Egress Point

Chapter 21 and a Half

At around 10pm, Max paid them a visit. Nick and Em were deep in thought at a computer. Patey was going through the plan with Arebecca.

"We move tomorrow morning, first thing," He looked uncomfortable. "Vadik wants his cards by midnight."

"No can do Max," Patey said, twisting in his chair. "We won't be ready to go until tomorrow afternoon at the earliest--"

"We move first thing!" He stepped towards Patey. "What do you need?"

Patey stood up and looked as if he might try and argue. Then he sat back down. "We need suits for me and Em and legitimate papers that will pass their scrutiny. We need some of their actual physical security cards. We need phones, earpieces, ID that looks real."

"This is all fine, I will have it by the morning."

"And we need to make sure your botnet can create a D-DOS at the right time. And it has to be just right -- big enough to mask our work, but not so big the SCP falls over."

"You don't need to worry about that. It is ready." Max stared at Patey for a few seconds and then continued. "We will move tomorrow. Two of you stay here, and two go to the SCP."

"No, that won't work," Patey stood back up to face the Russian. "We need two at the facility and two at the hotsite. I need Arebecca and Nick at the hotsite."

"You think I'm a fool!" Max's cheeks starting turning and angry shade of red. "Two stay here, or I give you all to Vadik today."

Patey balled his fists, knuckles turning white and Arebecca found herself edging away from him and Max.

"I'll stay," Nick cut in. "We could use someone reliably connected. In case things need fixing on the fly. But we need the others. Arebecca's the only one of us that can pass as German, Em's going to smuggle the drive in, and Patey's the decoy. I'll stay as long as those three are allowed to carry out the plan."

"I have a German on my team, from Berlin, he can take her place!" Max wafted a hand dismissively at Arebecca.

"And he'll be able to distract the guards with his winning smile, I suppose?" Patey said.

Max looked from Patey to Arebecca. Then he gave her the down-and-up. Arebecca blew him a kiss.

"If you try and trick me, or do anything that I don't like, then I'll kill Nick myself," Max calmed down a little and smiled. "And I'll send your details to Vadik and let him decide your fate. If he doesn't get his data by tomorrow night, we're all dead. You understand?"

"Perfectly," Patey said. "Arebecca will need I'D too."

Max nodded and left them.

"Can you create the accounts we need in time?" Patey asked Nick.

"They're already done. I've got you and Em set up as external security assessors for one of the companies which uses the SCP. I just need to arrange a visiting time in their system. Then Max needs to hit them with his D-DOS at the right time and we're good. As long as Em can get the drive connected, I can manage the decryption process from here."

"What's the D-DOS?" Arebecca asked.

"It's a distributed denial of service attack," Nick said. "It's one of Max's good points. He's got control of tens thousands of computers around the world -- his botnets. Basically the computers don't know it, but Max can get them all to overload the SCP at the same time."

"I thought it was way too secure for that kind of thing?" Arebecca asked. "Couldn't he just use the bot-net to get the data into the SCP?"

"No, it really is too secure. The bot-net isn't hitting the SCP directly, but other, public-facing websites. The payment sites that send their information to the banks that send it here to process. The bot-net will attack them with data, and that data will be sent to the SCP here."

"And when it happens, we'll be inside," Patey said. "Well, Em will be. She'll connect the drive, and if Nick's done his job the HSM will start to decrypt. At the same time Max will have to ease off his attack. The decryption servers will still be hit hard, but it'll be by our data being decrypted."

"If you can get the data in, why can't you get the decrypted data out?" Arebecca asked Em.

"I can get the drive with the encrypted data in through the man-trap and Nick can get the HSM to decrypt it. But there's no way of getting the decrypted data out of the HSM. It gets sent directly to the card networks over lots of secure connections. So that's when we shut the hotsite down and you come in."

Arebecca wasn't sure she had all the pieces in place. She had to be at the hotsite and swap a hard drive out of a server. Nick had shown her what to do, and she felt confident she would get it right.

"I still don't get it. We decrypt the data in the facility, but we can't get that data. So how come the decrypted data will be sent to the hotsite for me to steal?"

"That's the trick," Nick was smiling as he spoke. "The decrypted data isn't sent to the hotsite. But the running configuration of the HSM will be. The hotsite doesn't have an HSM -- they're too expensive -- it does the decryption in software on a normal server. So when the SCP gets hit hard and starts to fail, all the keys used to decrypt the data in the HSM will be sent over to the hotsite. Once they're there, I can intercept them and we can use them to decrypt the encrypted data again."

"I'd be more comfortable with two of you at the hotsite," Patey said. "But I don't think that Max will budge."

"Just make sure and come back for me afterwards," Nick tried to sound confident. But they all knew he was in the most danger. If things went wrong, it would be him in the firing line.

It seemed to Arebecca that a lot could go wrong with the plan. Patey, Nick, and even Em were fairly matter-of-fact about the whole thing. What if Em couldn't get the drive into the facility? What if Max's D-DOS attack wasn't good enough? What if she couldn't get the hard drive from the hotsite? And what if Max decided he wanted to give the card numbers and her and the others to Vadik?

Then there was Patey's plan to escape from Max once they had the data. There was a lot for Arebecca to remember. But, if it meant she only had to spend one night on the bunkbeds, then she was happy to give anything a try. She went to sleep going through the plan in her mind, and hoping she would get her part right.

Em/Patey get into the secure facility

Em smuggles drive and connects it to HSM

Max's DDOS attack starts

Nick sends data to HSM

HSM decrypts data to send over card networks

DDOS shuts down hotsite

Hotsite starts up

Decrypt keys passed to hotsite

Hotsite compromised and keys copied

Arebecca enters hotsite and pulls the keys out