The Supreme Leader was meeting with his general staff to review status of his personally devised “Heavenly Judgment” project. As a medic went around the room giving each member a shot the chief technician discussed the first set of high-altitude balloons with aerosol dispensers ready to be released. Estimates presented to the leader promised that the new highly infectious strain spread over the US would increase current pandemic numbers there resulting in at least another 200 thousand deaths with even greater impact on western economics. The leader smiled at the updates estimates knowing that the closed borders of his country would limit any cross-infection to at most a few thousand deaths. A young man sitting in a small cabin on the other side of the world watched the meeting, a voice translator program running on the computer beside him. As the medic finished giving everyone including the supreme leader what they thought to be a vaccination for the new strain the man in the cabin smiled. Interesting how a simple switch of the vaccine and the concentrated virus taken from the balloon dispensers made for a very karmic result.
* * * * *
Daniel was happy to be on another date with Sammy. This time they drove to a larger town an hour away. Sammy had never been bowling and Daniel promised to teach her. They had a great time even with all the gutter balls. Walking back to the car eating their ice cream cones Daniel noticed a woman with a little kid rattling a door of a store and then looking sadly at it. Walking up to them Daniel and Sammy stopped and checked the store out. It was a food bank and according to the hours on the window it should be open.
The woman with the child said “I hoped they would reopen but I guess not”
“Maybe they will re-open tomorrow” Daniel said.
“I hope so but Mr. Waggoner said they needed to find some way to replace the missing money first” said the woman as she turned and walked away.
Daniel noticed that the little boy was now happily eating cone that Sammy must have given him. Holding his cone out to Sammy to share he thought about the food bank and missing money. He decided to check when he got home.
The news article from two months ago read “Local charities fail victim to ransom ware”. Continuing the story Daniel read how the Mentor iDonnor system was hacked infecting all the charities that used it by encrypted all their data. The loss of their pledge data alone had closed over a dozen charities including the food bank Daniel saw. Those pledges were desperately needed for the funds to keep hundreds of families fed through the winter. Reading further Daniel saw that the iDonnor company actually paid the ransom depleting their funding and bankrupting the company. However the decryption key was not sent by the kidnappers and instead they asked for another payment of $500,000. At which point the company had to close their doors leaving the client charities stuck with making public requests for help to replace the funding.
The question Daniel had to decide now was should he get involved? Still if he didn’t get involved it didn’t look like anyone would. One thing Daniel had come to realize ever since he found hawk was that he couldn’t deal with every bad situation out there. Still thinking of the look on the mother’s face when she found the door still locked and how happy the boy was to get that half eaten ice cream cone he decided to do something. The question was what could he do?
Tracking hidden and encrypted transactions across the web was not something Daniel had ever done before and wasn’t really sure how to go about it. After thinking about it a bit he decided to try approaching it from another direction. There were experts at tracking these kinds of criminals he just had to find them and take advantage of their skills. Looking back to right after the incident he found a brief investigation by the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). The entire investigation was just a call made to an iDonnor representative. After the statement was taken a line was added to their monthly incident report for the FBI. It looked like all series investigation efforts were only made to few incidents involving ransom ware attacks on state, local, and government organizations.
Daniel was not that surprised by it. Limited resources always seem to be spent on the high-profile targets. Looking at a presentation being given a few months ago on known gas thought to be committing cyber attacks a couple of gangs stood out. These gangs were known to specifically target charity organizations. Daniel, watching the meeting as it was being presented back then realized that those two groups were being pretty much ignored and had not been properly investigated. He decided to dig a bit more into those groups to see what he could find.
Shifting to the office lunch time on the days right before the meeting Daniel finally found a period when a staff member’s computer was unattended but still logged in. A quick couple of key pokes and Daniel got the individual reports in the two groups. The reports were pretty fascinating in the way the two gangs operated. Most of the member’s names and locations were known but they were located in the Ukraine and Russia. Neither government had made any serious effort to stop the gang’s attacks. A few attempts were made to get individual members arrested and jailed or even deported to the US but were met with constant delays and sometimes just outright refusal to do anything. It was noted in the file of the possibility that the members were a quasi government supported group since the timing of the ransom ware money collected seemed to match with deposits made to several officials offshore bank accounts.
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Sitting back in his chair Daniel thought about the groups what to do about them. There were any number of ways to stop the groups from committing a specific cyber attack but that did not address the issue of the government agencies supporting them. It also didn’t do anything to keep groups from operating with the support of crooked politicians again in the future. The solution had to include a way of getting the group’s respected governments to step in and deal with both the members of the groups and their political supporters. As Daniel continue to sit and stare up at the ceiling he mulled one approach after another looking for one that would accomplish the goals but also appear to have happened either accidental or redirect attention to some other source as the culprit. Finally Daniel decided that the best choice was just to assist the groups in stealing more money.
Vasly Melnyk was sitting at his pool feeling pleased with himself and at the top of the world. For a geeky hacker that his parent thought would never amount to much he now had more money that his father had made in his entire career as a company finance manager. Thinking about his current affluence Vasly decided to checkup on this month’s bit coin transactions. Even with the new security features being implemented in the cloud the gang’s focus on smaller, less high-tech companies like charities was succeeding. Looking at the transaction logs he could tell it was a good month with over 30 different businesses given in by paying to get access to their data again. His share alone of the more than 2.5 million collected this month would pay for the new Porsche Panamera he had ordered.
Deciding to check on the gang’s current cash reserve he opened a new browser and went to the crypto exchange that was used to do the bit coin conversion. Checking the transfers to the gang’s Cayman Island accounts the balances were looking great, even higher than expected. Continuing to check by looking at the individual transfer fees he noticed that the fees being charged were much higher than expected for some reason. Expanding to see the details on the charges Vasly noticed that there were additional fees for extra transfers and for converting hryvnia currency into bit coins and then into dollars. This made no sense to him since the group would never accepted ransom in anything other than bit coins. Vasly started to get a bad feeling about this. The gang’s success depended on a high level of isolation from the money they extorted and up to now bit coin provided that.
Dima Moroz was not happy to be called into an emergency meeting by Vasly. As he waited for the online video conference to start he kept getting angrier for the waste of his time. He had a pleasure filled day planned to break in a new girl he had paid a lot of money to a procurer to get for him. The fifteen year old girl was young, innocent and somewhat naïve just like Dima liked. She thought Dima was an agent and was interested in getting her work doing TV commercials. A few drinks with the right drugs mixed in and she would be pliant and incapable of resisting anything he wanted to do to her and he had a lot planed. But all that had to be put on hold just because Vasly was upset about some extra cash showing up in the gang’s accounts. Having less cash Dima could understand being upset about but more? Who cares! The gang has nothing to worry about Dima though; we pay more than enough to the right politicians here in the Ukraine for them to ignore anything the gang did.
Dima Moroz was getting more and more impatient as he waited in the meeting room with the other members of the gang all waiting on Vasly to show. Finally he sent one of his body guards to find out what was keeping him. While waiting he decided to check his email on his phone. Surprisingly he found one that had just arrived from Vasly. Opening it he saw a sequence of transaction tracings of money going into their primary account that seemed to originate from several other accounts in the Cayman Islands, Switzerland and Belize. A short message from Vasly was attached saying “Run, it’s the Verkhovna Rada accounts”. While Dima was trying to understand what it meant the body guard came back into the room and said Vasly wasn’t in his office and it looked like he left in a hurry. Thinking maybe Vasly had stolen the funds and wondering why he would send the email with that message attached Dima suddenly heard police sirens approaching the building.
Later at his very short trial Dima finally understood where that extra money had come from. The private accounts of the Verkhovna parliament members. Crooked politicians like them were perfectly willing to look the other way when it was someone else’s money was being taken but heaven help anyone coming for theirs. Realizing Dima’s gang of hackers had the right skill set to have pull it off they came straight to her
Six months later Dima was staring at a cockroach eating the rancid mush from his dinner plate. Missing most of his teeth from the “interrogation” from the Politsiia he was limited in what he could eat. The interrogations were getting worse as the politicians lost their patients about getting their money back. Vasly was the smart one, one of the guard captains let slip that Vasly had run to the American embassy confessing his part in the ransom ware attacks. Now he was sitting in a comfortable American prison while they fought over extradition.