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The company could not allow the lockout to continue for more than a few days. DarkVenture wanted twenty-five million dollars in a Bitcoin payment and, unlike most ransomware attackers, they wouldn’t negotiate. They wanted every penny.
“I assume Pastek paid,” Letty said, “since you’re here.”
“They did. Twenty-five million dollars. Paying it, by the way, was technically a crime,” the man said.
DarkVenture, he said, was a well-known hacking combine and there was a widely held assumption that they worked with the tacit approval of the Russian government. But Vernon Pastek, who founded Pastek Cybernetics, was not a pushover. He gritted his teeth, paid the ransom, and then went looking for revenge.
The man leaned forward. “The six principals of DarkVentureare well known to most intelligence agencies and even some civilian hackers here and in Europe. Pastek isn’t a hacker, but he knew how to get in touch with an American hacker group that calls itself Ordinary People. They started out doing political hacks—Donald Trump’s IRS files, Republican emails, harmless stuff. Pastek won’t admit it, but he came up with a revenge scheme and paid Ordinary People one million dollars, personal money, to carry it out.”
The two NSA operatives took turns explaining what happened next.
Russia, they said, has the second largest rail system in the world in terms of tons of freight moved per kilometer, after China. The U.S. is third. Ordinary People got into the Russian rail system and essentially owned it for several months. The Russians could move trains, but they didn’t know what was on them. They’d get Mercedes-Benzes in Nizhny Novgorod and tractors in Moscow. A trainload of Army rations in Vladivostok and commercial ocean-fishing gear in Belarus.
Then Ordinary People, operating under another name, DarkVirus, a riff on the DarkVenture name, just to stick the fork in, made a ransomware offer to the Russians: publicly execute the six principals of DarkVenture or put fifty million into a Bitcoin account. The Russians had to think about it for a while, but eventually paid up... or DarkVenture did. The NSA wasn’t exactly sure of the mechanism of that decision.
“Who got the money?” Letty asked. “Ordinary People, or...”
The woman: “Pastek got it. Or, he owned the Bitcoin wallet that held it, initially through a shell company registered in the British Virgin Islands, and from there to a half-dozen other offshore accounts. Where it went from those accounts, we don’t know and probably can’t find out. That’s also illegal, but we’re not the IRS.Ordinary People got their million, up front, nothing more. And that’s the problem we’re getting to.”
“I have to fight the Russians? Or Vernon Pastek?”
The man shook his head. “No. Ordinary People started out as idealists who... well, they really had their heads in the sand, money-wise. Eating tuna fish sandwiches for supper. Peanut butter for lunch. Fighting for the right to be progressive. There are probably not more than twenty or thirty of them. They got a million dollars from Vernon Pastek, but after you split that twenty ways, you’ve earned about what you’d get as an elementary school teacher. We think they’ve become unhappy with their lifestyle and were impressed by how lucrative a ransomware attack can be. And how easy it is, if you pick the right target. And how anonymous. How safe.”
Letty: “So they’re going off the rails, so to speak?”
“Yes. We watch critical computer systems in the U.S.—thousands of them, which is neither here nor there, not something you have to worry about,” the woman said. “We believe Ordinary People have been nosing around natural gas distribution systems. We have no definitive proof, but we suspect they plan to turn off the natural gas supply for a northern city, or even multiple cities.”
“Like the Twin Cities,” Letty said. “I used to live there. We had gas heat.”
“Yes,” the woman said. “So you know what we’re talking about. If somebody takes out the natural gas system for a northern city in the next month, it’ll be a huge disaster. When natural gas goes down, you can’t just turn it back on. It takes days, or if the outage is big enough, weeks, even when you have full control of the system.”
“You’re the computer geniuses,” Letty said. “Why not just grabthe gas-system computers before Ordinary People do? Lockthemout?”
“Because they may already be in there and they’d see us,” the woman said. “If they see us, they might pull the plug and we don’t even know exactly where they’d pull it. It’s a cold winter in Minneapolis, Rochester, Bozeman. So cold the ski trips are down in Jackson and Big Sky. It was twelve below zero at the Butte airport last night.”
“Okay. So why not figure out who Ordinary People are and sic the FBI on them?”
The man nodded. “The FBI is not known for its subtlety. They’d start an investigation, and about the time they interviewed their second subject, the word would get out, and OP might very well shut down a city.”
NSA had been aware of the group for some time, but OP was not a small, well-organized cell. They were an amorphous group, with hackers coming and going. There were apparently different factions—one wing purely political, another environmental, some were anti-gun, there was a pro-choice faction.
“We could figure out who they all are, separate the factions, if we had the time. Maybe... three or four months, or a year?” the woman said. “We might have a week or two... The current cold front is clearing out, but there’s another one behind it.”
“And I can fix that by...”
“By doing what you just suggested that we do—figure out who they are. You’ll do that by hooking up with one of our computer specialists,” the man said. “You’re his girlfriend. He drives an old, rehabbed Toyota Tundra, he has tattoos, he’s got very strong computer skills, he talks the hacker talk. We put you where we thinkOrdinary People might be... dangle him like a trout fly... and hope that he gets a bite. Hope you two can identify them.”
“That sounds like a major fail,” Letty said. “I’ve had a couple courses in JavaScript and Python, but I’m no kind of programmer.”
“We don’t want you for your computer skills. We want you for your gun skills and your believability as a very young and somewhat cheesy girlfriend. Somebody who couldn’t possibly be a federal officer,” the man said. “We want you to take care of our guy while he figures out who the Ordinary People are. If Ordinary People are planning to take down a natural gas system, that means they’re dangerous folks who are willing to kill for money. Or have become that way. Our boy is a little... not to say wimpy, but...”
“Wimpy. Despite the macho truck and tattoos, he’s a wimp,” the woman said. “He’s agreed to do this, after some arm-twisting, but he’s scared. We need somebody to take care of him.”
“I’m not going to sleep with him,” Letty said.
The woman winced. “We’d never suggest such a thing.”
She said it in a way that made Letty think they actuallyhadthought of such a thing. “That’s good, because I won’t.”
