Support and Defend (11 page)

E
THAN PULLED
into his driveway just before six p.m. A light freezing rain fell, so he held his leather folio over his head while he ran to his front door and put the key in the lock, but before he could turn the knob the door opened suddenly. Eve Pang reached out and grabbed him by his tie and pulled him inside, and then she kissed him deeply.

He shut the door behind him and she pulled his tie off, her lips did not unlock from his as she completed the feat, and then she pushed him up against the door and went to work on his coat.

Ethan caught a quick full-body glimpse of her in the mirror against the wall by the hallway. She had already changed from work, and now she wore one of his white pinpoint oxfords that matched the color of both her panties and her thick wool socks.

Eve pushed his overcoat off him and tried to let it fall to the floor, but he caught it behind his back and laid it on a chair by the door. She began removing his suit coat, but he fought her attempts to pull it down.

Finally, she removed her mouth from his. “Is something wrong?”

“Tough day at work, babe. Can we talk?”

Surprised, she said, “Yes. Of course.”

“Good,” Ethan said, and he headed upstairs to change while Eve hung up his coat for him in the hall closet.

E
VE
P
ANG WAS KOREAN
American, a network systems engineer for Booz Allen Hamilton, a government contractor. Ross met her six months earlier after a presentation she gave at a training conference for government employees with TS security at her corporate offices Tysons Corner, Virginia. He had signed up for the daylong class just to meet her. He knew she was one of the government’s top classified network administrators, and while most of the other NSC staffers in attendance couldn’t wait to get out of the mind-numbingly boring training and back to D.C., Ross, on the other hand, was captivated—primarily by the classes on secure network infrastructure, and secondarily by the Asian girl with the nerdy glasses who administered a portion of the course. She was attractive, but more important, it was obvious to Ethan she possessed incredible knowledge about the architecture of the U.S. intelligence community’s most classified systems, and he wanted some of that knowledge. Eve had worked on the security infrastructure of JWICS since she received her doctorate at MIT at the age of twenty-five. Now, at thirty-two, she was a highly paid Booz Allen systems engineer based at Fort Meade, but she worked all around the D.C. area on security protocols for the U.S. intelligence community’s VPNs, or virtual private networks, remote-access systems that allowed government employees to log on to some of the intelligence community’s most highly classified databases from outside of the confined networks.

Ethan Ross asked her out the day he met her, and she agreed with wide eyes and a thumping heart. She was flabbergasted by his advances—she’d dated only other computer geeks, and most of them had been Korean, but he was an attractive, charming, and well-groomed White House staffer, who seemed as interesting as he was intelligent.

Ethan knew he was using her, but he wasn’t bothered by things like that, because he’d never possessed much in the way of a conscience when it came to relationships.

Their early dates involved a lot of talk about work. Eve had lived computer science for her entire life, she essentially
had
no other hobbies apart from her work, so networks and code were the easiest topics for her to talk about. And since her new and inquisitive boyfriend possessed top-secret clearance, she did so freely. Sure, there were aspects of her job she knew she shouldn’t and couldn’t discuss, even with her boyfriend, but little things slipped out here and there, and she saw no great harm in that.

They were on the same side, after all.

Ethan never even gave so much as a hint to Eve that he was leaking classified information to the International Transparency Project. And he passed his computer security infrastructure questions off as both his own personal interest in computer science and a desire to ensure the NSC was safe from both outside hacks and inside breaches.

Ethan liked to war-game scenarios with Eve while they ate dinner or sat in front of the fireplace in her condo. She knew he was extremely intelligent, just like she was, and he possessed orders of magnitude more curiosity about her job that she did about his.

It didn’t hurt that he plied her with wine while they talked, and her lips loosened by the glass. But she actually found the war-gaming fun and intellectually challenging. Eve fielded his questions, proud that her genius boyfriend took a real intellectual interest in her work. She joked with him on more than one occasion that even though she was an IT security professional, he was more obsessed with security than she was.

One night they sat on the sofa discussing vulnerabilities to the system, after a second bottle of claret lay empty on its side on the coffee table and a third was newly opened. Between sips from her glass, Eve explained that the weakest aspect of network security was at the default domain administrator level. The default domain administrator was the first account created on a network, and it had sweeping privileges. IT professionals often disable the DDA after setting up other users with lesser authority, but, Eve explained, in the case of Intelink-TS, the CIA’s top-secret network, the DDA was up and running, though the password for it was known only by a few highly placed administrators, all of whom were thoroughly vetted.

Eve claimed that anyone who logged on as the DDA had virtual Godlike access to the all aspects of the Intelink-TS, it was the virtual keys to the kingdom. An administrator with bad intent could dig around on secret corners of the system, and even exfiltrate data and erase the history of the transaction.

Ethan’s interest was piqued, but he needed more information. “Wow. Those people given that logon must be very reliable.”

Eve smiled and winked with an eye already half-mast from drink. “I have it.”

“You
don’t
.”

Her smile widened. “I
do
.”

“And with it you can go anywhere and no one would know?”

“If I wanted to. I never have. Why should I?”

Ethan still found this all hard to believe. “There is an audit trail for everything we do. Madeline Crossman, the security compliance officer in my department, is always checking on us via audits to make sure we don’t try to pull unauthorized access.”

Eve replied, “There is no audit for the DDA that I can’t get around, which means, when I’m logged on as the DDA, there is no audit for me.” She giggled. “Ethan, at my level, I
am
the audit.”

“So your password makes you untouchable?”

“Not exactly untouchable. I work with the virtual private networks that access Intelink-TS via the JWICS, and this requires two-factor authentication.”

She walked over to her purse and pulled out two small identical fobs the size of key chains with LCD screens on them. On the screens were a half-dozen numbers. One of the devices had a red tag on it that said
Pang
and the other said
Pang-DDA
.

“I use these. I can access the CIA’s network via my laptop by putting in my logon and then adding the number on the screen, which changes every thirty seconds. But if I wanted to logon at the DDA, I would do the same thing and use this fob. These fobs and the numbers on them track back to me.”

Before Ethan’s eyes, the six numbers on each device changed to six new numbers.

Ethan looked at the fobs closely. “But you are saying someone who isn’t logging in remotely, like someone inside CIA or somewhere with direct access to the network, wouldn’t need these things.”

“Exactly right. Someone on the network itself only needs the DDA logon, and then they can do whatever the hell they want. I’ve written papers about it, it’s a real vulnerability, but no one listens.” She laughed, dropped the fobs back in her purse, and reached for her wineglass. “The best IT people in the business aren’t working for the government, and we contractors are given a lot of access power, but not a lot of decisionmaking authority.”

Ethan mumbled to himself. “Incredible. You’re almost untouchable.”

She reached out, took Ethan’s hand, and slipped it under her button-down oxford shirt. She placed his hand on her small breast. “I am touchable. See? But with my password and my fob, you are the only one who can touch me.” She laughed at her joke, and in her laugh Ethan could tell just how inebriated she was.

He decided to push his luck. “Don’t you ever worry you’ll forget your password?”

She shook her head. “My password? No, because I use it every day. But I only use the DDA credentials every few months, so I have it written down.”

“What? That’s not smart, Eve. Even
I
know that.”

She kissed him. “Don’t worry. I’ll show you.”

She left the room for a moment, and Ethan sat there, gobsmacked.
No one
in IT handed over their password, even drunk lonely girls trying to impress their boyfriends.

He scrambled to refill her wineglass.

When she returned she opened a single sheet of paper. He tried not to snatch it out of her hands, because he knew its importance to his mission.

But when he saw it, he realized he didn’t have the keys to the kingdom he thought he did. It was a page full of handwritten characters that looked like Asian script of some sort.

“It’s in Korean?” Ethan said. “That’s not exactly secure, babe.”

“It’s not Korean. It’s Idu. A thousand-year-old script that was used in Korea. Not many people can write it. But the best part is, it looks like traditional Chinese. Like Kaishu, which was around at the same time. If someone tries to translate the words and numbers here, they will get it wrong, because they will think it is traditional Chinese. Idu is forgotten.”

Ethan was impressed, and he told his girlfriend so. She beamed, she swooned, and ten minutes later, she passed out.

Ethan photographed the page of chicken scratch with his phone.

While Eve slept, Ethan spent the rest of the night congratulating himself on his incredible intellect and social engineering skills, and wondering how the hell he was going to translate characters from Idu.

E
THAN FOUND A TRANSLATOR
after a few days of Internet searching, a professor of ancient East Asian languages at the University of Chicago. The professor did it for free; it took him just minutes to e-mail back a fourteen-character series of letters and numbers. Ethan then used the DDA access credentials to log in on a JWICS terminal in the NSC’s secure administration wing. He found the docs on the SCI code-word-access flotilla operation. He didn’t read every page of every document himself, that would have taken hours and he had only minutes. He pilfered the files using the techniques Eve outlined to him over dinner, and he’d sent the files to Harlan Banfield. Banfield looked them over, then told him they would sit on them until they knew the breach had gone undetected, perhaps as long as six months. Ethan was impatient, he was certain he’d executed the breach perfectly, but Banfield insisted the ITP would nevertheless use its own tried and true security protocols. And then nothing. For four months he’d seen nothing in the news on the flotilla raid. He’d held off pilfering more documents from JWICS because he wanted to see how
The Guardian
exploited this first batch, but the fact Banfield and his group hadn’t even sent the files on to the media infuriated him. And now this. The FBI running around the NSC, claiming a data breach, and alleging the breach got some ex–Israeli commando and his family killed.

Something went wrong with his exfiltration of the data.

He’d managed to obfuscate his involvement; he’d logged in as a DDA, so they couldn’t have known it was him, after all, but somehow they had still noticed the transfer into the file-sharing location.

T
ONIGHT
E
THAN AND
E
VE
sat at his house, not hers, but they drank claret and talked about network intrusions, much like that evening a half a year ago. Eve knew all about the NSC breach, even though it didn’t involve her or one of her virtual private networks, she would have been briefed on it first thing this morning.

Ethan talked about the meeting with the FBI man and the possibility there was some sort of a mole at NSC, but this was all just to set up his line of inquiry, because he desperately wanted to know what went wrong. He didn’t think for a second he had made a mistake himself. No, he was certain Eve Pang had screwed up in her explanation of the DDA logon’s omniscience over the network. This infuriated him, but he wouldn’t let it show.

Between sips of wine and while gently stroking Eve’s hair as they sat facing each other on his couch, he asked, “What do you think happened?”

“I know exactly what happened.”

This surprised Ross. “You do?”

“Yes. The government IT hacks are fools. They let the intrusion happen, but then they got lucky. It was nothing more than that.”

Ethan forced himself to take a sip of his wine. His fingers wanted to crush the glass in his hand, but he forced an air of calm. “How did they get lucky?”

Eve smiled. “A spot audit for anomalous behavior was done on the network. This happens less than five percent of the time. Even then, the audit records were never reviewed. They were just stored automatically on the server. It picked up the files being moved to the file sharing server in the National Security Council office.”

“I see,” said Ethan. “Can they tell if the files were downloaded or printed?”

“Most likely downloaded. The printers themselves would have recorded the job if they were used. I assume even the government IT security people are competent enough to check that out.”

She added, “Someone should have begun investigating this four months ago. Instead, it wasn’t till the thing happened in India when the system administrators at Langley were asked to review the files on Intelink-TS to make sure they were secure.” Now she laughed out loud. “They must have pulled up the logs and shouted ‘Oh, shit’ when they saw they were accessed and exfiltrated.” Then she added, almost as an aside, “They’ll never find out who did it.”

“Why not?”

“Do you remember that night when I told you about domain administrator access?”

Ethan looked off into space for a long moment. “Vaguely.”

“I’d bet anything someone logged on as a DDA to do it. I can’t prove it. That’s the problem with DDA credentials, but that’s what I think happened. They’ll never know who broke in that way, so they might as well give up looking.”

“How about that.” Ethan said. He wanted to put his hand through the wall.

Just as he’d expected, he’d done everything exactly right. It had only been a stroke of very bad luck.

His intrusion likely never would have been noticed if not for the completely coincidental death of the Israeli in India.

Eve tried to make another move on Ethan, but he wasn’t in the mood. She went to bed early, and he sat in his living room with a glass of wine in his hand, staring at a movie on TV that he didn’t give a damn about.

His entire focus now was on beating the polygraph. If he did that, he’d be fine. He told himself there wasn’t a single FBI agent in the world who could outsmart him. The investigation would fizzle out, or else that bitch Beth Morris at the Western Hemisphere desk would be suspected of the breach.

The only thing left for him to do was ace the box.