"Breaking [SHA-2] or similar is usually the first step in the process of securing the target assets. While I would have liked to say that we knew the exact right timing to commence the Integration, it was partially a matter of trial and error. And in the cases of error, it often resulted in wasted potential or an Integration that was far from smooth."
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Alex Scarfeld woke up drenched in sweat. It was the middle of August, and there was a heat wave that his air conditioning system was apparently incapable of staving off. Even worse, that recurring nightmare came to him last night for the fourth time already this month. In the dream, he was sprinting as fast as he could on a track, legs burning, struggling to get air. But the end of the track kept getting farther and farther away. He kept running faster, but it seemed that for every step he took the track got two steps longer.
He shook himself out of the daze. This was nothing. Alex had meditated every day ever since he started college, and he couldn’t let a simple dream faze him. He took his phone from his bedside table to scroll on YouTube for a bit before he got out of bed. The phone lock screen read 10:04 am. He wasn’t planning on waking up this early, since he usually slept in until 12 or even 1 when he had time off. His internship had just ended and he was relaxing before he had to go back to school. Seeing as there was no way he could fall back asleep, he’d just stay in bed for a while until he woke up fully.
But for some reason, the front page of YouTube wasn’t loading. He quit the app and opened it up again, but still nothing. He decided to try the browser version of YouTube. What he saw there immediately shook him out of his drowsiness. A plain white scrollable text box covered the entire screen, with no remnants of the original YouTube interface.
If you are reading this message, you have been infected by a lethal pathogen (p < 0.0001). This nanotechnology-based pathogen has three remotely triggered ‘gates’. Each gate brings more severe symptoms, with death following the activation of the third gate. In order to avoid this fate, please report to the nearest processing center for evaluation and an in-depth tutorial. A searchable map of nearby processing centers is available below.
The message then continued for a few more paragraphs. Alex stopped scrolling and stared at his phone blankly for a few seconds. The message must be some sort of weird prank that he could think about later, so he started thinking more about what the hack meant. From his limited knowledge of cryptography, it would be nigh impossible for a group of amateur hackers trying to play a prank to hack into YouTube. He was a computer science major, so he found this feat to be particularly astounding. He closed YouTube and went to search on Google to see if he could find news reports about the hack.
Strangely, as he was typing into the search bar in Safari, autocomplete suggestions didn’t show up. And when he entered the query, to his amazement, the same message appeared, filling the entire window. He quickly went to check other sources to see if there was information about this issue. He entered the address ‘reddit.com’ into his browser, but to his bewilderment, the website displayed the same message. While Google and YouTube were owned by the same parent company, to his knowledge, Google and Reddit were unrelated. He quickly verified that any common website he entered into the search bar led to the same message being displayed.
Still in his boxers, he ran to his computer on the desk in his bedroom to look up this problem. But it seemed that the same problem had affected his computer as well: every website displayed the same message. Before he entered full panic mode, Alex shook himself out of his sleepiness. Waking up from a nightmare in a sweat and being confronted by a weird hack was not something he was prepared for. He now took a step back and tried to evaluate the situation calmly. After all, he had to think about what he should do, and there were some possibilities that demanded extreme caution.
The first possibility was that someone was targeting him specifically. Being a computer science major, he had friends who were good hackers, so he couldn’t rule this out from being a prank that one of his friends was playing on him. Besides being a prank, he couldn’t think of anyone who would have malicious intent against him. But it would still be really odd since from his knowledge of hacking, they would have needed to have physical access to both his computer and his phone for an extended period of time.
The second possibility was that these websites were actually down due to a coordinated attack by a group of hackers. There could have been a major vulnerability exposed in the infrastructure underlying all of the major websites, and some group of people with a lot of resources took advantage of this. This was actually a possibility he had read about and discussed with some of his friends. Basically, in layman’s terms, major websites use a method of encoding called SHA-2. This couldn’t be decoded reasonably by any known standard algorithm, but it was believed that quantum computers would be able to decrypt it. Nevertheless, even though there had been major advances in the past few years, quantum computers in 2028 were still not nearly powerful enough to tackle such a problem, or so Alex thought.
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Then there was a third possibility that Alex was too sober to consider at the current moment.
While there were flaws in either of his two main hypotheses, it was usually better to assume a small-scale glitch than something global. Regardless, it was probably a good idea to talk to someone sooner rather than later. He hadn’t tried making a phone call yet, and the telecommunications infrastructure seemed less likely to be affected. So he tried calling up his parents, who were supposed to come back from vacation tomorrow.
He wasn’t that surprised when his cell phone didn’t work, so he put on some clothes and went downstairs to use the landline. But there seemed to be something interfering with the signal when he tried to place a call; the line sounded warped and distorted. At least it seemed that electricity was still functional. His movements gained more urgency as he drank some water and went to drive to a friend’s house. The car still seemed to work, so at least it wasn’t utter sabotage.
As he pulled out of the driveway and onto the road, however, he started feeling ill. While it could be because of stress, his thoughts kept being pulled back to the message. As much as he didn’t want to consider the possibility, could there be some truth to it? He stopped the car and opened up his phone again to continue reading the message.
The three gates will open according to the following schedule. The first gate has been activated at 7:00 am local time and will cause mild symptoms to develop within 3-6 hours. The second gate will be activated at 1:00 pm local time, and will cause more severe symptoms that gradually develop over the next 12 hours. The third gate will be activated at 1:00 pm local time tomorrow. The activation of the third gate will cause irreversible damage to multiple body systems and death within seconds. Please arrive at a processing center before the activation of the third gate.
The signs and symptoms of the activation of each of the three gates are as follows:
First gate: cough, chills, low-grade fever, mild malaise, etc.
Second gate: severe cough, high fever, nausea, vomiting, shortness of breath, etc.
Third gate: death.
It was quite a disconcerting message, but it was still very difficult to believe. Alex put down his phone with a knot in his stomach, and began to drive. When he reached the main road in his small suburban hometown, it was immediately obvious that there was something amiss. The shops looked dead, and traffic was much worse than usual. A feeling of dread seeped into his bones. He started shaking, either from the chills predicted in the message, or anxiety, or both.
When he arrived at Peter’s house, the house was dark and the blinds were closed. Peter Liu was his best friend from high school. His mother had tragically died when Peter was in his early teens, and so Peter lived alone with his father. Unfortunately, his father was a businessman and often went on business trips, so Peter didn’t have much of a family life. Alex and Peter became best friends in part because they were both only children, and they quickly became inseparable. In high school, they influenced each others’ interests strongly. Peter was the reason Alex became interested in computer science in the first place, since Peter was an exceptional hacker. If this whole ordeal was a prank in their local area, the only person he knew who could pull this off was Peter.
Alex knocked on the door. After getting no response, he rang the doorbell several times. A disheveled thin young man in pajamas, rubbing bleary eyes behind glasses, opened the door a crack.
“What’s up? It’s hardly 11 am, man. I’m feeling a bit sick so I don’t know if I can hang today.”
Alex’s stomach dropped. “Peter. Does Google work on your phone?”
“Huh? What are you talking about, dude?”
“Just open your phone and go to google.com, please.”
Peter complied, shaking his head. But his eyes widened as he saw the ominous message that appeared.
“What the hell is going on?” He started coughing as he was reminded of the fact that he was feeling sick.
Alex remained silent. Peter waved for him to come inside, and they went to his desktop computer. They once again tried to access standard websites, with the same message invariably appearing. Then, Peter had an idea. He pulled up a Tor browser, which allows access to the Deep Web — websites not indexed by standard search engines and much less likely to be targeted en masse during this type of hack. It could not possibly be the case that every single website and server was compromised.
But it was at this point that Alex’s memories started becoming foggy. Try as he might, he could not remember what happened after they opened the browser. The next few hours passed in a blur. There were certain odd details he could remember — a sound that reminded him of drilling, the inside of what looked like a military base, with plaques on the walls of high-ranking Army officers, and sneaking through a forest. But the rest was a complete blank, as if he were trying to remember a forgotten dream.