A Study in White

A STUDY IN WHITE

a silent revolution series

inspired from Mr. Robot

"Where have you been? I've been calling you all night," Kirsten asks, my childhood friend.

"What happened?" I ask. She walks past me and attends to her computer. "There's an attack at the Villain Corp. A DDoS attack, we've been trying to stop it for over an hour, but they won't just stop." She says, every word faster than the other, it is almost impossible for me to understand her.

When it seems that it is hopeless, she looked up, worn out from the stress. “This time, it’s bad.”  

"Have you tracked their IP address, have you blocked it yet?" I ask, looking over her shoulder, I see a stream of attacks over the black screen on her computer.

“Is Rommel here? Is he talking to their tech department?”

“He’s online with them, but so far nothing…I don’t think Rommel can handle this. Look, Ms. Jeanibeth put me with this account and I can’t screw up in my big break. I need you. Please.”

You don’t have to ask Kirsten. Even if I don’t want to help you, my mind is already running through the things I saw from your computer screen. The attack is spontaneous. Whoever is doing this, they are making sure to down the servers of Villain Corp.

“Lenniel? Will you help me?” I am out of my reverie as soon as I heard her speak.

I’ve been working for a month now with Cybersafe, my job? To keep hackers away from the servers of the clients, our biggest account is with Villain Corp. Villain Corp, it’s actually V Corp, but I like to call it Villain Corp, they are the biggest conglomerate that is almost everywhere, had business everywhere. I hate them. They control everyone. But not me. I hate them, yet I am working for them.

“Lenniel?” I look blankly at her. I am overthinking again.

“Did you reconfigure the DNS?” I finally ask.

“Yes.” She looks at the screen where Rommel is working.

“Stop the services.”

“I already stopped the services.”

“I tried to reboot the servers but they’re not coming back up. Dude, someone is straight up fingerblasting their entire network right now.” Rommel says, not looking away from the computer screen.

“They just started reporting on the outage,” she says while looking at her phone.

I sit beside Rommel and starts to look up the attack.

Sht. This is worse than I thought. They’re in the network?

“What’s the status update? I thought we set up security protocols so that this doesn’t happen,” Ms. Jeanibeth says as soon as she steps in the office.

“Where’s the attack coming from?” She asks, looking at Rommel.

“Everywhere, obviously. The Philippines, USA, Thailand, China….”

“Start restaring the services, load sharing, redirect the traffic,” she’s tense. I can feel it.

“I don’t think this is just a DDoS attack. I think…” I pause, their attention is focused in me. “…they got a rootkit sitting inside the servers.”

“What’s a rootkit?” Kirsten asks.

“It’s malicious code that completely takes over their system. It can delete system files and stop programs. Viruses, worms…” Rommel explains.

“How do we stop it?” Kirsten anxiously ask.

“That’s the thing. It’s fundamentally invisible…you can’t stop it.” Rommel says in defeat.

“All of their servers are timing out,” Ms. Jeanibeth says while looking at the screen.

“None of them are coming back up,” Kirsten says.

“That’s because every time we restart the server the virus replicates itself during boot up and crashes the host,” I say. Leaning on the chair, they’re good. Those hackers are good.

“How are we supposed to bring up the network if we can’t restart the servers?” Ms. Jeanibeth asks.

“We can’t, which is what they wanted. By defending ourselves, we ended up spreading the virus everywhere. Only thing we can do is we’ve got to take the whole system offline, wipe the infected servers clean, then bring them back up,” I explain.

“You’re coming with me,” Ms. Jeanibeth says, then dial something in her phone before she disappears from the office.

--

We went to Villain Corp’s server farm through their private jet, the smell of the velvet seat is suffocating me, and it smells new.

The servers are placed in a neat and organized way. We look at the big screen inside, they’re already booting the network back.

“Stop, tell Rommel to stop.”

“Why?” Ms. Jeanibeth asks.

“There’s an infected server up and running. What’s the ETA before it hits this server?” I ask, pointing at the green circle with a blinking yellow outline, server CS30.

“The back up server up and running?” I ask.

“It’s ready but it’s not configured for auto switch.” The employee from the server farm says.

“Give me your laptop, we need to redirect the traffic, we need to switch DNS.”

“You got this, you got this, you got this.” I say the mantra in my head.

“This impossible. Its almost back t the server,” Ms. Jeanibeth says, pressuring me. I try to concentrate with what I am doing. I got this, I got this.

I hear a sigh of relief as the infected server has been transferred to idle one, the server can’t be affected by now.

“I’m gonna take a look at the infected server, give me a minute.” I say.

“Yes, I’ll meet you at the elevator,” she says, standing up.

I focus my attention with the logs of the attack. They must have left a mark or something. Every hacker loves attention. They just don’t do DDoS attacks for no reason.

I stumble upon a log. This is it. The madhatters. Is this supposed to be a joke.

LEAVE IT HERE, the readtxt says. They tell me to leave it here. But why? Doesn’t matter.

Time to shut them down.

Why can’t I delete it? I don’t…

This is good. I know it’s good. This is for Cybersafe. I help them.

WHITEHAT

(n) something bad is good