. Surely an impossible hack, one part of his brain kept saying. They were just kidding you.
But Skullface had sounded serious when he said it.
He started with an hour on Google.
The computer networks at the White House are managed by the WHCA, the White House Communications Agency, which is controlled by the DISA, the Defense Information Systems Agency.
The White House was part of GovNet, a separate network air-gapped from the Internet: isolated by the very simple process of eliminating actual physical connections between GovNet and the Internet.
Sam reasoned that through. Theoretically, it was impossible to access an air-gapped system; however, the reality was that a widespread network like GovNet would be almost impossible to air-gap 100 percent, despite the best efforts of the computer administrators and their security policies. It just took one connection from inside the network to the outside world, and the entire air gap was compromised.
DISA controlled ten digital gateways that served the network from three network operations centers. The network covered the White House, Camp David (the presidential retreat), Air Force One, the fleet of presidential helicopters, the presidential limo fleet, and the president’s cell phone, along with a wide range of other governmental locations.
E-mails were routed to a cluster of specialized servers based in the Washington, D.C., network operations (NetOp) center. From there, White House traffic was filtered, monitored, and transferred inside GovNet to a secondary e-mail server in the White House itself, where it was rescreened and finally distributed to the various e-mail accounts throughout the building.
The only open connection between the Internet-connected e-mail servers in the NetOp center and the server in the White House was a two-way e-mail pipe. All other network ports were shut off.
But it was a wire that crossed the air gap.
That would do it. One of Sam’s special tricks was a clever bit of software that would break IP packets into tiny bits, attach them to genuine e-mails, and reassemble them at the other end, creating an invisible connection between the two computers that flowed beneath the constant current of e-mail messages between the two networks.
It was like writing secret messages, one word at a time, underneath stamps on envelopes and posting them one after the other. At the receiving end, someone had to assemble the words back into a full sentence.
He called it Cross Fire, for no particular reason.
He slipped his software onto the NetOp e-mail server by launching a Denial of Service (DoS) attack from a small server farm in the Netherlands that he had compromised over a year before.
While the systems and their administrators responded to that, he slid Cross Fire quietly onto the server using a variant of the old Metasploit tool.
Now for the e-mail server.
An Uninterruptible Power Supply, a UPS, protected it against power outages. The UPS was connected to the server by an old-fashioned serial cable, which in emergencies could send a shutdown command to the server. Furthermore, the company that installed the UPS monitored it so they could run diagnostics and respond to any problems in the device.
Sam crept carefully into the network of the UPS supplier and slid slowly down the wire to the UPS device itself.
It wasn’t enough to load Cross Fire onto the server, though; it had to be run. The program had to be executed, and he couldn’t do that through a serial connection.
He encased Cross Fire in a self-executing shell and renamed it to that of a common internal Windows program. Someone inside the White House would unwittingly run the program that would complete the circuit and give Sam access, through the e-mail connection, to the heart of the U.S. government.
Through the serial connection, he copied the file into the Operating System folder of the e-mail server and closed out of the UPS and the UPS company network.
Now there was nothing more he could do. It was up to the staff at the White House to open the door and let him in.