Juniper was taking her morning stroll around the village of Oraibi with Chuka, her three-legged dog. She liked to get out early before the sun climbed too high in the sky and started baking Second Mesa like a loaf of stone brown bread. Many of her neighbors had the same thought. They walked the narrow dirt pathways between the ancient pueblos quietly, never looking her way. Occasionally, one offered a friendly, “Hi, Chuka.” But nothing to Juniper. It was the classic Hopi ghost treatment at which they excelled.
Hardened by years of shunning, Juniper hardly noticed the slight. But this morning was different. After the first three of her neighbors walked by without a word or look, Juniper decided she would try a little reverse psychology. Everyone she passed got a hearty “Hello!” or “Good Morning!” She amped up her volume, another thing Hopi shied away from. Several of the older folk recoiled as her words touched them.
Juniper reached home in high spirits, ready to go on the attack.
Petrov was a world-class scumbag, but as a general rule, he wasn’t stupid or careless. He exercised the proper precautions to maintain security with his electronics. But there were ways to crack into someone’s system even when they tried their best to keep prying eyes away.
In today’s world, we are all interconnected, she mused. That’s one of the great strengths of the internet. But that interconnectedness also makes us all vulnerable.
Combing through Vladimir Petrov’s email account, Juniper created a list of places where he liked to hang out: his resort in Scottsdale, a fancy brothel called Blue Dreams in Las Vegas, and an exclusive health club in Tempe called Pumped. All three fun spots had lax internet security. Their bored employees surfed the internet on their work computers, clicking on videos and websites infected with all sorts of nasty viruses.
The day before the Fourth of July, Juniper had infected the computer systems of these businesses. If Petrov happened to have brought along his laptop and plugged it into their server, his development company’s primary system would be infected. Then, if he used his laptop to contact his own company or the mysterious RPS, their servers would be infected with a ransomware virus that would lock down all the files on the infected computers.
It would be a bit of a waiting game, and Juniper couldn’t be sure that Petrov would log into any of the infected servers with his personal laptop. But it was worth a shot.
Upon returning home from her military tour in Eastern Europe, Juniper had done a little innocuous hacking. She had given herself the hacking name Chuka.
A family crisis forced her to use some of the tricks she had learned fighting against the Russians.
She initiated her first serious hack for her father. It had happened under strange circumstances. Juniper and her father were like two interstellar bodies in close orbit, whose gravitational pulls kept them safely apart.
But during the final year of her father’s last term as Hopi Tribal Chairman, he came home one night and broke into tears. Juniper had never seen him cry.
He told her that the tribe had gotten a bill for $10 million from the Washington law firm representing the Hopi in multiple lawsuits against the Navajos, Peabody Coal Company, and the U.S. Government. There was no way to pay for it. The tribe would have to declare bankruptcy, and the U.S. government would take them over and put them into receivership, like the city of Detroit. He would be publicly disgraced and unable to face his people ever again.
Juniper listened to the sad story. Then she used her pet virus to hack into the server of Mason, Aldrich, and Weinberg, one of the most prestigious of Washington’s K Street law firms. It didn’t take her long to uncover multiple instances of malfeasance—several of a criminal nature—like double and triple billing.
The Hopi weren’t the only client taking it up the shorts by the high-powered D.C. law firm.
She contacted the law firm anonymously with the information taken from their own files, telling them to get in touch with the Hopi with the news that they owed nothing, not a penny. If they complied, immediately, their sins would be forgotten. If they didn’t, she would share the files with the press and law enforcement agencies. The lawyers did as instructed. Juniper’s father was an instant hero.
Neither her father nor anyone else—not even Albert Tuvengwa—knew the truth. That’s the way Juniper liked to roll. It was never about glory. She just wanted to do the right thing. And she expected others to do the same. For those in positions of power and authority, she felt the obligation was even stronger.
In 2017, Juniper graduated to the big leagues. She got her hands on the original iteration of the spy tool EternalBlue, the mother of the now-famous WannaCry, one of the most dangerous viruses on the planet.
As was usually the case, the virus had been created by the National Security Agency. The United States liked to claim the Russians, Chinese, Iranians, and North Koreans were hacker kings, but the truth was that America was where a lot of these insidious bugs originated. Once unleashed on the world, someone like the Chinese or the Russians would get a hold of it, and the real fun began.
EternalBlue was eventually leaked by a group of Russian hackers known as the Shadow Brokers. They took their name from a character in a Mass Effect video game series.
The Shadow Brokers obtained EternalBlue after hacking (or buying off) the Equation Group, a sketchy quasi-private company purportedly working for the National Security Agency’s Tailored Access Operations Unit.
A few months later, they held an anonymous internet auction and sold the virus to the highest bidders.
When EternalBlue was teamed up with a backdoor exploit tool called DoublePulsar, WannaCry was born.
So it went in the wonderful world of hacking. Hackers were always tinkering, trying to exploit some weakness in the Web. Like a designer drug, only with computers.
The virus had been modified to take advantage of a Microsoft vulnerability. As an infection vector, EternalBlue could beat the Microsoft security patches.
A recent version of the virus had infected hundreds of countries and businesses, including sixteen National Health Services offices in the UK; Megafon, the Russian telecommunication giant; and the Spanish telecom company Telefónica. A Russian hacking group got the blame, but that was like blaming the stars for the sun.
The virus had a “hunter” module, which attacked the infected PC’s internal networks. Once it got in, it was all over for not only the computer that was carrying the virus but also anyone who connected to that server. That’s how it spread across the globe, like an electronic version of COVID.
The virus initially attacked a system through a very clever spear phishing move. Phishing worked insidiously. You received an email about an amazing sale on Southwest Airlines tickets from the website CheapoAir. You got these all the time and had bought airline and cruise tickets on that website before. So you trusted the site. You clicked on the message, and it sent you to a website that looked exactly like the real thing but was really an elaborate fake. It directed you to enter your personal information to make your purchase through a secure system. Or it may just have provided a link within the fake site for “Super Deals of the Week!” that was infected with malware.
Who took the time to run their cursor over every message header or web link they received each day before clicking on a link when surfing a favorite and trusted website for the latest scoop or deal?
That’s exactly what the hackers counted on, laziness, familiarity, complacency, and greed.
Juniper logged in to see if the server at the Grand Canyon Esplanade Company had been infected with the WannaCry virus and BINGO! it sure had. Petrov had used his laptop at his favorite whore house.
RPS hadn’t yet been infected. That was okay. At this point, Petrov had no idea his computer was infected, and he would send something to his buddies at RPS sooner or later. When he did, Juniper would be in.
In the meantime, she would be combing through Petrov’s company files. There were bound to be some unsavory items in there.
Once she had control of the Grand Canyon Esplanade Company and the RPS systems, she would download all of their files and go to town.
Normally, the point of ransomware was to blackmail the victim for money, so their files remained secret. This case was not about the money. She wanted access to the company’s files so she could start leaking that information to the press.
The last part of her plan was still a bit sketchy. She didn’t know anyone in the press. And she wasn’t inclined to trust anyone, especially with the illegally obtained information.
But Juniper was certain that there was way more to Petrov’s game than the resort on Navajo land. She intended to find out what it was. After that, she would figure out who to share the stolen goods with.
The only reporter who seemed interested in what was happening with the Navajo and the Grand Canyon Esplanade resort was some guy named Josh David with the Arizona Republic. She knew nothing about the guy, but she would run a background check on him and see what he was all about. Maybe he was the right person to bust the story.But first, she needed a story.