The Reader's Chronicle

3rd draft—The Duel.
©Copyright 2011, John Inshaw.

1

IBM Research Center, Los Alamos National Laboratory, New-Mexico, USA.

    Andrew Keller lifted his glass of champagne amidst loud cheers from his team. Behind him loomed the fastest computer in the world, Sequoia, his brainchild. The IBM Sequoia, a petascale Blue Gene/Q supercomputer with a targeted performance of 20 petaflops—20 quadrillions floating point operations per second—more than the combined performance of the top 500 supercomputers in the world, 20 times faster than the IBM Roadrunner—a supercomputer with the power of two million laptops—15 times faster than the most powerful Cray supercomputer, and 8 times as fast as the supercomputer Tianhe-1A, a supercomputer with a performance of 2.507 petaflops located at the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin, China, the current fastest supercomputer in the world.

    Keller, a physicist Nobel laureate, made his way through the crowded room with two glasses of champagne in his hands among applauses and accolades towards a man in his thirties in a crumpled cheap suit.

    – “Peter, here have some champagne.”

    Peter Curtiss took the champagne and lifted it slightly. “To you, Andrew. Congratulations. You did it. To Sequoia.”

    Keller took a sip and said with a smile. “We’re all working for the same company, you know, Peter.”

    Curtiss nodded and looked at the man he had come to loathe by the day, the man who had stolen his dreams. Andrew Keller had been promoted to the position of Director of the IBM Advanced Research Team right after winning his Nobel prize, a position held by Curtiss for more than 15 years. It was Curtiss who had seen to the final design of the Roadrunner—a hybrid system, using two different processor architectures requiring system engineers to master two different assembly programming techniques to fully realize the potential of the hybrid architecture. It was him with his programming abilities that had allowed the development of the Scanning Tunneling Microscope which had earned Keller and Roning—two unknown researchers working at that time for IBM Zurich— their Nobel prize in Physics. Roning was hired by Cray Supercomputers subsequently and Keller had replaced Curtiss to become the most powerful man at IBM.

    Curtiss was, at first, happy to provide help to Keller who was all hardware. The man didn’t know an Intel machine code from a Motorola’s. He had come to Curtiss for all machine code and software related needs during the design of Sequoia. Curtiss didn’t mind at that time because he did not think that Keller would succeed and even if he did Curtiss thought that he would be sharing in all the honors and recognitions. But when only Keller and Roning had been nominated for the Nobel prize, Curtiss had stormed inside Adam Watson’s office and demanded that he tell the world about his role and involvement in Sequoia and other IBM breakthroughs. The IBM Chief Executive Officer had made it clear then that he wouldn’t tolerate any indiscretions or smearing campaigns from Curtiss. He, Peter Curtiss, was no longer the number one man at IBM. And, to add insult to injury, neither Keller nor Roning had mentioned his contributions during their acceptance speeches. 

    The same thing was happening again. Sequoia was seen by IBM and the whole world as Keller’s personal triumh.

    Adam Watson called Keller from the other corner of the room. Keller shrugged, excused himself and disappeared among the crowd. Curtiss put down his untouched glass of champagne when Frances, his ex-secretary now Keller’s, approached.

    – “Peter, I want you to know I think it’s unfair to you the way they—”

    Curtiss touched her shoulder. “It’s alright, Frances. That’s how the game is played nowadays.”

    Frances turned to look at Keller talking to Watson.

    – “He could have at least acknowledged your input for all the—”

    Curtiss cut her, not because he didn’t want her sympathy but because it hurt too much to hear the truth. “Frances, I said it’s okay.”

    – “Okay? What do you mean, okay? He’s a Nobel laureate, Director of the Advanced Research Team and you—you, they put you in the basement after all these years!”

    Curtiss forced himself to show Frances a smile. “Frances, thank you. I really appreciate your loyalty and friendship but I’d better go now, I don’t want to spoil Andrew’s moment.”

    He embraced Frances, headed for the elevator and pressed on the button marked sub-level 3. He walked into his office and locked the door behind. He was angry and frustrated. Had he not signed that contract that states that all discoveries by him and his team belong to the company, he would be now suing not only Keller and Roning, but also Watson and IBM for hundred of millions.

    Curtiss sat down at his desk. Alone at work, alone at home, he thought. No wife, no family, no friends. He used to think that IBM had been the best thing in his life. He loved programming. He loved dissecting other people’s programs. He loved cracking codes and hacking into other people’s systems just to prove to himself that he can do it.

    What Watson or his colleagues at IBM never knew was that by the age of 18, Curtiss was the most renowned hacker in the digital underground world. His handle was ASMC to highlight the fact that he speaks only Assembly language and C. His knowledge of operating systems and networking was unequal. His programming and hacking skills far surpassed the others. He was by far the best hacker but the world never knew it. Unlike most hackers who knew only how to break into home computers with few protections, ASMC hacked into mainframes and workstations of scientific laboratories and government systems—sit any self-proclaimed ‘hacker’ in front of a terminal of a mainframe and he wouldn’t even know how to list a directory. At that time, supercomputers from Cray, IBM and Hewlett-Packard were the only systems he could not hack into. It was when he hacked into the US Secret Service’s obsolete IBM MVS mainframe that he learned about the upcoming operation code-named Silverlight, a hackers’ crackdown to be led by the US Secret Service, the NSA and the FBI under the authority of the US Attorney General. It was that knowledge that had allowed him to slip through the nationwide raid. Other famed hackers combined, be they whitehats or blackhats—a term used to differentiate between hackers who use their skills for legitimate works or to exploit computer systems—did not have half his abilities and knowledge.

    Curtiss knew all the firmware and networking protocols and most of all, he was born with the programming gift like others were born piano prodigies or mathematical geniuses. It was something he did naturally, without effort. It would take him only a few minutes to assimilate new techniques, computer architectures or programming languages. He would compile list of zero day threats—vulnerabilities in a computer application unknown to the software developer—and write proofs of concept, codes showing how to exploit the vulnerabilities either directly, through injections or buffer overflow methods and give them away to other hackers just to watch the ensuing war between hackers and software developers. Although he had never used the concept for himself, he was the author of the ‘bot’ trojan, a program that takes over mostly home computers which then would obey commands sent from a master control computer like robots, hence the term ‘bots’. On the first trial run of his program, it had netted 240,000 computers. Tell him what kind of software someone is writing and he would know where to look for bugs and loopholes because, chances are, he had already written that software before, either for a company or as a learning tool for himself.

    He looked at the brand new, transparent laptop on his desk and smiled. He remembered clearly that day when he was looking for a legitimate job. Computer system managers from IBM, Digital Equipment, Sun Microsystems, Microsoft, Apple, Red Hat and Google, not counting those from computer security firms like Symantec, Norton and McAfee walked into their offices that morning to find that their systems had been invaded and that the hacker had left them a résumé. All wanted him to work for them. All were willing to do whatever was necessary to have him working for their companies. Curtiss went with IBM. He wanted to work for the world’s most famous computer company, on their most advanced machines, at the cutting edge of technology. His job description requires him to know everything that was done in the computer world, hardware or software wise. All he had to do was to sign a paper with a list of computer brands, operating systems or software and he would have them delivered to his lab by express couriers the next day or the next week. IBM Advanced R&D Team’s lab on the first level of the basement was full with computer systems from the DEC PDP-11 to the latest Custom Workstation Dual Six-Core Xeon 5600/5500 Tesla HPC Personal Supercomputer, not counting the Cray CX1, Microsoft Windows HPC Server and other SUN Ultra 27 Workstations. A dedicated server served as a repository database for any imaginable software for any machines or operating systems. He was so skilled in programming that he could reverse-engineered any software just by looking at what they can do. He rarely needed to disassemble any codes. He could be having lunch and write directly on a napkin finished bug free programs that any R&D teams would take days or weeks to develop and test. All those programmers at Microsoft, Apple, Google and the people writing modules for Linux who could not write a single program without a template or framework were just amateurs. Even the system programmers of mainframes and workstations were of no match to him.

    During the 15 years he had worked for IBM, Curtiss had not done one single action that could have been construed as illegal. He had left behind him his hacking days on his first day with IBM. Watson needed his advices on everything. Whenever IBM’s competitors came up with a new hardware or software, the IBM Advanced Research Team, under his direction, would always come up with something better and faster the following weeks or months. He read and wrote machine and hexadecimal codes as though they were English prose. He downloaded on his personal laptop rootkits, viruses, worms, trojans, spyware and other malware on purpose, just for the pleasure of dissecting them later and eradicating them with codes written only in Assembly. Looking at the codes of those malicious software that so scared the public, he could not believe that they actually work. For those malware to cause the kind of damages he’d heard sometimes in the media, it must have required a stunning combination of luck, unwanted side-effects, stupid users and incompetent technicians. And every time, the so-called computer virus researchers from Symantec, Norton and other companies would talk about those deplorable programs as if they were the latest, most dangerous well-crafted computer codes and predicted doomsday. Hackers and crackers with ridiculous handles would brag endlessly about themselves on the Internet for copycat exploits. And what about all those low-lives spammers and macro-viruses writers? How in the world could they ever call themselves ‘hackers’? Was he that smart or the others that dumb? Very often, the idea of writing a virus had occurred to him. Not for malice or fame or monetary end. He just wanted to see who out there could match his expertise. But he never did. If he started hacking, no one could stop him. He knew that. There was no one out there in the computer world with his programming skills.

    Curtiss opened the lid of the transparent laptop. This would be his answer to Keller and IBM. His prototype of the first quantum computer. He wasn’t in the IBM Quantum Computer Research Team. Keller didn’t want him. He had been hiring only young men with Ph.D. in Physics. Curtiss had been working on this project on his own time and money using all the available materials from IBM. He would show them all that they have been betting on the wrong horse. But there was only one problem. A very big problem for all the research teams in the quantum computing world. No one knew yet how to control decoherence and none of the research teams had observed entanglement. It’s quantum mechanics and its uncertainty again. If he knew how, the transparent laptop in front of him would have the same power of calculation of Sequoia. Curtiss’ heart accelerated. He could imagine Watson and Keller’s faces if he told them that his laptop could do everything that Sequoia is capable of in the same amount of time or less. Sequoia has a performance of 20 petaflops—20 quadrillions floating point operation per second. A 30-Qbit quantum computer has a performance of 10 teraflops—ten trillions floating point operations per second. His laptop is a 64-Qbit quantum computer prototype. He could imagine the media frenzy and a call from Oslo at 6:00 a.m. in the morning to announce that he had won the Nobel prize.

    Curtiss pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his forehead. He watched with horror a drop of his sweat fell onto the keyboard in slow motion. Curtiss swore out loud, reacted but was too late. The drop of sweat was now on its way down to the motherboard by the side of the Enter key. “No!” he screamed. Three years of hard work and that single drop of sweat could ruin it all. Curtiss still tried to dry the key carefully as best as he could when he pressed it by accident and a beep froze his veins. The sweat had short-circuited the board. He raised his head and saw something on the screen that was not supposed to be there. On his screen were these simple words. Results: 158. What the hell? he thought. He had been running the program as a background process waiting for decoherence and entanglement to take place. It was a program written to crack a public-key cryptography scheme known as RSA. RSA is based on the assumption that factoring large numbers is computationally infeasible by classical computers and is widely used in electronic commerce. No classical algorithm is known that can factor in polynomial time. But, by using Peter Shor’s quantum algorithm on a quantum computer, RSA can be broken. It was this program that Curtiss was running on his prototype. With a slight shake of his hand, Curtiss pressed the Enter key one more time and stopped breathing altogether. The screen was now showing him the set of RSA encryted passwords he had been using for the test, all in clear text…

    He did not remember how long he sat in his office staring at the list of decrypted passwords. QDP as he had named his Quantum Decryption Program was a reality. If his prototype was really a working quantum computer then it meant that he could decrypt all the public encryption keys using RSA algorithm or any encryption methods based on integer factorization. Of course, there were other cryptographic algorithms that do not use integer factorization but he would not need to break them. Breaking RSA alone was enough. Most of the secured websites and electronic commerce use RSA. Curtiss knew that besides breaking RSA, a quantum computer is not capable of solving any problem that a classical computer cannot, given enough time and memory, but there was another side-effect of a quantum computer that had not been pursued as it should. Superposition. If he could control superposition and entanglement, exploiting a zero day vulnerability would allow him to command an army of botnets by the millions at once. One single command from his laptop to those slave computers would have the same effect as having millions and millions of computer’s owners typing in the same command and pressing the Enter key at the same time. And, as to breaking passwords on mainframes and supercomputers, a brute force attack by a quantum computer might return some very interesting results. The resources required for a brute force attack scale, not linearly but exponentially with increasing key size. Doubling the key size for an algorithm squares the required number of operations. If a machine could brute-force a 56-bit encryption key in one second, it would take that machine 149.7 trillion years to brute force a 128-bit encryption key. But a quantum computer is essentially a massive parallel processing machine that can work on millions of calculations simultaneously whereas a traditional computer works on one calculation at a time, in sequence. Once the Qbits are entangled, their superposition states should in theory allowed the machine to brute force the same 128-bit encryption in less than a month’s time without requiring the extra energy in power set in the Von Neumann-Landauer theoretical limit.

    Curtiss carefully lifted the transparent laptop and gently placed it inside his backpack. He stood up, turned off the lights and headed for the door with a question on his mind. What can the world’s best hacker do with a quantum computer?

2

Two months later… Bay Area, San Francisco, 9:00 p.m.

    The central room on the second floor of the building housing Defbytes Inc., an upstart company in computer security, looked like a war room. All the monitors were on with servers humming and technicians working feverishly at the keyboards. Secretaries were running around, going from one desk to another relying information to analysts. A group of people crowded around the central desk where Jim Hoffner, Defbytes best security expert was trying to thwart their number one client’s servers against a massive onslaught of distributed denial-of-service attacks coming from thousand of personal computers that had started earlier that day.

    Ted Cruz, CEO of MailGuard Inc., had a rather radical idea for stopping spam for his clients. He had sent out emails to major spammers from a list MailGuard had compiled over the course of four years telling them to remove MailGuard’s customers from their list or MailGuard servers and its client’s machines would launch a denial-of-service attack against them. Surprisingly, it worked. Some of the spammers complied. MailGuard was hailed by the press, its customers and even by its competitors. Things went on smoothly until that morning before Cruz got the following email. ‘You will not get away with this. You and your customers will get 40 times more spams that you would normally. Just remember one thing. We didn’t start this. You did.’

    Panicked, Cruz called Defbytes for help. Immediately, Jim Hoffner and his team started monitoring spammers favorite IRC—Internet Relay Chat—and found out that there was a call from the Russian spam kingpin ‘Ispam’—the man responsible for more than 60% of spams received worldwide—to all spammers in the world to flood MailGuard and its customers with electronic junk mails. An hour later, spammers, using their botnets Storm, Conficker and Waledec—a total botnet of around 24,000 computers—knocked MailGuard offline as well as two hundred thousands other customers from their ISP, Bay Web Services, and took down with it all the companies who shared the servers in the same facility. Two hours later, Bay Web Services dropped MailGuard publicly in a press conference to stop the denial-of-service assaults on its servers.

    MailGuard’s site was down since 4:00 p.m. that afternoon and requests that cause the denial-of-service were now joined by another botnet of at least 7,000 computers. Hoffner and his team could not do one single thing. To make matter worse, spammers were now attacking Defbytes itself. Wally Hobbs, Defbytes Chief Operations, had called back all his teams of analysts and experts to fend off the attack.

    – “Jim! Any assessments?” Wally yelled from his desk while listening to Cruz at the other end.

    Hoffner was working frantically at his keyboard as well as all Defbytes technicians.

    – “No Wally… its coming from more and more bots… I can’t… we can’t stop them.”

    – “What about our servers? Are they still up?” Wally asked his IT Manager.

    – “Barely Chief. If the assault continues like this for another hour, they’ll shut us down too.”

    – “Ted, I’ll call you back in a few.” Wally said then slammed down the receiver and turned to his experts. “Does anyone have any ideas of how to get us out of this mess?” he shouted over the room’s noise.

    All his personnel were still working furiously at the keyboards, discussing and arguing among themselves.

    – “Anyone? Any-one?” Wally was still screaming.

    – “Chief?”

    Wally turned. It was Henry Cole calling from a small section of the room. Wally had recently formed small teams of new inexperienced analysts to help out with the company’s rapid success. Henry Cole and Dan Fisher, along with Julia Aragon, their team leader, were one of them. They were ‘bluehats’. All three of them had only worked on Penetration Test—a method of evaluating the security of a client’s system or network by simulating an attack from a malicious source—so far.

    Wally walked up to Henry and Dan standing behind Julia watching her work.

    – “What you got?” he asked.

    – “I think Julia’s on to something.” said Henry.

    Wally leaned over Julia’s shoulder to look at the monitor.

    – “Talk to me, Julia. We need all the help we can get.”

    Julia was still typing and looking at her screen. “Okay Wally, here’s my thought. There are thousand of computer attacking us. One of them must have some information we can use.”

    – “Like what?”

    Julia was still typing and looking straight at her monitor, “If I can get to one of the zombies’ SNMP to monitor its Internet connections—”

    Wally grabbed Julia’s shoulders so hard she almost jumped.

    – “We can see where the zombie’s getting its marching order from! Julia, you’re a genius!”

    – “There! She got it!” Dan cried out loud.

    Everyone else in the room stopped at what they were doing to assemble behind Wally and Julia.

    Julia tapped her screen with a finger. “Here you go Wally. The zombie’s being talking from its port 9800 to an IRC… in Russia… irc.phreaks.ru”

    – “We got the bastards!” Wally shouted while already on his way back to his office. As Chief Operations of a computer security company, he has procedures to follow in cases like this. The computer security company would call the US Secret Service which would then call their counterparts in the other country to pull the plug on the servers commanding the botnets. It is an international cooperation between countries to stop hackers and spammers. The whole procedure usually takes no more than one hour as any company victim of these attacks could lose millions for each waste hour.

    Half an hour later, irc.phreaks.ru was no longer online. Wally was seen doing a group hug with Julia, Henry and Dan under the general applause of the personnel except for Jim Hoffner and his team.

3

    Jose Morales looked at the crumpled note in his hand and then at the man in a decrepit suit standing outside the door of his lodge. Smell of freshly baked corn tortillas drifted into the courtyard while the maids’ soft laughters and conversations in Spanish could be heard from the outbuilding on the opposite side. The Aragon’s vineyard was located in a secluded valley accessible only through a dirt trail of almost two miles long from the main road. Morales looked down at the gringo’s large, battered suitcase. A grin formed under his mustache. Did he really walk all the way carrying that? he thought.

    – “Have you worked in a vineyard before?” he asked in a heavy Mexican accent, a stub of cigar between his teeth.

    – “No, sir.” replied the stranger with an uneasy voice.

    Morales chewed harder on his stub. “And old Garcia told you to come here for a job?”

    The man noticed Morales’ tone and lowered his eyes. “Yes, sir. We met at a day labor in Phoenix. We’ve worked together for four months. When our contract ended, he gave me that note and told me that he would be here the last week of May and that he would talk to you about me and—”.

    Morales held up his hand, cutting him off. “Look amigo, you don’t have to call me ‘sir’. My name’s Jose but everybody here calls me Morales. Too many ‘Jose’ around here, you know what I mean?” he said with a nudge towards the group of men milling around the barn.

    Morales twisted and flipped the note in his hand. Something bothered him. The stranger did not look like an itinerant worker a bit. To him, a man who had been working vines all his life, the stranger looked more like an out-of-work salesman rather than a vineyard worker.

    – “Mr. Morales, I’m sure if you ask Garcia—”

    – “Old Garcia died last month from a heart attack in Jalisco, his hometown.” came the answer. His wife called me last week. Poor Garcia. He was like family here. He had been working for us for years at each harvest season. I’m sorry you’ve come this far for nothing amigo.”

    Morales dropped his cigar to the ground and stomped it slowly. “I am really sorry amigo but you have to understand, working vines is hard. As a foreman, I have to hire people with experiences and there are a lot of them at the migrant workers camp up there in Calistoga.”

    The stranger simply nodded

    – “You wanna try at other vineyards? I can drive you there but chances are they’ll tell you the same thing.”

    The stranger seemed to consider the offer then shook his head. He picked up his suitcase, thanked Morales for his time and headed back towards the gates. Despite his disappointment, he could not help but admiring the magnificent scenery that lied ahead. The estate, the hills and valleys were bathed in a splendid scarlet hue under the Napa Valley dusk. He walked past the antique fountain with its slender stream of water when Morales came running after him, “Amigo, wait!”

    – “You have money to travel back?” he asked in a softer tone.

    The stranger smiled uneasily, embarrassed. “I have some.”

    A silence settled between them. Morales scratched his head, looked around, then sighed. “Look. Why don’t you go wait in my lodge. Let me talk to the boss, okay? I’m not promising you anything but maybe we could use you for something else for a few days—just a few days. That way, well that way it might give you enough money for the bus. What do you say?”

    The stranger hesitated for a moment. “Thank you.”

    Morales put his arm over the man’s shoulder. “No problem, amigo. By the way, what do I call you?”

    – “Lester. John Lester.”

    – “Alright Juanito. You know, I kind of think that if Old Garcia liked you and told you to come here then you must be a pretty decent guy.”

    – “I appreciate what you’re doing for me. I hope you won’t get in any kind of troubles.”

    Morales laughed. “No, no troubles. I’m family here and—the Aragons are very nice people. My family have been working for them since their ancestors came from Spain a hundred year ago. They might not be the richest vintners in Napa Valley but they are of noble descent.”

 

    When they arrived at the lodge Morales turned around, “Wait in here, Juanito. There’s a bottle of Merlot made from our grapes on the table. Help yourself while I go talk to the boss.”

    He crossed the courtyard in the direction of the Aragons’ house, an imposing white Victorian house with its gables, front porch steps, large windows and columns supporting a wide balcony overlooking the whole structure. He had not yet reached the steps when a tall man in his early sixties walked out to the front porch. He was dressed like a farmer, his hair and mustache on the gray side.

    – “Don Pedro.”

    – “Morales, the grapes from yesterday look nice and healthy. Congratulations.”

    – “Thank you, Don Pedro. I think we’ll have a good harvest this year. Is Senor Victor available?”

    – “He’s in the basement choosing a bottle of wine for my granddaughter’s return.”

    – “Oh, right. Shouldn’t Julia be here already? Who went to pick her up? Arturo?”

    – “Yes—I just hope he didn’t get lost like the last time.”

    Morales bent down his head to hide a smile.

    – “Does Julia like her new job?” Morales asked.

    – “Very much, apparently. She’s their computer expert from what I heard. She’s just got a promotion.”

    – “Senora Isabelle!” Morales called out, looking over Don Pedro’s shoulder at the full woman in a traditional Spanish dress who had just walked out to join them. Her demeanors were of a woman who has been raised in a rustic countryside, someone simple and openhearted.

    – “Isabelle,” said Don Pedro, “we were just talking about your daughter’s homecoming.”

    The woman gave him a look and turned to Morales. “Where’s Arturo? He should be here with Julia by now.”

    – “Ay, Senora Isabelle, you should have told me... I would have gone myself. Arturo cannot be...”

    Morales was interrupted by the rattle of an old pickup truck pulling into the courtyard. Two maids were running after the truck from the outbuilding. The truck made a turn and slowed down to a stop.

    – “There she is,” Isabelle said, stepping down the front porch to meet her daughter.

    – “Mom! Grampa!” Julia jumped out from the truck, her arms opened wide. Isabelle held her daughter’s hands and looked at her with pride. Julia was wearing a straw hat and an elegant flowered shirwaist, her long auburn hair disappearing behind her shoulders. She’s beautiful, Isabelle thought. She looks just like an actress from the 50’s. Julia held her mother and Don Pedro for a long moment before reaching out to hug Morales. “Morales, good to see you.”

    – “Did Arturo make you wait? Was he late?” Morales asked, looking at the young driver.

    Julia laughed then pretended to put on a serious face, “No, and don’t you all dare scold him. I was the one who made him wait. We had a little celebration at the office.”

    She swung aroung to hug the two maids in gray dresses who were of the same age as herself, “Anna! Maria! I brought some stuff for you. Beautiful dresses from the Bay Area and—”

    Isabelle tugged at her daughter’s arm, “Enough, Julia. Let’s go see your father first. He must be worrying sick. There’ll be enough time for you to talk to them.”

    Julia turned around and mouthed some words to the maids who laughed and went back to the outbuilding.

    Arturo was carrying Julia’s luggage in the house when Don Pedro seemed to remember something. “Morales, why do you want to see Victor?”

    – “Oh, I almost forgot. There’s a gringo in my lodge looking for a job. He used to work with Old Garcia in Phoenix. I told him we do not need help but the poor guy had come all the way from Arizona and I was wondering if maybe Senor Victor could use him for a day or two, so he has some money to pay for his trip back.”

    – “Why did he come here?”

    – “Old Garcia had promised him a job with us for the harvest season.”

    Don Pedro straightened up. “Keep him for a few days. I’m sure there are things we can make him do. Anyway, with the harvest coming, Isabelle might need help with some housework too.”

    – “I’ll do that. Thanks, Don Pedro.”

4

    Lester stood up from his chair when Morales walked through the doors. “Sorry it took so long, Juanito, but I have good news. You’re staying with us for a few days. Is that alright?”

    – “Thank you.”

    – “There’s only one problem, Juanito. The outbuilding is full so we have to lodge you somewhere else. There’s a cabin just a stone’s throw away from here that we rarely used. Come on, let’s get you set up.”

    Lester waited while Morales went through a closet and brought out an oil lamp. “There’s no electricity at the cabin.” he said in a neutral tone.

    They left the lodge and stopped by the outdoor cellar entrance where a cool, damp air could be felt coming out from the room. Morales leaned his head inside.

    – “Don Pedro, this is John.”

    Don Pedro came out, a glass of wine in one hand.

    – “John, meet Don Pedro, the head of the Aragon’s family.”

    Don Pedro extended his hand, “Welcome to our family, John.”

    Lester put down his suitcase and took the old man’s hand in both of his.

    – “Nice to meet you, Don Pedro, and thank you for letting me stay.”

    Don Pedro waived him off. “Ah, don’t mention it. I am sorry we cannot do more.”

    – “It already means a lot to me, sir.”

    – “John will be staying at the cabin.” said Morales.

    Don Pedro seemed surprised, then leaned over and whispered, “Maybe you will not thank me so much after you saw the cabin.” He straightened back with a smile and winked.

    – “I’m sure I’ve been to worse places, sir.”

    – “All right then,” said Don Pedro with a laugh, “I think I like your attitude young man, but may I ask you a personal question?”

    – “Yes sir, of course.”

    – “What’s in that large suitcase? Isn’t that too heavy to carry around?”

    Lester looked down and smiled. “It’s mostly empty, sir. Just a few clothes and books. I bought the suitcase at a thrift store and they didn’t have anything smaller that day.”

    – “Oh, I see. Sorry for asking. I didn’t mean to pry into personal matters.”

    – “No harm done, sir.”

    Don Pedro turned to Morales. “Show our friend the cabin and let him get some rest.”

    Morales tilted his head for Lester to follow. They walked along the courtyard and took a left just before reaching the side of the Aragons’ house to enter a long, narrow path fenced by tall hedges.

    – “Stay at the cabin. I’ll send someone when I need you—It can be at any time, day or night, alright?” Morales said.

    When he saw the look of surprise in Lester’s face, he added, “Juanito. This is a vineyard. This is our life. We do not have a timecard. We check on the vines everytime the weather changes.”

    Lester looked down with embarrassment. “Sorry.”

    – “That’s alright, Juanito.”

    They walked in silence until they came to an old, ramshackle cabin on the right side of the path.

    – “Does the path lead to somewhere?” Lester asked.

    – “Nowhere. It stops right after the turn. It’s totally enclosed. Beyond that, there’s nothing but a jumbled of shrubs and bushes. Nothing can get through them.”

    Morales pushed open the door, “There’s no lock.” he said.

    Lester followed Morales inside the cabin. It was dark but he could still make out a sink, a wood stove, a plain pine table with two chairs. A bed topped with a mattress was pushed against the rear wall. It was obvious that the cabin had not been used in a long while.

    Morales lit the oil lamp and placed it on the table. “You might need to clean up the place a little bit.”

    Lester looked around and nodded, “No problem.”

    Morales walked out the door. “Make yourself comfortable. I’ll tell Anna to bring you some clean sheets and blankets with your supper. I don’t think I will need you before tomorrow afternoon, so take a good rest, Juanito.”

    – “Thank you.”

    Lester stood staring at the flickering flame of the oil lamp glowing faintly inside the cabin long after Morales footsteps had died away when something unusual caught his attention. It was the silence. There wasn’t a sound anywhere. Just silence. A still silence.

    He spent the next hour cleaning the room with the sparse supplies found in the closet. He had not yet finished when he heard the sound of approaching footsteps. A few minutes later, the door was pushed wide open and an a young woman in her twenties with folded sheets and blankets under two covered dishes stacked on top of each other stepped in. The look of surprise in her face was apparent when she saw him. “Oh, I am sorry, I... I’ve brought you some supper.”

    – “That’s all right. Here, let me take that from you. I’m John.”

    – “Anna.” she said with a warm smile.

    Lester put the dishes and the pile of sheets and blankets on the table. He could see she was an attractive woman despite her disheveled hair and her drab dress.

    – “Morales did not tell me that you’re... uh... he called you ‘Juanito’... so I thought you were from the migrant workers camp. I hope you like Mexican food.”

    – “I love it, thank you.”

    Anna gave the cabin a quick inspection. “Why did Morales put you here? Aren’t you gonna stay with us for the harvest?” She was now attentively looking at him.

    – “I don’t think so. I’m here only for a few days.”

    Anna looked disappointed. “You have to leave?” she asked, while managing at the same time to arrange her hair and her dress without it being too obvious.

    – “No, but Mr. Morales told me he doesn’t need me. He lets me stay here just to help me out.”

    Anna pushed a strand of brown hair out of her eye. “Oh...” then moving closer to the bed she peered into Lester’s open suitcase, “You like to read?” she asked, pointing at the books inside.

    – “A little—it helps pass the time.”

    Anna browsed through the books, “Oh my God, they’re all maths and physics books? You must be pretty smart.”

    Lester moved closer. “Oh no. I read what I can find in thrift stores, just to pass the time really. I’ve never finished school.”

    – “No?”

    – “No—my parents passed away when I was two weeks old. I was raised by my aunt who cleaned houses for a living. When she got sick, I had to drop school to help out. I was twelve at that time.”

    – “Where is she now?”

    – “I lost her six years ago to cancer.”

    Anna looked up from the book. “I’m sorry.”

    An uncomfortable silence settled between them. “Where should I take back the dishes?” Lester asked.

    – “Oh, don’t worry about that.” said Anna, putting the book back in the suitcase. “I’ll come back to get them later... but... you can come see us at the outbuilding if you like. We stayed out late... you know... just talking.” Then she quickly added, “Oh, and most of the nights, Joaquin and Luis would play serenades. It’s pretty nice.”

    Lester smiled. “Sounds like it.”

    Anna put a hand over her mouth, “Oh, you must be tired and here I am keeping you from having your supper. Sorry. Enjoy your meal, Johnnie... you don’t mind I call you Johnnie, do you?”

    – “No, not at all.”

    – “I’ll be back for the... dishes.”

    Anna gave him a last once-over before walking out, leaving behind a sweet scent of lavander and soap.

5

    It was around three o’clock in the afternoon the next day when the dusty farm pickup truck full of workers pulled into the courtyard. Morales got out from the driver’s side, lit up a cigar when he noticed Victor Aragon and Don Pedro waving at him from the barn that had been transformed into a temperature controlled storage room. He walked over to them.

    – “Did you take a look at the grapes from yesterday? What do you think, Senor Victor?” he asked.

    Victor looked at Don Pedro who nodded then turned to Morales. “I think we can start the harvest as soon as next week, Morales. Good job.”

    Victor was looking at the workers climbing out from the truck bed with Lester in an overall too large for him, wiping sweat away from his face.

    – “Who’s that?” Victor asked nodding his head in Lester’s direction.

    – “That’s Johnnie, Senor Victor.” Morales said, “I’ve hired him just for a few days.”

    – “They’re out of workers at the migrant camp?”

    – “No, Victor.” said Don Pedro, “I told Morales to keep him here for a few days just to help him out. He needs some money to go back to Arizona.”

    Victor nodded. “He didn’t slow down the others or cut himself, did he?”

    Morales scratched his head under the straw hat. “No—he works pretty hard. Too bad we have already all the people we need. I would have kept him otherwise.”

    Victor looked puzzled. Hand harvest is the most physically demanding job in winegrape vineyard work. When filled, standard-sized tubs weighed an average of 57 pounds and some even weighed in at over 80 pounds. Workers must stoop, grip, lift, carry and dump up to 20 times per hour, besides relocating the tub down the row. “Honestly I can’t see him—”

    – “Senor Victor, the guy works hard, very hard and uh—he’s very careful and uh—precise. It’s hard to describe it, you have to see him at work.”

    – “Really? I haven’t known you to be impressed by anybody in this line of work, Morales.” Don Pedro said, leaning closer.

    Morales grinned. “It’s not something I can put my finger on, Don Pedro. But yes, this guy impresses me. He has something that—”

    Victor laughed. “Okay Morales, if you say so.”

    – “Meanwhile Don Pedro, you think you can find him some work to do? I won’t be needing him this evening and tomorrow.” Morales said.

    – “Sure. Send him over to me in the library.”

 

 

    Lester was led to the library by a smiling uniformed maid. They walked through a large hall with double ceiling decorated with antiques art, their steps resonating on the polished floor as if they were inside a cathedral. They passed a ballroom and a formal dining room which Lester guessed could easily fit fifty people.

    Felicia rapped twice on the wooden door at the end of the hall and pushed it open without waiting for an answer to reveal a large room filled with books on both sides of its walls. Don Pedro who was standing behind a young woman typing at a computer desktop by the fireplace held up a finger. Lester’s attention was soon drawn to the woman. Of all the beautiful and precious things he had seen in the house, she was without doubts the most beautiful and the most precious.

    – “Troubles?” Don Pedro asked.

    – “I don’t know yet. Something bizarre is happening at USABank, my biggest account server’s site. Looks like someone broke into their system.” Julia said.

    – “And they need you back?”

    – “Not really. I can work from here on the client’s system and be in contact 24/7 with my team but I’d like for them to be here with me. This could be our first real case.”

    – “Tell them to come up here. I’ll tell Felicia to prepare the guests rooms.”

    Julia nodded but she was still thinking. Yes, this could be her first real case. A break-in. What she did yesterday was fending off a denial-of-service attack from spammers. But this. If it were really a break-in, she would be going head-to-head against a real hacker. She would be really earning her title of Intrusion Detection and Prevention Systems or IDPS specialist. She knew Defbytes was in competition with all the computer forensic giants and among them, the best and the biggest in the business, Fortress Corp. Fortress had among their analysts mostly ex-blackhat hackers who were all very good at what they do but best among the best was Davis Anderson, the famous whitehat who had helped the FBI traced and captured some of the most infamous hackers, dismantled botnets of more than 70,000 computers and who had regularly testified as expert witness before Congress on electronic crime bills and hearings.

    Julia turned and saw Lester for the first time. “Grampa, there’s—”

    Don Pedro took his eyes off the large flat computer monitor. “Oh sorry, Johnnie. Come in. Julia, this is Johnnie, our new worker. Johnnie, Julia, my granddaughter.”

    Lester walked in the room and stood by the desk.

    – “Julia, why don’t you call your team and have Johnnie here help you set up the library for your work? Are they all gonna be here before nightfall?”

    Julia stood up. “Oh yes. It’ll take them at most two hours to get here.”

    – “Okay then. It’s settled. See you at dinner.”

    Don Pedro left and Julia was telling Lester how to group tables in the middle of the room while she was connecting her desktop and laptop to different pieces of equipment.

    Lester was working in front of the flat screen when a bell chimed and a video of a young man appeared inside a window. Behind him was another one with thick glasses typing furiously at the keyboard.

    – “Julia, are you there? Come quick!”

    Lester stepped back to let Julia sit before the monitor.

    – “Yes, what is it Dan?”

    – “It’s getting big Julia. Very, very big. This might be it. The hack of the century! Microsoft, Apple and Google had just admitted that their securities have been breached! 29 servers in all. Nothing was stolen from the systems. Nothing was done to the systems but whoever was there had logged in and simply left a message, ‘hello world’! Software companies are freaking out. They are all now guessing group of Russian or Chinese hackers acting in coordination. All the companies are right now, as we speak, running a full security audit on their servers. Julia, whoever is doing this is good, very good!”

    – “What’s the link with USABank? What our client has to do with those giant computer software companies?”

    – “It’s not clear but we think it’s because they share the same facility with some of Google’s servers. A kind of electronic collateral damage of sort.”

    Nothing came to Julia’s mind right away. “How’s that possible? Don’t some of them use RSA encryption? Which method did the attacker use, PKCS or Coppersmith?”

    – “Apparently none, believe it or not. Trace logs did not show any guessing attempts or dictionary brute force attacks! The guy logged in as if someone had handed him all the passwords and—here comes the unexplainable. All the 29 servers were broken into exactly at the same instant, Julia, and all the servers logs show that the hackers type his message at exactly the same time, to the second!”

    Julia hesitated. She did not know what to make of this last bit of information. “What do you mean, Dan?”

    – “It means, it looks like the guy, instead of having 29 hackers working for him, has instead 29 computers and keyboards and broke into those systems with his 29 hands!”

    Julia leaned back on her chair while the man with his thick glasses joined the first one and talked into the camera.

    – “Bad news for us, Jules. The man on top wants to give the account to Hoffner and having all the other teams, us included, working for him.” said Henry.

    Julia straightened up right away, her cheeks becoming rose pink. “No way! No. This is our account. This is our case.”

    Henry shrugged. “You’ll have to convince Wally but from what I heard, Jim Hoffner is right now inside his office telling him all the reasons why we shouldn’t have the case with the CEO himself on video conference.”

    Julia hit the desk with her palm. “The weasel!”

    Henry and Dan looked at each other on the other side of the camera. “Uh Julia, Jim might be right… he has a team of six experienced analysts and we—uh—we’re just a newly formed team of—”

    – “No! This is my case. I’ll call Wally right now. You two just hurry up here. I’ll let you know when you’re here.”

    The two men nodded. “Alright Jules. On our way.”

    While Lester was moving chairs and tables around the room, Julia had called her supervisor and among pleas, threats and passionate arguments, she had finally convinced him to let her have two days to show him positive results before he turned the case over to Hoffner.

    Julia had her head in her hands when Lester approached her.

    – “Are you okay, Miss Aragon?”

    Julia startled. “Oh yes, thank you Johnnie. It’s office’s politics. I don’t think I’ll ever get used to it.”

    – “Will you be needing me longer?”

    – “No and thanks for helping me set things up.”

    – “You’re welcome. If you need anything else, I will be at the cabin.”

    Julia looked surprised. “The cabin? Why did Morales put you there?”

    – “That’s not a problem. The outbuilding is full and anyway I’m here only for a few days.”

    – “Oh, sorry to hear that.” she sounded sincere.

    – “You have a good night, Miss Aragon.”

    – “You too, Johnnie… and thanks again.”

6

    The following day, the security breaches at the software giants made the news throughout the world’s media and press with one single common title: ‘Hello, World!’

    Security experts, ex-hackers and virus researchers as well as spokespersons from renowned software companies had taken their seats in front of the cameras of CNN and national networks one after another giving either reassuring or alarming advices to companies while claims of responsibility poured in from all sources. Hackers and system crackers from the US, Russia, China, Eastern Europe, Iran, Japan and even Al Qaeda’s terrorists and the Taliban, all claimed responsibilities. Some asked for ransom, others wanted fame and recognition. Whoever the hacker was, he had showed the world that no operating systems were safe from him. Not only had he hacked into all the known operating systems on different computers but he had also broken a few 128-bit RSA public keys encryption along. Different operating systems from mainframes and workstations did not stop him either. The audit logs showed the hacker or hackers did not hesitate before running the right commands on those unusual systems known only to the few system programmers.

    The US Secret Service, the FBI, the UK National Hi-Tech Crime Unit and their counterparts in Europe and Russia had already formed an international joint task force under the pressure of their respective governments. If the 128-bit RSA encryption had been broken, government, military and bank secret documents were no longer safe. Agents from countries in the task force were sent to interview all known hackers and most were raided that same day. There was only one snag. None of them had ever heard of a hacker with the handle ‘hello world’.

    Suddenly, in a matter of a few hours, the whole world learned about Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, creators and authors of the C programming language in which they stated that the only way to learn a new programming language is by writing programs in it. The first program to write is the same for all languages. Print the words ‘hello, world’.

7

    Past 7:00 p.m. that same night, at the Aragon’s vineyard, Henry and Dan were inside the library with Julia, their laptops on the table with scattered documents, papers, faxes and computer listings. All of them were working at their laptops while Felicia and Lester gathered food plates and empty glasses.

    They were inside their client’s system gathering the data from the intrusion detection system or IDS device.

    – “Woah, look at the list of servers he broke into.” Dan said and handed the listing to Henry.

    – “Okay let’s see. Among the 29 servers our client has the IBM ESA/390. The rest belongs to Microsoft, Apple and Google. Sun Solaris and SPARC Servers, Windows Servers, Mac OS X Servers, Sun Ultra II, IBM RS/6000 and an Intel Dual Pentium II Server.”

    Julia looked at the list. “The hacker knows his way around all these machines?”

    – “Looks like it or his team of super-hackers does.” said Henry.

    – “You can now add a Cray XT5 supercomputer on the list.” Dan said with a discouraged expression on his face.

    Julia and Henry turned to him. “What?”

    Dan pointed at his monitor showing CNN latest headline news. “Our mysterious friend had just visited the Institute of Statistical Mathematics in Japan, the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany and the National Center for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. They all have a Jaguar Cray XT5.”

    Henry threw his pencil on the table in frustration and sighed. “A Cray supercomputer! I don’t even know what operating system runs on the Crays.”

    – “Cray Linux Environment with SUSE Linux.” Julia said.

    – “And… let’s see… what’s this? Aw, damn! Microsoft, Apple and Google plan to hire Fortress. Davis Anderson will be on the case.”

    – “Shit!” Dan shouted, pushing away his laptop. “It’s over guys. Might as well pack our bags. We don’t stand a chance against him.”

    Julia looked at her team. “Come on guys. Let’s not lose hope yet. Let’s try to find out how the hacker did it. How did he obtain the passwords and what does he want?”

    Henry seemed to absorb what Julia had just said. “Wait a minute. You’re right! What does he want?”

    Henry stood up. “You’re on to something Jules. Why let the world know that you have the passwords to those systems? Why not use them to enrich yourself, or blackmail, or—”

    – “You’re way off base Henry.” Dan said, “Who cares why? We’re here to try to trace him.”

    Julia shook her head. “How can he make tracking devices believe he’s from 29 different countries using 29 different computers? It’s unbelievable.”

    A bell chimed and a window appeared on the large flat screen.

    – “I see you’re all there.” said a voice.

    – “Wally, you’re still at the office?” Henry asked.

    – “Not only I’m still at the office but we’re gonna have a video conference right now with USABank and Fortress.”

    – “Wally, please. Why Fortress?”

    – “I’m sorry Julia. This thing is out of my hand now. USABank called Fortress and Anderson called for this meeting. Depending on what you have for our client right now, he will stay with us or hire Anderson. Switch to conference.”

    Henry pressed a key on the desktop keyboard and two more windows appeared on the flat monitor.

    – “Good evening, Mr. Roberts.” said Julia addressing her client and ignoring Anderson’s smug smile from the other window just below Wally’s.

    – “Good evening, Julia” said Roberts, “I’m sorry to do this to you. I have no doubts you’ve been working hard for us but the people above me need results. They had already told me to go with Fortress and Mr. Anderson here who seems to have a lot more experiences than yourself in these kind of cases. I have convinced them to let me have a last talk with you. If you have made any progress please let me know and I will report back to my people. Otherwise, I’m afraid we’ll have to go with Fortress.”

    Julia sat in front of the camera. Henry and Dan were standing behind her.

    – “Mr. Roberts. I’m curious as to know what’s Mr. Anderson’s idea.”

    Anderson smiled. “Julia, right? May I call you Julia? It’s simple. I’m certain they’re a group of 29 international hackers working under a leader and here at Fortress, we have the resources to send investigators to those 29 countries.”

    – “And how did they break the RSA encryption?”

    Anderson flashed another smile. “They stole them. Somewhere, somehow, those list of passwords exist and they had simply fallen into the wrong hands.”

    – “Mr. Roberts, don’t you find Mr. Anderson’s explanations a little bit—simplified?”

    – “Julia!” It was Wally. “We at Defbytes do not judge anyone. We are here to try to help our customers.”

    – “Well, now that you’ve heard my theories. Let’s hear yours, Miss Julia. We’re all very interested in hearing your theories, am I right, Mr. Roberts?” Anderson said, still with a smug on his face.

    Roberts tried to calm down the situation. “Umh, Mr. Anderson’s right, Julia. I need to hear your theories.”

    Julia knew she was trapped. She had no theories. She did not have any ideas on how the hacker did it or why he did it. She knew she would lose her client right there and right then in front of her team, her supervisor and her haughty competitor. It would also be the end of her career at Defbytes. She felt tears coming up to her eyes but fought them vigorously.

    – “Mr. Roberts, I have to admit that I don’t have yet a clear idea, however, I’m asking you to give us a few more hours. The break-in occurred less than five hours ago and you cannot reasonably expect us to—”

    – “You’re right, Julia. Again, I’m sorry for doing this to you but there’s a lot of pressure on me to resolve this quickly. How about I give you another 12 hours? Would that be fair?”

    – “We would really appreciate that.” said Julia.

    Roberts turned to Anderson. “Is it alright with you, Mr. Anderson?”

    Anderson did not look happy. “It’s your call Mr. Roberts. Me and my team can accomplish a lot in 12 hours. If I were you I wouldn’t want to waste them. Imagine if the hacker were to log in again and start doing some damages.”

    Julia could not help jumping in. “Mr. Anderson, if that were his intentions, he would have done it so the first time. As to USABank, we think the break-in was accidental.”

    – “If you’re right and the break-in of our mainframe was accidental then it would be a great relief to us. Julia. Please let me know your results before tomorrow 3:00 p.m if, and I say if, we don’t have more break-ins meanwhile. Otherwise, I would have to make a decision on the spot. Did I make myself clear?” Roberts said.

    – “Yes sir.”

    – “Well, goodnight to you all and good luck.”

    Roberts signed off, followed by Anderson.

    – “I’m sorry Julia but he’s the client. I hope you’ll find something by tomorrow, I really do.” Wally said.

    – “I know Wally, thank you. Why don’t you go home now?”

    – “Goodnight guys and good luck in your hunt.” Wally said before signing off.

    Julia looked at her team. “Go get some rest if you want. I’ll work a while longer.”

    – “You’re joking right? Do you really think any of us can sleep right now?” Dan said.

    Julia stood up and noticed that Felicia and Lester were still in the room with them. “Felicia, Johnnie, why don’t you go? Don’t worry. We’ll clean our mess ourselves. Thank you for everything. Henry, Dan, let’s go outside for some fresh air. I think we all need a break.”

    Minutes after they left the room, an email message  popped up in the middle of the large flat monitor in the silent room with a sinister chime: Mind your own business or else… And it was signed: ‘hello world’.

8

Meanwhile in Tianjin, China…

 

    Inside the National Supercomputer Center, Xiao Ming, Director of the Center, walked along the vast air-conditioned room where were located the 112 cabinets that composed the pride of his country. The Tianhe-1A supercomputer. Scoring 2.507 petaflops as measured by the last LINPACK benchmark, Tianhe-1A had achieved the record by using 7,168 NVIDIA Tesla M2050 GPUs and 14,336 Intel Xeon CPUs. The total disk storage of Tianhe-1A has a capacity of 2 Petabytes implemented as a Lustre clustered file system and its memory size, 262 terabytes. Tianhe-1A had cost China $88 million to built and around $20 million annually for costs of energy intake and operating costs. It also requires 200 workers to have it operate properly. Used mainly to carry out computations for petroleum exploration and aircraft design, it is also an open access computer available to international clients. Tianhe-1A overtook Cray’s XT5 Jaguar in October 2010 to become to world’s fastest computer, giving China bragging rights as a technology superpower.

    Xiao leaned over to caress lovingly the 6 cabinets that house Tianhe-1A communications network. Any country with enough money and technology can built supercomputers which are only a combination of thousands of small computer servers running under a software that turns them into a single entity. In Tianhe-1A though, the real achievement was the Chinese networking technology. Tianhe-1A networking was composed of the Chinese-NUDT custom designed proprietary high-speed interconnect called Arch that runs at 160 Gbps, twice the bandwidth of any communications link used in high-performance computing and enterprise data centers worldwide.

    Xiao watched the hundreds of technicians working smoothly and efficiently around the supercomputer. He wasn’t impressed at all by IBM’s announcement of the Sequoia. Tianhe-1A was built so that it could be easily scaled up. Give China another few months and his marvel would resteal the title of world’s fastest computer. That’ll show the West what China is capable of.

    Xiao arrived at the Tianhe-1A main console where Zao Chen, China’s best ex-hacker turned legit, worked. He and his group were the hackers who had successfully conducted multiple intrusions on computer networks in the United States, Britain, Germany and France including the Pentagon and Google.

    – “Everything’s in order Zao?” Xiao asked.

    – “Yes, sir.”

    – “I guess you’ve heard the news about that hacker.”

    – “Probably a guy with a list of stolen passwords.” Zao said.

    – “So you don’t believe he—”

    – “No. If I can’t do it, nobody can.”

    Xiao nodded approvingly. “What if he tried with us?”

    Zao laughed out loud. “That’s what I was wishing for before you came in. I hope the hacker will try with us.”

    Xiao laughed too. “He has to be really stupid. It would take us less than 2 minutes to track him down.”

    – “Too bad. I really wanted to know what Tianhe-1A is capable of against attacks.”

    – “By the way, you’ve never told me what’s our defense against a distributed denial-of-service.”

    Zao smiled. “Simple. They can’t.”

    Xiao raised his eyebrows. “Meaning?”

    – “Meaning I’ve written my own version of the ingress filtering. Any forged IP packets will be rejected.”

    – “And what about the spammer?”

    – “I’ll hunt him down myself.”

    Xiao lifted up a finger. “Ah, but you must not Grasshopper. With great power there must come great responsibility.”

    The two men burst into laughs at the explicit references.

    – “Anyway, to invade Tianhe-1A, a hacker has to master the low-level assembly and the Extended C language of the CUDA-based Tesla M2050 GPU and that’s very unlikely.” Zao said.

    – “Have you finished the intrusion tests and the security review?” Xiao asked.

    – “Nothing to worry, sir. I can write books on computer intrusions. Any hacker trying to penetrate our security will be—umh—greatly surprised. I wrote a permanent denial-of-service program that will replace a device's firmware with a corrupt one that will completely damage the system hardware. The minute a hacker shows up on our radar, Tianhe-1A will flood his system and search through all the known vulnerabilities of his OS and networking configuration to inject the PDoS. With Tianhe-1A speed, once he’s flooded, it will be too late for him.”

    Xiao grabbed his ex-hacker by the shoulder and beamed with pride. “I have never doubted you, Zao. Not one second. I know you’re the greatest hacker of them all.”

9

    As far as Julia could remember, there has never been a complete silence at the Aragon’s estate. There was always far too much going on for that—the activities of men and women at all hours in a vineyard of 230 acres, almost one of the largest private vineyards in the country. These were all sounds that she had learned to know and love through years. And now, sitting under the veranda with Henry and Dan, she could look directly into the courtyard. The familiar scene warmed her heart: Morales sitting in a rocking chair outside the door of his lodge enjoying a cigar, and no doubts tasting some wine; sound of strumming guitars and Mexican love songs coming from the outdoor cellar; men going in and coming out the outbuilding while women tended to their occupations. It was as if they all lived in a small enclosed village. Each and everyone of them was considered part of the family. The Aragons.

    Her mother had gone to oversee the preparation of the guests rooms after dinner while her father had retreated in his study with her grandfather. Julia was glad to be back. She had not been back for more than six hours and already, the bustle of the city life in San Francisco was forgotten. Here, she was home.

    – “How’s the computer crime fighting job going? Did you catch the bad guy, yet?” Don Pedro joked while coming out from the house.

    Julia looked at her grandfather and shook her head sadly. “No, Grampa and they might just yank the carpet from under our feet.”

    Don Pedro sat by the side of his granddaughter and patted her hands. “Don’t worry, honey. I’m sure you’ll know what to do. You always do—oh, listen, Joaquin and Luis are singing your favorite song when you were little. Paloma Querida.”

    Without letting Julia time to answer, Don Pedro led her into the courtyard right by the outdoor cellar. He took his granddaughter’s hands in a waltz like manner and they both swirled in the courtyard to the sound of one of the most romantic Mexican folk songs while workers from the outbuilding sang along and cheered. Julia was laughing and making signs to Ana and Maria who were standing there to go get Henry and Dan to dance. The girls complied and was soon joined by workers with their wives, daughters or girlfriends and the Aragon’s courtyard was instantly transformed into a Spanish open-air dance floor.

    Julia’s mother, Isabelle, came down the large solid oak curved staircase to see what they were all celebrating when she saw movements inside the library room. She entered the library and saw Lester standing in front of the flat screen.

    – “Oh, it’s you Johnnie. Why didn’t you join the celebration outside?” she said.

    Lester took a few seconds to compose himself. “I—I forgot to remove those wine glasses. I was afraid someone would spill them accidentally on those nice machines.”

    – “You’re working too hard. Come on, let’s go see what’s happening out there.”

    Lester nodded, put away the wine glasses on a table by the corner and followed Isabelle out in the courtyard.

    Outside, they stood under the veranda watching couples swirling to the tunes of romantic Mexican songs under the beautiful Napa Valley night.

    – “Isabelle! Isabelle!” Don Pedro was making signs at his daughter-in-law.

    Isabelle went down the veranda steps and took Julia’s place who came back at Lester’s side, still laughing.

    – “Johnnie, why don’t you join the dance?”

    Lester was uneasy. “I—I’d rather watch. I have two left feet.”

    Julia was encouraging the dancers.

    – “It’s good to see that you can relax from your work.”

    She turned to him with a sad look. “No, I’m just honest with myself. I know I will lose the account to our competitor. Whoever I’m tracking did not leave any traces and his methods show him to be far beyond my skills. Who am I kidding? Henry, Dan and myself have never worked on a real case before and on our first case, we met someone with a far superior mind and knowledge.”

    – “I—I overheard some of your conversations while in the room. You don’t think they’re a group of criminals?”

    Julia shook her head. “No, but I might be wrong. It’s just a feeling.”

    – “Why other people believe the attacks are coming from different countries?”

    – “They have to. The IDS devices can track proxies or routers that have been diverted and they didn’t show any signs of—oh, listen to me. I’m talking to you using geek-speak. I’m sorry.”

    – “That’s alright. There’s—there’s something in the number though—”

    – “What?”

    Lester shook his head. “No, Miss Julia. You’re gonna think I’m a complete idiot talking about things I know nothing about.”

    – “No Johnnie, really. What number are you talking about?”

    – “The number 29. I heard you talked about 29 servers. I don’t know how I remember this but I’m pretty sure that I’ve read somewhere that 29 is a prime number. I don’t know what that means but I like the expression. Prime number. It sounds so mysterious.”

    Julia’s expression turned serious suddenly. Prime number. 29 is a prime number! And the hacker’s last break-in was on 3 Cray supercomputer. Another prime number. Is there a significance or is that simply a coincidence?

    – “And you know what Miss Julia? While I was cleaning the tables, I saw the list of those 29 numbers, you know the ones with the figures and dots—”

    – “The IP addresses. The Internet Protocol Address, a numerical label assigned to each machine.”

    – “Oh, is that what they are for? Anyway, I didn’t know what they were so you know, I’m just adding all the numbers from the first one and the sum was 421. Wouldn’t it be awesome if that number was also a prime number?”

    Julia was now almost in trance. She was still staring at Lester but did not see him. Her mind was working too hard and too fast. She simply nodded when Lester said goodnight and walked back to the cabin. She came back to reality only after Lester had rounded the hedges and disappeared into the path. She swung herself around almost immediately. “Henry! Dan! Meet me in the library room! Hurry!”

 

§

    Julia and her team stood staring at the email without a word. The hacker had found them. Not that it surprised her. Someone of his skills.

    – “Jules, the guy’s freaking me out now.” Henry said softly.

    – “What are we doing now?” Dan asked.

    Julia closed the email window. “Henry, pull up your prime number calculator and see if the sum or each IP address from the list is also a prime number.”

    Henry and Dan looked at each other for a moment before it hit them. “My God! 29 servers, 29! 29 is a prime number.”

    Henry sat down at his laptop and with a few keystrokes brought up his prime number calculator. “Dan, give me the first IP on the list.”

    Dan read it to him. “74.125.77.145”

    Henry typed in and said. “Okay, the sum is 421 and 421 is… a prime number! 421 is a prime number, Jules!” then to Dan, “Dan, give me the next address.”

    Dan read off the IP addresses, one after another and their sums were all prime numbers.

    Dan was hugging Julia from her back. “Jules, you’re a genius, we are geniuses!”

    – “I’ll be damned.” Henry said.

    Julia leaned closer to the screen. “Come on guys, now let’s try to figure out what all this means and Henry, bring up anything on hackers, prime numbers, Dennis Ritchie and Brian Kernighan with a copy of their book. With luck, we might be able to figure out why he signed his messages with hello world.”

10

    The next day, at 1 New Orchard Road Armonk, New York, IBM Corporate Headquarters, the mood in the vast conference room was sullen. All the regional and national directors were there looking at their colleagues from other states and other countries on the multitude of video screens around the walls. Adam Watson appeared in the central and largest screen in the room.

    – “I hope someone has some good news for me.” Watson said.

    Andrew Keller on the right screen spoke. “Adam, he was inside two of our servers last night but did not do any damages.”

    – “How did he get in?”

    – “We—umh—we don’t know yet. Our security experts are working on it right now.”

    – “Were we able to track him down?”

    – “Unfortunately, no.”

    – “Why not?”

    A silence fell into the room as Keller looked for words. “It’s—it’s something I—we haven’t figured it out yet…”

    – “What do you mean, Andrew? Could you elaborate for all of us here?” boomed Watson’s voice through the sound system..

    – “We tracked him back but the results were—umh—inconclusive.”

    Watson seemed to have lost his patience. “Andrew, just tell us whatever it is.”

    – “The results of the trace show that the attacker was in—uh—different countries at the time of the intrusion, Adam. Somehow, he knew how to fool all our tracking devices.”

    Watson did not lose his composure. “Anyone in the room want to comment on that?”

    When nobody spoke, Watson added. “Anyone in the room have any ideas of who that might be?”

    Same silence.

    – “Anyone in the room have any ideas on how to protect ourself or catch the attacker?”

    One of the men in the room said timidly. “There’s Davis Anderson from Fortress.”

    Watson nodded. “I’ve already thought about that. We might have to use him. Do we have anybody in our midst with the same level of skills as this Anderson?”

    When nobody answered, Watson opened the folder in front of him. “What about you Peter? Do you have any opinions? After all, you’re considered to be the greatest ‘greyhat’ of all times.”

    Peter Curtiss winced. He hated all those damn terms; blackhat, whitehat, greyhat, bluehat. Terms invented by morons to make themselves feel important. A greyhat was supposed to be a nice hacker breaking into your system just to tell you that you have a vulnerability.

    – “Uh no, Adam. I’m like everyone else. I have no idea how he did it. All I can say is he is way, way better than that. Why else would he let the world know that he can hack into those systems? He knows that right now all the security experts are tightening their firewalls and encryption methods. He will invade them again just to prove that he’s the best.”

    Watson frowned. “All right, thank you Peter. But if I were you, I would be careful not to sound so protective and proud of that criminal when you talk about him. I’m curious to know how he breaks the RSA—”

    Watson was interrupted by Keller. “Adam, let’s be serious. I don’t care how good the guy is, I’m telling you right now there’s no algorithm that would allow anyone to break an RSA encryption.”

    Watson cleared his throat.

    – “Gentlemen, for now, let’s not yet say a word to the press. If the break-ins happened again maybe one of those companies like Microsoft or Google or the FBI will catch the attacker first whoever he is. Until then, I want all of our Research & Development teams to focus on the security of our servers.”

     Watson then looked straight at one man in the back row.

    – “Leonard. I want your opinion on this. Is there anyone who could stop this hacker?”

    Leonard Scott squirmed in his chair and looked around the room, embarrassed.

    – “Leonard, you can speak freely. We are way past our personal little secrets and I need your expertise in this field.”

    Leonard leaned closer to his microphone. “There— there might be someone—”

    – “I said you can speak freely, Leonard.”

    – “There’s a hacker who has never been caught. He was no doubts one of the greatest hackers ever but unfortunately no one knows his real name, only his handle, ASMC.”

    No one in the room or from the video screens had noticed the grin of satisfaction on Peter Curtiss’ face.

    – “Do you know anything, anything at all that would allow us to find him?”

    – “Unfortunately no. He disappeared from the scene after Operation Silverlight and hasn’t been heard from since.”

    – “Okay Leonard, I want you to call up all your umh… ex-contacts and use all our available resources to see if anyone knows where he is and keep me informed about the progress.”

    – “Wait! How do we know it’s not him who did this?” Keller asked.

    – “We don’t. Let’s find him first. If it’s him then we’ll hand him over to the FBI, if not, we would need him as an ally. Any other comments?” Watson said.

    – “Hmm… just one more thing, Mr. Watson—”

    – “Yes Leonard?”

    – “Mr. Keller is right. ASMC is certainly capable of doing the break-ins. Just in case, I would also like to use our investigators to look for another hacker. Rumour umh—I’d rather say legend, has it that there was a hacker as good as or better than ASMC himself.”

    A spilled glass made everybody turned their heads. Peter Curtiss apologized.

    Watson turned back to Leonard. “Who is he?”

    – “No one knows his name either, only the handle he used when he was active. Electric Dream.”

    – “All right then. Leonard, you’re in charge of finding these two individuals and I need daily progress reports. Gentlemen, this meeting is now over. Good day to you all.

11

    Inside the library room of the Aragon’s vineyard, Julia and Dan had been working round the clock. Julia’s call to USABank about the prime numbers had convinced them to stay with Defbytes but although her team was credited with the discovery, Julia was still not sure of being able to keep the case. Defbytes’ CEO might at any moment hand the case to Jim Hoffner without any explanations. And what will she and her team do at the next attack? The hacker would probably invade government systems, giant software companies servers, Swiss banks supercomputers or Wall Street mainframes. He would not waste his time with USABank. The good news was that her client would be happy, the bad news was that she would never come face-to-face with the hacker. And she wanted it so bad. Julia wanted to fight against the best of the best. She wanted to play a small part in the capture of the hacker who was taunting the world’s best computer security experts.

    She was frustrated for not knowing what to do with the prime numbers. Was it a false lead or did it have a real significance? Another thought was also nagging her. She did not make the discovery. It was Lester who suggested to her the idea with his totally innocuous remark. But was that really such an innocent remark? She remembered his words, ‘You’re gonna think I’m a complete idiot’ but then, what kind of idiot thinks of prime numbers when he hears ‘29’? The only idiot she knew who thought like that was the mathematical genius Ramanujan who on is death bed was told by his friend, the famous mathematician G. H. Hardy, of the cab’s taxi no. 1729 that had brought him that morning when they were out of conversation. When Hardy declared that it was a rather dull number and hoped that it wasn’t a bad omen, Ramanujan replied, “No, Hardy, it is a very interesting number. It is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways.”

    Julia and Dan were interrupted by CNN Live in one of the windows on the flat monitor. The attractive Chinese-American reporter was standing in front of the main entrance to building 17 on the main campus of Microsoft in Redmond.

    – “This just in. Microsoft has hired Fortress Corp. as its security advisor against future break-ins or attacks on its servers. Davis Anderson, the most famous whitehat in the US, will be defending the world’s most powerful software company while being the coordinator between the international joint task force and the private sector. Anderson, as his first move at the head of the Microsoft Security Team, had enlisted the help of whitehats from software and security companies nationwide. He had also made a call to hackers and crackers from around the world to come forward if they have any information about the hacker ‘hello world’ with the promise of a one million dollar reward offered by Microsoft and a total immunity from prosecution guaranteed by the Department of Homeland Security. At the other side of the world, China had joined the task force and is offering the use of Tianhe-1A, the current world’s fastest supercomputer to help capture the hacker. Zao Chen, Tianhe-1A system programmer and himself an ex-hacker, had subsequently been chosen to lead the task force. During his first interview given to China’s national TV, when asked if he was impressed by the hacker’s skills, Chen had simply answered, ‘Let’s wait and see who’s really the best.’ The whole world as well as the whole digital underground world are no doubts following these latest developments very closely. Who is the best hacker in the world? The blackhat ‘hello world’? The whitehat Davis Anderson? Or the greyhat Zao Chen? Reporting from Microsoft Redmont in Seattle, Michelle Liu, CNN.”