The Beginnings of the Cause @ruff_tr In the summer of 1978, a young man dribbles a basketball off the side of a court where his older brother is playing. You can see the heat rising from the painted concrete court as the bright sun shines. Sweat glistens on the faces of the players and those waiting to play. A light breeze blows in off of the Atlantic ocean that is appreciated by all. The ball moves seamlessly from hand to hand as the young man waits for his chance to get in the game. The young man is obviously smaller than most of the players on the court. No one notices him. Well, almost no one. A man quietly watches from a distance. He’s taking notes, but to the rest of the world it looks like he is just working a crossword puzzle in the daily journal. When the young man gets his chance on the court, everyone could see his fluid motion and selfless dedication to the game. Passing the ball to open teammates when he could have made the shot, being the first back on defense, setting a pick, taking a charge, all traits that are so rare in young players. The watcher smiles as he makes more notes. All of the hours and risks taken to get this small piece of information, and it could really be true. This young man could be the symbol of sports excellence for generations to come. A door opens and the middle aged man telling this story pauses and looks over to see a young lady motioning for him to come to the door. The man says, “Give me a few minutes, I am needed on the floor.” All of the keyboards in the room begin clicking and the group puts their headphones on and return to their assignments. Walking down the hall, the young lady quietly says, “Dr. Daniels, may I ask a question?” “Of course,” he answers. “That was such a long time ago, why do you keep taking time to tell this story?” He chuckles for a moment and pauses in the hallway before he answers. “History, Ms. Marrison. It’s important for everyone in this fight to know where this organization began and where the money came from. We have a small group of individuals battling a much larger, much better funded enemy. Our team needs to be exactly that, a team. A team who knows that what we are fighting for is important and that we have been fighting for a long time.” With that he continues down the hallway to the command center. Walls of monitors show the status of networks, news feeds from around the world, and maps highlighted with dots of every color of the rainbow. Dr. Daniels quickly looks at the dashboard and knows there’s trouble. “Why is the Hazelwood data center offline?” he asks quickly. A young man speaks up from the back, “They picked up on our piggyback traffic and began filtering the packets. We were worried that they might be able to crack the encryption if we kept it running.” Dr. Daniels walks over to the young man’s terminal. “Nice Bonooru”, he says, referring to the scarecrow on his shirt. Over time, the team’s “uniform” became a custom to wear small unnoticed elements from pop culture. That was much in the same way this small team was a part of keeping the masses safe from those who wish to control the digital world. “What do you think about bringing Hazelwood back up via MPLS until we can update the piggyback protocol?” Dr. Daniels asks. The young man looks back over his shoulder to the network specialist behind him and she nods. He answers with a small amount of confidence, “Yes sir. We will make that happen.” “Don’t forget to let Dr. Hearn know we need the piggyback update right away”, Dr. Daniels says as he walks away. The young man logs into bugzilla and sees at the top of the page. “Piggyback is a network hack that allows one to attach data to packets in route in the network. The data gets delivered to the destination without being easily detected.” As Dr. Daniels enters the classroom, the keyboards quickly grow silent and the headphones are hung on the side of the monitors. The group waits anxiously for him to continue where he left off. One young man raises his hand and asks, “Everything ok?” Dr. Daniels replies, “Yes sir. Just had to reroute some network traffic for a day or two. Hazelwood is analyzing some pretty important stuff and we can’t afford for them to be offline for long.” With that, Dr. Daniels returns to his story. This handsome unassuming young man, correctly identified by those in power, was destined for great things. And they had set the wheels in motion to not so subtly remind the world they are still there and still in control. But this time it was going to be different. One person in their organization with a conscience and with the will to stand up for what they believe in had given us this piece of information. It took several months for the information gathered on this day to be passed to another friend of the cause. The friend of the cause would guide this young man to the place where he was destined to be. At the same time, he would, in quiet times and places, show the young man the importance of our cause. For the first time in a very long time, the number 23 would stand for doing things the right way. The young man acquired a great fortune along the way. He has been very generous in helping our cause. As generous as he could be without drawing attention from those in power. The Hazelwood datacenter was built entirely from the money shared by him. With that, Dr. Daniels takes a bottle of water from the podium and takes a sip. He looks over the group and asks, “Did any of you know this already?” He sees a little surprise and disbelief in their faces. One young man with auburn colored hair and blue eyes is shaking his head slowly. He reaches out and touches he DefCon 22 badge hanging on the side of his monitor. “Everything ok T.C.?”, Dr. Daniels asks. The young man looks up and says, “I have seen pictures of my dad when he was a baby, wearing tiny Air Jordan shoes. Did he know?” Dr. Daniels smiles and answers, “No sir. Your grandfather joined our cause late in his life. I barely knew him, but I know he had no idea until he heard this same story. I believe that he, like many, was a fan that wanted to put the best on his children and show his support.” T.C. nods in acceptance. “Anyone else have any questions or comments?” Dr. Daniels asks. The room is quiet for a moment. “Why don’t all of you take a short break? I know you all have to go to work tomorrow.” Everyone in the room quietly gets up and shuffles out of the room. T.C. stops to talk to Dr. Daniels. “Grandpa never really talked about when he joined the cause. It was always about the why and the how. He gave me a collection of cool badges he got from various cons. He talked about first con, Skydog Con and how it opened his eyes to so many things. He laughed about how the lines were so long at his first DefCon. I bring that badge with me every night to help remind me of his dedication.” Dr. Daniels paused for a moment and said, “He didn’t have a lot of time with us, but I have heard he was so motivated. He had kept up with technology even after going into teaching. He would spend hours here with his wife. She helped keep tasks on track and made sure everyone had the things they needed to continue working. She made the best sweet tea. I was lucky enough to have a few glasses just before your grandad’s passing.” T.C. smiles, obviously remembering the taste of that tea. As T.C. walks away, Dr. Daniels grabs his tablet for a quick update on where things stand with the virus project. Everyone does have to go to work tomorrow. In days past, the cause could “hire” members of the cause and pay them a salary just as if they were working for any company. Now government monitoring of all financial transactions has been mandated to “prevent crime and money laundering”. It has become increasingly difficult to setup shell corporations to pay the brightest minds who believe in the cause. The powers that be simply tap into the government systems and find the information they need to find the members of the cause. So many of the cybercrimes and data thefts that plagued the world for more than two decades. All of these were simply tools to manipulate the masses. Convince them that the only way to keep them safe was to monitor all online activity. Convince them that the only way to keep their money safe was for the government to monitor it. Ensure the masses that they would be taken care of by the government and law - ever increasingly complicated law that could be broadly interpreted to mean almost anything. Members of the cause had been prosecuted for simply turning off the location tracking in their mobile phones and their vehicles. “Does the government really need to know I went to the store at 1 am for milk and condoms?” was played over and over again on the news as they proudly announced a “hacker” had been caught. The truth was that the powers had found a member of the cause and abused wide ranging laws passed by their puppets in the congress. Ten years in prison for turning off location tracking, which was once an option in the device settings. Ten years that a member of the cause could not help stop what was happening. Ten years that he/she would not be able spend with their family. The cause has many projects in progress. Piggyback is for hiding encrypted network traffic. Didka is an advanced three layer encryption for protecting data at rest. The virus project was truly the most important of all of the projects taken on by the cause. Much like the “Manhattan Project” of the 1940’s, the nuclear arms race of the 1970’s and 1980’s, the information wars of the early 2000’s, this was a race to the newest weapon. But those were battles between countries that had rules and understandings. This was a battle waged between the powers and the cause. There were no borders, no rules of engagement. With all of the advancements in genetic engineering and biocomputing, this race was to find the final keys to building custom viruses. These were not the viruses of two generations ago - software that “infected” electrical computers. This race was for biological viruses. An entire infectious virus particle, called a virion, consisting of the nucleic acid and an outer shell of protein. These custom viruses could be used to infiltrate or disable biocomputing nodes. Dr. Daniels knew all too well that this technology could also be used to disable or destroy humans one day. Hazelwood was working on algorithms to calculate the formula of the outer protein shell. The protein shell is how the virus attaches to the cell that is being infected. The calculations for the DNA at the core of the virus were being done in the Canton datacenter. The actual building of the virus would be done in a U.S. Government facility under the guise of a flu vaccine. That was still months if not years away. In addition to projects, the everyday work included setting smokescreens and facades. To the outside world, the cause portrayed itself as a group of hacktivists similar to Anonymous two generations ago. The group, now returning to the room, was a part of the hactivism facade. As T.C. enters the room, he places a glass of sweet tea on the table next to Dr. Daniels. “Double sweet with two lemons?”, he smiles as he asks. “Thank you sir”, replies Dr. Daniels. He takes a long slow drink of the tea and smiles. Putting his tablet down on the table, he stands up and returns to where he is in front of the group. “Ladies and gentlemen, it appears that someone has picked up on our network traffic from Hazelwood. We need to distract those now watching for Piggyback data and give them something to find.” The room began to buzz with the sounds of keyboards. The Piggyback traffic from Hazelwood had to be replaced with something else. Using encryption that they knew had long since been broken, the team sent false plans for moving a large sum of money into untraceable accounts in Germany. Germany remained one of only a handful of countries to not require 100% monitored digital transactions. Hopefully this will keep the powers off of the trail of Hazelwood. In all the corners of the world, small teams of determined people work day and night to keep the few freedoms that remain. Privacy, a free internet and unmonitored activity are things of the past, but there is hope for the future. Be calm, and fight for the cause….