Chapter 18, part 1
“Just look at this thing; it went through everything like cancer!” Lieutenant Vinica said out loud.
“And remember that it isn’t an A.I.” Lieutenant Grant replied.
“It could fool me.”
“It did fool me for a full hour, maybe two; I think I lost the track of time…”
“Will you two just focus!” Commander Summers barked at the two lieutenants who were just chatting while being fully glued in front of their screens.
“Sorry sir.” Both of them replied at the same time without even looking up.
“Now can either of you tell me if the virus or whatever you call this thing is off our systems for good?” The three of them were alone on the bridge, the rest of the crew was busy either repairing the damage or taken a much needed short rest after everything that happened.
“I don’t think that we can say that sir, not yet anyway.” Lieutenant Grant replied while looking at Lieutenant Vinica as if he was calling for backup.
“And when will that happen?”
“Whenever we have this beauty figured out.” Lieutenant Vinica said with giggle.
“That wasn’t helpful…” The commander replied and looked at Grant who just stared at his comrade as if he was ready to strangle her. “Grant, can you explain to me how this whole mess happened?”
“I don’t know how to start sir… it’s…”
“And do that in English, I don’t want a repeat of what happened when you two tried to explain how we got our systems upgraded with the Orgus software.”
“Ah…well...you see…” Lieutenant Grant begun as Vinica started giggling. “I am going to get you for this.”
“Am I dealing with 12 year olds or Scout Corp’s officers?” The commander yelled at both of them.
“Sorry sir.”
“Go on Grant and please, keep it simple this time.”
“Sir, the Umiak malware just used exploits in the Orgus communications and navigations software to latch itself onto them and from there to infect the rest of the systems through the emulation we
run the Orgus programs on.” Grant explained.
“So this whole mess happened due to the Orgus programs?”
“You could say that sir, but to be honest that’s just how the… malware got a foot through the front door. After that…well…”
“After that it’s magic.” Vinica cut in.
“Wasn’t the emulation supposed to act as a safeguard from such attacks?” The commander asked.
“It should stop ordinary attacks that specifically target the emulated software sir, our systems that have completely different programming and parameters should never be vulnerable to any malware designed for Orgus software. However no one would have ever believed that one could attack the main system in such a roundabout way through an emulation; this malware has unbelievable pattern recognition logic algorithms hammered into it. The moment it breached the Orgus software it repurposed some functions and begun analyzing the emulation and how it interacted with the main systems.” Grant explained.
“So the malware was initially confined in the emulation but it analyzed a way out?”
“Yes sir, it took it some time but that’s how it did it. It acted like we believe an A.I. would, by analyzing the patterns of the running programs in order to try and figure their purpose. Once it had some basic patterns figured out it started applying them in order to establish itself in the main systems. It took it some time and plenty of trials but in the end it figured out a way to apply certain administrative privileges on the highjacked emulation before managing to write an adapted copy of itself directly on our hard drives.” Grant replied.
“Shouldn’t our anti malware suite pick that up?” The commander pointed out.
“Not in the way it did that sir. Remember that if fully managed to highjack the emulated programs by using their known exploits and unfortunately our anti malware suite is set to tolerate some erratic behavior from the emulation because of our belief that nothing infecting the emulation could infect us.” Grant explained.
“Erratic behavior?”
“No emulation is perfect and no program can run perfectly on even its own native operating systems. Minor stuff like memory leaks, momentary program freezes and other minor issues are tolerated and the in emulation fixes strapped on everything demand some latitude in order to keep everything running. The malware had masked itself as such an issue while it did all that.”
“And how long did it take to do all that?”
“It was slow in computer terms but it only took it a few minutes from the moment it infected the Orgus programs to the moment it managed to force itself into the main operating systems.” Lieutenant Grant replied.
“You know that my computer knowledge is limited so let’s keep it brief, in the end the malware got into the emulated Orgus programs, hid itself there while observing our systems and then acted from what it observed; am I correct?”
“Yes sir.”
“And this malware is not an A.I.?” The commander asked.
“To tell you the truth sir, that’s how we theorize that an A.I. would do it but this is not an A.I. ; it does have awesome pattern recognition abilities but its actions are based on a weirdly detailed and expanded plan. Vinica has been looking at how it infected our systems while following its orders for the past hour or so.”
“All I can say that the one who programmed this is a maniac.” Lieutenant Vinica replied while keeping her eyes glued on the console. “They put down everything!”
“The Loroi repeatedly described the bugs as monomaniacal.” The commander commented.
“It fits with what I am seeing.”
“Ok then, it got in, it managed to partially take over some systems but you stopped it and are trying to get it out; what’s the problem with taking it out?”
“That’s the real tricky part sir.” Lieutenant Grant begun. “The malware is inherently very inefficient in its processing demands and the storage that it is hogging. This is due to the fact that it didn’t rewrite our systems, although it looked like it at first. The way it went about everything was to just copy the programming patterns it recognized and then pasting them whenever it wanted to alter something for its own use since the whole system is literally alien to it… Imagine someone who wants to eat a steak but doesn’t even know what a kitchen knife looks like; however they do know what a wood saw looks like and they are able to use it.”
“Messy…” The commander commented.
“It is but the saw would still cut the steak. The leftovers then become the problem as well as the various bits and pieces of the saw itself when it inevitably breaks down because of misuse; there are many programs with seemingly random bits of code injected into them throughout our systems and then there are several parts of our hard drives that are filled with seemingly random garbage code. We can’t figure the purpose of the garbage or the random bits scattered throughout, they could be failed attempts of it to adapt patterns for its own use, they could be a sleeper version of itself or it could be something that we haven’t figured out yet.”
“Wouldn’t a purge fix all that?” Commander Summers asked.
“There are three kinds of such a purge sir, the first is what we are doing now; everything on safe mode with minimal functionality. I was forced to do this as it was the only way to get some basic comms back online after the Umiak ship got taken out; right now we are running cleaning routines on every independent system and subsystem, deleting and reinstalling everything that was altered while erasing any recent changes on our systems. This is what the colonial fleet does whenever someone gets the bright idea to cheat in one of their simulated battles. The whole process takes a day maybe two but the ship’s systems will be fully functional by then; this takes care of most malware but people who know what they are doing will have taken measures about such a purge. The second kind is when we just erase everything and reinstall as if it was on a blank slate; it takes a week to do all that and re-calibrate the systems from scratch. The problem is that the stored data isn’t really deleted when we do that, the space it occupies is just marked as write-able and since we can’t be 100% sure that nothing from the malware isn’t running right now we can’t be certain that something won’t remain when we do such a purge; some of our more persistent malware can survive such a purge as well. The only way to be completely sure that nothing remains on our systems is to erase our hard drives, then flood them with garbage data and then erase them again before reinstalling everything; this will take more than ten days.” Lieutenant Grant explained.
“We can barely afford a couple days, we can’t stay idle for a week and certainly not for ten days…” The commander commented as he massaged his forehead. “What can we do to make sure that this malware doesn’t resurface until we get back to Earth?”
“The only thing we can do is to finish the normal purge and constantly monitor our systems all the way back. Not foolproof but it’s the only thing we can do with what we have.” Lieutenant Grant replied.
“Damn… Just tell me that we can at least stop it from spreading to other ships.”
“That’s fairly easy and we already have communications protocols in place in case our systems are compromised, back from the time that corp spied on the entire Corps.” Grant replied.
“Glad to hear that something good came up from that mess.” The commander commented. “Which reminds me, Grant how the hell did you trick the malware to send the wrong coordinates to the bugs for so long?”
“That’s an idea I got when I was wondering if it was an A.I. or not and if we should physically cut off the connection to our antenna in order to stop it from reporting our position. I figured that if it was an A.I. it would detect me as I put in some false data into the systems it had compromised by that point. I tried to change the coordinates that the systems showed since it hadn’t fully penetrated the navigations systems yet; the malware immediately picked up the change and transmitted it as if it were true. That’s when the captain got the idea with the torpedoes while I tried to somehow slow the damn thing down while everyone else set up the trap.”
“Good call lieutenant.”
“Thank you sir.”
“Just try to make sure that the ship will run as it should on the way home.”
Chapter 18, part 2:
http://www.well-of-souls.com/forums/vie ... 692#p22692