THE VICTIMS OF THE 17 SECONDS WAR
Copyright © 2021 Christoph Brueck / www.christophbrueck.com / All rights reserved. Photo by Patrick Langwallner on Unsplash
Andrew sat down on the old worn-out couch and tried to make himself comfortable. It wasn’t as easy as one expected. He took the data glasses from his nose and pushed them into the jacket. The elder man, he was probably in his late forties, came back from the kitchen carrying two coffee mugs.
“It’s organic. Real coffee. A little luxury I afford from time to time.” He smiled and gave one to Andrew. “So how have you been, boy?” he asked.
“Good. Virtual studies kept me busy, and I have a job at ENDOX now. I program their nanos. Adjusting them to their client’s needs. Mostly I do hair color,” he said.
“A programmer. Like me,” he laughed.
“No, most of the stuff is done by AIs. I really just make sure the right data set is worked on. I do a little coding at university, though. Virtual reality installations. Games. Such things,” Andy said proudly.
“Good. Sounds like you got yourself nicely settled,” Kyle said and sat on the old-fashioned, large seat. It was the imitation of something they called a Chesterfield, he had once told him. It was old, like everything in the cellar. Everything except the computers, humming in the corner from the modern workstation which seemed so anachronistic now in the days of wearable computers.
“What do you do, Kyle? Too young to retire, hm?” Andy said.
“Freelance work,” Kyle sighed. “I do some security stuff, sometimes I track code. Nothing fancy. I am an outdated old man. Mostly playing around with legacy systems, too old to be updated and too important to be replaced by modern counterparts. Makes a living,” Kyle sighed.
“Cool. So, you are still in business, are you?” Andy smiled.
“So your mum said, my nephew needed my help. What have you fucked up that your old uncle needs to repair?” he asked and chuckled a little.
“Oh no, nothing like that. I decided on history classes this semester. We have to write a paper, and I think you are an expert on the topic,” Andy said.
“What is it?” Kyle asked.
“The 17 Seconds War,” Andy said. He saw Kyle raise his brows and drink from his mug.
“I see,” he said.
“You fought in the war, didn’t you?” he asked.
“It didn’t last long enough to really speak about fighting,” Kyle said and laughed.
“Cyber warriors, you guys were called back then,” Andy said.
“Hm,” Kyle leaned back. “State-sanctioned hackers. That’s what we were.”
“The same thing, I guess. The first and only cyberwar ever fought. A world war entirely fought in the digital world. Please, tell me about it. I think a firsthand perspective would totally elevate my paper,” Andy begged.
“Sure,” Kyle said. “The 17 Seconds War. A war lasting the entirety of seventeen seconds,” he laughed. “Actually, it lasted months. The fallout lasted months. But the real combat, if you wanna call it that, was done in the seventeen seconds on the fourteenth of March 2032. There weren’t any shots fired. No soldiers deployed. No troops were involved. No bombs. No guns. There were victims though. Billions of them. Had they known how fatal it would be, I always wonder if they would have ordered this fateful attack at all. Probably, they would have. Those who wage war have this ability not to care too much about those falling in them. I think otherwise a politician would never be able to start a war. Something greater than any individual has to be at stake. Something greater than all of us, which is why we must suffer for this greater good, right? In the 17 Seconds War, it was trade regulations. Damned, fucking trade regulations in the South China Sea. I don’t remember the specifics, but for months China and the US struggled over them. A lot of speeches were given. A lot of angry threats were spoken. On March twelfth we got our marching orders. I was working at the Cyber Defense Center outside Houston at that time. Codename Castille. One of five centers of this kind. A hive of young people had been recruited to prepare the ultimate strike against the enemies of this great nation. We had developed the nastiest software ever to see the hard drive of a computer,” he laughed. “You still know what a hard drive is, don’t you?”
“Local saving devices for data, the predecessor of the global chain, so to say,” Andy said.
“Exactly. We still had those back then. We didn’t trust anything but our own local hard drives to carry the weapons we had created.” Kyle laughed. “We felt like Gods. Unlimited resources. Every one of us was a genius we believed. Everyone tried to be even smarter than the other. Worms, Trojan horses, self-replicating bot networks, codebreakers, encryptions, firewalls, remote access tools, we had an arsenal of weapons. We had experts in design, deployment, countermeasures. The worst was the infrastructure guys. They studied the enemies. They would exploit their systems and backdoors. They calculated the breaking points of data nodes and worked on data corruption on a large scale. What we prepared to do was wipe out our enemy so completely no conventional weapon would ever rival our attack. Except for a nuclear war, probably. But if we did our job right, even that one would be put to shame. We looked into blowing up their nuclear plants, actually. A nuclear strike without a rocket to carry the payload. Using the enemy’s resources against himself. I remember we had looked for a year into blowing up a nuclear reactor at Shenzhen which was in close proximity to a data center. We calculated the effect for weeks and finally decided against it. The effect wasn’t big enough. We needed something more …” Kyle shrugged. “We needed something more fatal. Something that had a more complete effect.”
“You were looking for the shatter point.” Andy smiled.
“Indeed, we were.” Kyle smiled. “We didn’t know the term, but we looked at the one point that was static enough and meaningful enough to kill the entire system of the enemy by attacking it. IP protocols, data distribution mechanics, encryption. The point is everyone talks about decentralized systems nowadays, but what people really mean is an autonomous, encrypted decentralized system. Distributed ledgers. The internet itself was always decentralized. It never rested on one entry point, one source of computing power, or one single data node providing or managing the flow of information. Actually, it was distributed by a protocol known as the internet protocol data for years between various, countless networks, allowing players to enter and leave the network at will. That posed a challenge. It was what we were meant to overcome at BLACK CLOUD. That was our codename. Funny, it was the only codename we used that wasn’t from Greek mythology.”
Andrew nodded. “So, you uploaded malware to computers? Sent emails with hidden programs in it and stuff like that?” The young man laughed as it seemed almost so rudimentary it was primitive to do this via an email.
“No. We had nowhere the capabilities of network analysis we have nowadays, but both sides leaned heavily on AIs at that point to monitor activity. Ours was called Cerberus Ono. Theirs was called … I can’t recall the name,” Kyle sighed.
“Changcheng.” Andy smiled. “The Great Wall.”
“Right. Exactly. So, we all knew that whatever we did would be recognized pretty much instantly. That was our main problem. We knew we would need to act quickly, but we couldn’t determine what their AI was actually capable of. Their AI seemed inconsistent in its defensive strategies. So, we needed to prepare attacks that couldn’t easily be responded to by a digital entity. That was how the Cameron Doctrine was put in place. You heard about it? It is damned important to understand how this was going down.” Kyle drank from his coffee again.
“Digital attacks on analog infrastructure,” Andy said, remembering the words. Kyle nodded.
“Exactly. Target and break real things, so no update in the world can repair them. I already told you we looked deeply into nuclear plants, but it turned out what was much easier was the water deployment network, communication, and especially the financial system. All three relied in parts on legacy systems, outdated and yet too important to replace.” He sighed. “We had good entry points there. Ancient exploits. It was why I was there. I had been old for this business, but I was an expert on cracking into the specific systems they used for their water supply. So, we gave up the nuclear plants and turned to those systems, infecting them slowly with remote-controlled bots, creating a network of self-replicating worms.” He shrugged. “All this stuff. On the third floor, though, the real killers worked or used to work until Christmas 2031. The guys upstairs wanted to crash their entire digital network. They wanted to take down the enemy’s internet. Oh man, I tell you the smartest people in the biz were up there. They looked into everything. Attacking the data codes through a virus was the least possible way. Internet is like water, take out some of it and it slows, and the data looks for a new way. But countries had cut off their entire internet by meddling with the BGP, the Border Gateway Protocols, so up there they were working on a large DDoS attack. Distributed Denial of Service. Basically, the idea to overload the system of a country through one giant bot network. Problem was, the AI would cut out infected computers faster than we could infect them. So, it didn’t really work, just slowed down the whole thing a lot. They almost cracked the alternative route, killing the DNS, the Domain Name System, which would have rendered all websites inaccessible. The problem was the internet wouldn’t be down forever and could be repaired, also it would take time. That meant we were winning a massive battle but not the war. By the end, everything came down to a combination of attacks and that meant we needed to coordinate a million operations at a time. The fifth floor of our building worked on that. They worked on HYDRA. Codename for our offensive AI. Something the Chinese didn’t have, as far as we knew. An AI capable of adjusting the attack patterns in nanoseconds, to overwhelm the enemy with attacks. Hydra was running on a Tier-6 quantum computer, one of only four of its kind. This wasn’t a nuclear option; this was a super capable general ready to launch everything in its arsenal at almost the same time. I remember the day we probably lost the war.” Kyle smiled. “December twentieth of the year 2031. We had our Christmas party and our leaders, generals, and advisors with little technical capabilities had been briefed and decided the attack on the internet itself was impossible, so we would use it to attack everything else. You know why we lost the war that day, don’t you?” Kyle asked.
“The other side had figured out how to crash the internet,” Andy sighed.
“Exactly. Another coffee? For lasting only seventeen seconds, it takes damn long to tell the story of the war, doesn’t it?” Kyle got up.
“Yes, please. It’s excellent coffee.” Andy smiled.
“Real coffee. Probably the first you ever had, hm?”
****
Kyle returned and sat down. “Most of the stuff I’ve told you is probably classified, but I guess you could piece it together from public sources anyway. Well, at the beginning of 2032 we realized we would soon no longer be theorists. We prepared for the practical application of the attacks we had prepared. A billion simulations were run with both Cerberus and Hydra. The CIA reported that Xi Bao, their leader of cyber-warfare had run tests for their own attack. We even knew what they called it. Dragonflies. Operation Dragonflies. We also knew the tests had been looked at extremely critically. What we didn’t know was the concerns weren’t that they would be ineffective, but rather the economic results of an attack too effective was what concerned the communist party’s functionaries. China held large quantities of dollars and we still were a large trading partner. Our downfall could be theirs too. It was in many ways. Anyway, we were confident if we launched Hydra, they would be overwhelmed by our attacks. The negotiations failed. By end of January, those trade wars turned into a not-so-Cold War scenario. Several cyber-attacks were registered on both sides. We basically began disturbing traffic control, financial transfers, and we hacked into their central computer network several times, stealing state’s secrets. They in return hacked the Pentagon, deactivating our defense network. It was a stupid move. One we had foreseen. All five Cyber Warfare centers worked independently from that network. So, three of the other four relentlessly attacked them, while we waited for our orders. One could argue the war was already beginning back then and lasted three months and not seventeen seconds, but anyway. The name probably made these things be defined as pre-war hostilities. We found ways to counter their attacks, back-up systems, and such things. The large tech companies were basically taken over by our government, and they shut down large portions of the internet as they saw fit to contain attacks, like quarantining a city to avoid the spread of a pandemic. It was effective. Effective enough. In February, they tried to talk again and our idiot president busted the talks and diplomatic relations between the United States of America and the People’s Republic of China were cut off. That was when everyone knew Hydra would be activated. It was only a matter of time. Like good poker players, we didn’t do it right away when China expected it. No. We waited. On March tenth, we received the order. The whole site was shut down. No calls to our girlfriends, no going out of the premises. Nothing. We went completely dark. We began uploading Hydra to their networks. We began to activate the bot networks we had established. The EU failed with their last attempt to negotiate peace and on the twelfth of March at 10:32:32, we initiated Hydra and ordered it to execute its only function. A complete attack on every system viable and connected to the Republic of China. It did well. It really did, actually. We didn’t lose because our plan didn’t work perfectly. We lost because we hadn’t anticipated the counter move.” Kyle sighed.
“The Blackout,” Andy said and drank from his coffee.
“Biscuits? I have chocolate biscuits somewhere,” Kyle asked.
“No, please continue,” Andy said.
“My attack pattern, Aquarius, was the second to be executed. It attacked the water deployment system of Beijing, Shanghai, Macau, Hong Kong, and Shenzhen. They all failed within minutes. I once read this led to over a million people dying. A million people I killed for my country. With a few lines of code. Within five seconds their financial system, stock exchanges, and money transfers were put down. The effect began to spread through the system. Factories ceased working as we encrypted their operating systems. Communication went down as phone providers found their systems not responding, killing a million calls instantly and allowing nobody to call anyone. Seventy-seven percent of their communication failed. After ten seconds, we had over fifteen essential systems compromised and under attack. Hydra pushed hard and a million attacks multiplied into a billion. We overwhelmed their AI completely, unable to keep up with ours it couldn’t protect their system anymore. We were winning, clearly. Of course, we didn’t realize that. What we didn’t know was the system was programmed to initiate a counterattack in that case. It activated a bot network embedded into our systems, much like we embedded ours in theirs. Theirs actually aimed at the key infrastructure we needed to wage a cyber-war. The bastards had found a way to shut down our internet. They had reversed our doctrine. Not attacking real-world infrastructure through the digital entry points but using attacks on real-world infrastructure to attack the digital capabilities. They attacked our power grid. Eleven seconds after Hydra was activated a few million bots and viruses lead to complicated series of data corruptions that left the whole power grid incapable of organizing itself. The electricity network needed constant regulation and without it, the system began to overload and shut itself down. It took another five seconds to take full effect, but when twenty-five percent of the electricity grid was down, the effect showed. When they reached fifty-seven percent, the network itself failed nationwide. Truth is, the internet was run by computers and those computers needed power. Lots of it. Their insatiable hunger for electricity made them the first to cause backlash cycles, and we lost our servers. When the back-up systems, those few who had any, went back up and tried to run a nationwide system of servers from batteries and generators, the power grid was mostly gone. We fought for an hour and finally the system failed, as millions of computers were no longer responding. Everything connected to the internet went either offline or had to be handled manually. Cerberus hadn’t even recognized the attack before it was over and both he and his aggressive cousin Hydra shut down. I remember sitting in the dark and realizing we had lost. Took us four months to repair the damage. Four months in which California had declared independence, most companies in the country had been ruined, the financial system had been wiped out, and communication had to be done by fucking radio again. Riots happened everywhere. Had all those idiots been able to coordinate, we might have had a civil war at hand. Then when our system came up again, our leader had already given in to all the enemy’s demands to make sure no second attack would ruin their efforts to repair our country. The internet needed a lot longer to come back and was never the same again. The decentralization was almost a religious idea now. Power distribution was never the same. When everything returned to normal six months after the war, they estimated forty million Americans had died. Hospitals had been unable to keep up operations. Machines had ceased to work, and without machines we soon ran out of gas, which then again led to logistics falling apart. The regions reliant on food supplies faced starvation. Los Angeles became hell, I heard. New York was almost completely abandoned. Summer passed. The cold winter and no heating system turned the city into a death trap for everybody. This country was never the same again. Cannibalism was pardoned by the U.S. President. It took years to reestablish security in many cities, as law enforcement had collapsed. Technologically we had been diminished by then, leading to a worldwide crisis, that dragged Europe, Africa, and Asia down to the pit of a crisis. Funny enough, it hit China very hard. They collapsed just days after they had crippled us. Things were even worse there.”
“How old were you when this happened? Seven?” Kyle sighed.
“Yeah, six, I think. I remember spending the winter at my uncle’s farm. We were pretty privileged.” Andy nodded. “For me, it was all one big adventure.”
“Yeah, they kept it away from you. Your dad went out at night and used those old-fashioned analog rifles of his to shoot trespassers. God knows how many he killed to defend his food.” Kyle sighed again.
“It was fine until he died. But things were getting better by then,” Andy sighed and leaned back. “Wow. I didn’t know you were … so involved. Mum told me you fought in the war, but… Wow,” Andy sighed.
“Yeah. There is a reason why there was only one of those wars ever. Probably in no war, fewer soldiers had died and barely in no war ever more civilians suffered,” Kyle said. “We had no idea what was gonna happen. Actually, all these smart people had blindly worked on creating chaos and we were so surprised when we saw what chaos truly is.”
“You went private afterward, didn’t you?” Andy asked.
“Oh yes, strangely I was in high demand suddenly. Nations never again took a step to attack each other, but corporate warfare turned into a very different beast. I can tell you it radicalized a lot until the decentralization of networks and widespread application of AIs put an end to it.” Kyle got up. “My coffee has gone cold. I’ll warm it up. What about yours?”
“I am fine, thanks,” Andy said and kept on thinking about the story as his uncle made his way into the small kitchen.
