Jony returned to his workstation after a small break. Dahlia was seated nearby, she seemed to be reviewing something on her tablet. His monitoring dashboard had turned red.
“Black hosting has gone offline,” Jony said.
“Have you heard from Byron?” Dahlia said.
“He doesn’t have traditional phone coverage. He uses a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) to communicate with the outside world. I suspect that connection has been interrupted.”
Dahlia dragged a hand through her hair. “Is it a problem with the service provider?”
“I checked with Black Sea Hosting, and they haven’t reported any outages; however, they did inform me that their CIR has been reached,” Jony said.
“What is a CIR?”
“It is the committed information rate for the network circuit. If that limit is reached, then they have saturated the network capacity. The ISP is investigating.”
“Should we be worried?”
“Not sure yet. There should be no large data sets from us going to that site. It is used to service the facility. The line is a fractional T1, so it doesn’t have a lot of bandwidth, anyway.”
“Make sure we monitor the situation. We may not be able to warn Byron if one of our clients is en route to get their data. Our top-level clients get very grumpy when they don’t have access to their data. That is part of the premium service that we offer,” Dahlia said as she left.
About an hour later, Jony’s phone rang.
“Mr. Clarke, this is Nelson from Black Sea Hosting. We believe that your facility in the Black Sea is experiencing a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack.”
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“I thought we had protection against these attacks. Don’t we have your premium service?” Jony said.
“Yes, you do; however, our provider, CloudShield, appears to have taken your site out of band. We are trying to figure out what happened,” Nelson said.
“I suggest that you figure it out posthaste. My boss is threatening to take my head.”
“Understood, Mr. Clarke. We will provide hourly reports.” The call ended.
D will not like this! Jony thought. Time for my investigation.
He tried connecting to the Black Iris hunting bounty boards, but got no response.
This site pays our bills, so I’d better get this working!
Jony logged into his bastion host: a computer with limited, direct access to critical infrastructure.
Jony’s phone rang again; it was from an unknown number.
Best answer it just in case.
“Who is this?” Jony asked.
“Don’t hang up!” A man’s voice said. “Listen to what I have to say before deciding.”
Jony was silent.
“This is Alexei Breven. We met at Phantom Island. We—I mean, the Collective—are under attack, and I don’t think it’s Black Iris.”
“Okay, assuming that I believe you, can you offer any theories?” Jony said.
Alexei told Jony about the incident at the lab and the other disruptions to the Colossal Machine and Collective infrastructure.
“We even have suffered DDOS attacks. Does Black Iris have any problems?” Alexei asked.
Jony’s first reaction was to lie. He had no reason to trust Alexei, but for some reason he sensed that the man was telling the truth.
Still, Jony thought, I have a bad feeling about all this.
“We’ve experienced some DDOS attack at some of our locations,” Jony said.
“At your hub sites?”
“We’re still making that determination.”
“I suspect that we both are being targeted, and you should check all of your critical sites,” Alexei said.
“On it,” Jony said as he hung up.
Jony suddenly had a difficult time breathing; his heart was pounding, and he was starting to hyperventilate.
What’s wrong with me?
He closed his eyes and tried concentrating on his breathing. After several minutes, he could feel his heart rate slow. The anxiety was fading away.
Jony opened his eyes to a frowning Dahlia. “What’s going on? I’ve been waiting for an update.”
He explained the situation to Dahlia, wincing as he mentioned the conversation with Alexei. She appeared stone-faced and said nothing for a long time.
“Do you trust him?”
“Yes, I sense that he is telling the truth. I don’t think he wants to harm us,” Jony said.