Five years ago, the Department of Defense received permission to pilot a cyberterrorism counter-measure known as Komodo. The idea was that if someone attempted to access files or folders on a server, a passkey was needed. Without the passkey, the server would retaliate with various attacks to either erase the drives of the attacking computer or somehow hack the offending computer’s BIOS to potentially damage the computer physically. Once the tech folks became involved, the basic premise was changed to something more modern than thirty years ago, but the idea of retaliation remained. The goal was to simply create an encrypted filesystem that attacks computers requesting access from outside the internal network.
Some believe that Komodo is a myth and various individuals have claimed to attack government servers without ill effect. Others talk about friends or friends-of-friends that had their computer overheat, holes appear on their storage drives, and other bizarre things. Various bloggers and blogger syndicates agree that Komodo probably exists, but its reported powers are the stuff of urban legend. They agree that software doing physical damage with software is almost impossible, especially in the five second timeframe that many ‘victims’ describe.
On secrets.blog, there’s at least one person that posts everyday about being a victim of Komodo. There’s also at least two people posting daily that they have circumvented Komodo. Roger had even posted once that he may have been a victim of a non-government Komodo project. It was because of that post that he met the person that he only knows as “Grah”. (It’s a slang term used to refer to a good friend, but it’s fairly common to use it for all friends.) Grah had posted a reply that was a manufacturer’s defect. When Roger asked Grah how he knew, Grah began to explain the results of a scan he had done on Roger’s computer right after he listened to the post. Roger didn’t consider himself a security guru, but he knew enough to protect himself from various kinds of exploits. He decided that if this person calling himself Grah wants to be helpful, he would let him be helpful.
On the plane to Alexandria, Roger looked at the news. Tom hadn’t explained the reason for the sudden flight, as usual, so he scanned the news for clues. Live coverage was focused on Northern Virginia where three military drones crashed. One crashed in Fairfax, another crashed in Alexandria, while the third crashed in an undisclosed location. Unconfirmed reports believed that the third plane crashed at Quantico, though one report claimed it crashed into the Jefferson Memorial in Washington DC. Roger didn’t think anything of it until a military spokesman claimed the crashes were caused by computer failures. That’s when Roger knew why he was flying out in the middle of the night: the Department of Defense had been cracked.