Sledge

By Erick C

This is the story of Sledge, a black hat hacker that turned white. The FBI enlisted his help to retrieve a secret file stolen. Little did Sledge know that he had been involved in the government's war against The APOSTLES, a secret terrorist organization that demanded the government to stop its surveillance programs such as PRISM and FISA.

Sledge has to rely on his hacking skills to face the threat posed by the Elites of The APOSTLES. Being a hacker, Sledge disagreed with the government's unchecked spying on the people, however, Sledge would not agree with the way of The APOSTLES.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Erick C
• Release date: Jul 16, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301813865

Erick C

Erick Chen stayed in Malaysia with his wife and two sons. He was not a hacker, and knew almost nothing about hackers at all. He loves exploring new gadgets and technologies. Erick had been working with computers since his junior high school and his passion in this field still burnt brightly till now. He had been thinking about writing books since ages ago, and he finally did it with ‘Sledge’, which was his very first attempt at it.

Book preview

THE RISE OF THE APOSTLES

The next war will be fought invisibly….

0523 hours, Apr 21

JetAirlines Flight 332 was bound for New York from Kansas City. It was a fairly new airlines entering into the already competitive airways business few years back with focus on low cost.

This is your captain speaking, we are going to arrive in New York, in about twenty minutes time, earlier than our schedule. We will be landing shortly and I hope you have enjoyed your flight with JetAirlines. Cabin crew, please prepare for landing. Thank you, announced Captain Paul Stanley.

There were a lot of movements in the plane as passengers got awaken and the cabin crew performed the necessary landing preparations.

This is JetAirlines JA 332 to Kennedy Tower, requesting clearance to land, Captain Stanley radioed the JFK Airport traffic controller.

After few seconds, came the reply, Roger, JA 332, you are number 5, please proceed to hold pattern.

Affirmative, JA's out, Captain Stanley finished and turned off the radio. Another smooth flight, eh, Chad? Captain Stanley nodded to his co-pilot.

Yes, Paul. We made a good time, Chad added, Once we reached NYC, first thing I will do is to drop by Ninth Avenue to have a hell of a party.

Well, it's good to be young, and for you lad, the best advice you will ever get is to have fun while it lasts, said Captain Stanley. He did a quick check on the weather broadcast readings.

I guess we will need to change the flight direction a bit, there's a heavy cloud directly 5 miles ahead of us, Captain Stanley then instructed the cockpit instrument auto pilot to change to a new heading, What the… he tried the operation again, but it was still unsuccessful. He tried something else, like changing altitude, but nothing seemed to work. The plane did not respond to any button or switch presses anymore.

God, we're losing control of the plane! the captain exclaimed in realization of the situation.

What? Chad tried some switches in the cockpit instruments as well. He could not believe it, but none of the navigation system really worked.

JA 332, this is ground tower, you are deviating from your route, the traffic controller radioed in. The flight computer was, in fact, setting a new flight direction for the plane without the pilot's instruction.

Ground, we're losing control of the plane, FMS not working, over… said Captain Stanley in response.

JA 332, try manual override! suggested the ground tower.

Negative, tower… manual override ain't working either, Captain Stanley replied, now fully losing control of the plane. Suddenly, the plane automatically changed its direction to head southeast from JFK airport. Some passengers, who had realized that they had changed direction abruptly, had become restless and demanded explanation from the crew.

There was really nothing that the captain could do. He had tried everything and could not regain control at all. The plane continued losing altitude and moving away from its original destination.

Ladies and gentlemen. This is Captain Stanley speaking. I have a very bad news for all of us. Our plane had been sabotaged. We are losing control of the plane. Currently, we are moving towards the sea south of Long Island. Based on computer's projection, we may be crashing into the sea in 5 minutes. May God… he was interrupted before he could finish.

There was a brief static noise coming out from the announcement system. The next voice that spoke out was not the captain's voice. This person had an artificial-like voice that modified his sound to be eerier, Good morning, my dear fellow passengers. This is your new captain speaking. I'm The Conductor. We are going to crash land soon, so ensure that you have fastened your seat belts, written your final wills… Oops, please forget about the last one… nobody will be able to read them anyway once we… CRASH and BURN!! The Conductor gave an ominous laugh that lasted for a few seconds. A classical instrumental music started playing. It was Pachelbel's Canon in D Major. The music playing in the background made the situation much more dramatic than it already was.

There were shouts of panics from the passengers and the cabin became chaotic. Their voices were drowned in the music as The Conductor increased the volume louder. Some had gone praying, others sending emails and text messages to their loved ones. The music increased the intensity of the passengers' fear. The plane continued its descent and crashed head first into the sea. The ground control tower personnel could only watch each other in horror as they heard the last communication from the plane. And then they lost contact from the plane.

~~~

A hacker group called The APOSTLES immediately claimed responsibility for the crash. They pasted the following message on a popular text sharing web site around one hour after the crash:

Title: The Beginning of The End

We are The APOSTLES

We will punish the government of The United States for crimes against its people

We will also punish the government for war crime against multiple countries

We want the government to stop PRISM, FISA and any other forms of spying on its people

We hacked the JA 332 plane on 21st of April for a start

We identified at least 5 NSA's high-ranking officials in the flight (you know who they are)

We controlled the plane remotely and crashed it into the sea as a warning

We could have crashed it somewhere else in locations with a lot of civilians

We will not stop here

We will continue to exact divine punishments as we see fit

We are unwavering in our efforts

By: The Conductor, Elite, 2nd Order of The APOSTLES, on Apr 21st

The declaration of war had been made. The government of The United States would be fighting a cyber war against an invisible group of hacktivist that nobody heard of before.

There were 76 passengers in flight JA 332. There were zero survivors. The news became the talk of the country immediately in Facebook, Twitter, TV, papers, and almost anywhere in the rest of the world. It was almost like 9/11 all over again.

SLEDGE

2342 hours, Apr 22

Sledge worked in Securite, a network security solution provider company located in the Silicon Valley. Sledge was actually his online nickname, which he used even in real life. People found it funny at first, calling him that way, but as time went by, they got used to it anyway. Sledge was a network security engineer in the company.

Securite became popular overnight, when it became the first company that introduced the Securitor anti malware software that could clean up the W32/Tosh.I worm. The worm was estimated to have caused more than $50 billion damage world wide, even more than the previous record holder, MyDoom worm, at $38 billion. The worm exploited weaknesses in the operating systems that damaged the user's data. Securitor was the first solution that was able to reverse the damage done by the worm, an unexpectedly simple bit-shifting algorithm to the victim’s data. Since then, many other security companies had also come out with a similar solution, but not quick enough before Securite earned its bucks.

The group of programmers that were responsible to write Securitor codes were rewarded handsomely. But nobody knew that, Sledge was the one giving those programmers the initial draft of source codes to destroy W32/Tosh.I and recover damaged data at the same time. Sledge was a very skillful programmer. He could code things quickly. But he never got interested to apply for the programming job. He thought that it was too boring for him. The programmers thanked him by sharing portion of the rewards with him.

Sledge had another special skill as well. He had a photographic memory, which allowed him to recall whatever texts and pictures he had recently seen. He could visualize the whole image into his mind, like a photograph. His was not eidetic memory though. He could not recall other kinds of sensory memory, such as what he heard, as good as what he saw. With this ability, Sledge would be able to rewrite a whole page of texts that he had just ‘memorized’ in less than 5 seconds. On a single page, he could even locate words by specifying the line numbers they were on. His photographic memory would normally last for about 2 to 3 days and after that, those images would become a ‘blur’ in his mind.

The network security in the company since then had been shaky. There were many hack attempts from across the worlds trying to penetrate the company's Intranet. Most of the hack tried to steal the source codes and documents from the company's knowledge center. Others were just in plain bid to ‘deface’ the company's website, the activity of changing the appearance of a website illegally.

Sledge worked night shift. Hack attempts from inside the country would normally be very active starting midnight to early morning, just before dawn. On contrary, overseas hackers would be most alive during daytime, due to time zone differences.

The creator of the Tosh.I worm must have been very unhappy, Sledge said to himself. Sledge thought that this was going to be another busy night. He had registered 1,000 over attempts to penetrate the company's firewall tonight. Then there was one that managed to go through the firewall. The hacker managed to go in via a compromised Securite's employee device and managed to jump into the company's internal network. It was currently scanning for any useful data for unknown intention. Sledge was able to detect the malicious machine via the warning from the distributed network system that he wrote himself. His custom distributed malware detection system were part of the custom software he plugged into network devices such as routers and switches. He was a true believer of SDN, Software Defined Networking, and he wrote custom codes for his routers to gain more control of the devices under his care. One of the modules he dumped into the devices was actually the distributed malware detection system.

Not tonight, not on my watch, thought Sledge. Sledge issued a command to redirect the router serving this compromised machine to his ‘honeypot’, a set of fake network that lure unauthorized machine over. Sledge's honeypot was well made and quite believable. It was designed to replicate realistic systems, databases and services. The hacker continued downloading files from the ‘honeypot’, all the while unaware that he had been tricked. As a bonus, Sledge also included his own version of Trojan horse inside the honeypot under the convincing name of important files.

The hacker hit the ‘jackpot’ in less than 10 minutes. Quite a capable one, to be able to locate this file in such a short time, Sledge was thinking out loud to himself now.

And then, within another minute, the hacker had transferred the entire stolen files from the compromised machine to his/her own machine. But too bad, not clever enough to check the file contents before opening them…

By this time, the hacker had opened the file that contained the Trojan horse. It was a reverse hack. Now Sledge, using a piece of controller software, was in full possession of the hacker's machine remotely. He sent the following warning message remotely to the hacker's screen via a pop-up:

Retreat ASAP! Or I will clean up your computer and there will be nothing left before you can figure out what happened…

The element of surprise always scared the shit out of those hackers. But Sledge's threat was not an empty one. Having installed a backdoor inside the hacker's machine, he could pull the plug off the target machine by a single key press on his keyboard. He was aware that doing this might risk lawsuit to the company, but he knew those hackers were in the wrong in the first place anyway. Tonight, this worked as usual. The hacker, surprised by the pop up message and fearing the worst, immediately disconnected from the compromised device without any delay.

Sledge then sent an email message reminding the employee of the compromised device to clean up the machine. He always hated this part, cleaning up the mess.

Another job well done! Sledge said to himself. Most of the time, these kinds of events would remain unknown. Nobody would have realized that he had saved the company countless time. He hated publicity, and preferred to work alone. He did not care when everyone called him ‘anti-social’. But Sledge got another darker side of his own.

FILE 61-398

1503 hours, Apr 23

Agent Redford was an FBI agent. He was not sure how he got lost inside the building, but he did. He had received a distress call earlier from his 12 years old daughter. She had been kidnapped. The abductor asked him to come alone, unarmed and not to inform the police or anyone else. Agent Redford complied because he did not want to lose his only daughter.

When Agent Redford entered the strange building, he found that it was empty. He called out loud, but nobody replied. He then went up the elevator to the first floor. The whole floor was a maze of walls made of transparent glass-like material. He tried to navigate around, and ended up stuck in a dead end corner. He had the feeling that he was being watched all the time. He checked his phone but it had no line inside here.

Suddenly, the floor below him collapsed. He fell down and landed on all four hands and feet. He told himself that he was lucky to have been trained in parkour for the past 4 years. He checked around his surroundings. He was in a place that looked like a lockup. He was trapped and was behind thick iron bars. The ceiling above him, which had given way earlier, had closed again as if nothing had happened. The door to the cell was locked. It had no keyhole or whatsoever locking mechanism. The place was barely lighted. As far as he could see, there were cells all around.

There was a male body lying face down on the cell’s floor he was trapped in. Agent Redford carefully turned him around and was shocked. It was the familiar face of Agent Trevor, one of his ex-FBI partners. He concluded that he had been dead for only about 24 hours.

Tell me… do you recognize our friend who is sleeping there peacefully? suddenly a voice came out of nowhere. It was from a loudspeaker hidden somewhere in the cell.

Where are you? … Where’s my daughter? Agent Redford shouted.

From out of nowhere, in the distance her daughter’s screamed out, Help, daddy…! Please help me, I’m scared… The voice pierced through Agent Redford’s heart like an arrow. She was somewhere nearby, but he could not see her.

Please… do not harm her… Tell me what do you want? he shouted in desperation.

He could hear her daughter’s sobbing cry but it was drowned by the kidnapper’s voice again, Let’s get straight to business, Agent Redford... I need access to File 61-398… and I believe you have the right permission presumably?

Agent Redford was surprised. Not only this guy knew about the secret File 61-398, but he also knew that he had access.

That file… Why do you want that file?

I’m the one asking questions here… so, what do you say? Agent Trevor here did not want to cooperate, what a pity…

Agent Redford gave the corpse another look. Poor Trevor! he thought. He was a promising and talented agent, with bright futures ahead of him. What you are requesting is a highly confidential file. I will need to obtain permission from the Director…

My dear Agent Redford… I’m starting to lose my patience… or do you prefer to see you daughter die… prematurely?

No… no… please! Not my daughter… Agent Redford thought hard for a while. If he agreed to the demand of this mad man, he might be losing his job and received severe punishment for his action. But since his wife left him, his daughter was the only direct family he got. The choice was clear to him.

Do you promise to release her if I give you the access code?

Give me the code and I promise that both of you will get to see each other again, otherwise...

Agent Redford could not trust the guy, I would like to see my daughter first… and then I’ll give you the code.

There was a long silence for another couple of minutes. Her daughter had stopped crying. Then he heard footsteps walking to the direction of his cell. Then the sound of footsteps became faster running sound. And from the door of the cell, there her daughter came into view.

Daaaaddy…!! she cried out loudly.

Honey…!!, he wanted to give her a big hug, but they were separated by the iron bars. He could only held her hands firmly between the bars.

Now, give me the code quickly… the voice came out of nowhere again.

Agent Redford inspected her daughter. From the look of her face, she had been crying for a long time, but other than that she looked okay.