It was really too bad that Lou Corlin had to have the morning airshift. Right now Spruance Del Curtin would’ve really liked to sit him down and talk IT.
Sprue had spent most of the morning in Dr. Doorne’s office, working on yet another dataset that needed sanitizing and verifying before it was analyzed. The further he went on this project, the more patterns he noticed — and the more he wondered just how much that data had to do with current events on Earth.
Why else would she have become so upset when I mentioned the spread of a virgin-field epidemic as an S-curve that initially looks like exponential growth?
It was also making him think of the propagation of certain kinds of malware on a network that lacked adequate defenses. Eventually you simply ran out of computers to infect — but until that happened, the spread would appear explosive.
And then Sprue remembered someone else from the station who worked with computers and networks. Spencer Dawes was working at the robotics shop, and while it was in Engineering, it had its IT aspects. Robots were controlled via WiFi, which meant needing security on those connections to ensure your robots stayed under your control, and didn’t get turned against you in obvious or subtle ways.
Visiting the robotics shop had the added benefit that Harlan Lemont was pretty laid back about discipline, and tended to be just a little overawed by Sheps. As long as Ken Redmond didn’t decide to put in an appearance, Sprue wasn’t likely to get Spence in trouble for slacking.
As it turned out, Spence was doing some pretty routine maintenance, so it wasn’t that hard for Sprue to lend a hand and avoid the issue altogether. “So how familiar are you with network security and malware?”
“Some. I have done some basic setup, especially when we have to replace a bot’s hard drive.” Spence gave him an odd looking over. “What are you looking for?”
“I’ve got a theory about the weird problems we’re having communicating with the outside universe, and especially with Earth.” Sprue considered how to lay it out, given that he wasn’t an IT guy and didn’t have that strong of background in the jargon. “The weirdest thing about this whole thing is how it’s intermittent. Part of the time you can get through, sorta-kinda, especially on low-bandwidth systems like SMS or on store-and-forward systems like e-mail. Other times it locks up completely and you can’t even ping anything outside our own networks.”
“That’s a pretty good description of the situation.” Spencer Dawes retrieved a can of machine oil and applied a few drops to several points on the robot’s joints. “That’s what’s got everybody in IT so sure it’s got to be a new kind of DDOS attack. Instead of continually bombarding our servers with phantom requests, the pwned computers are sending them intermittently, with periods of letup that make it harder to identify the sources and block them.”
Sprue had overheard enough to know how well that was going. “Except everything they do to trace incoming TCP/IP traffic is showing no evidence of unusual patterns of incoming requests. Which suggests there’s something completely different going on, that just looks like a DDOS attack. Suppose someone could create a completely different piece of malware that causes problems that look like a DDOS attack, but is completely local to the affected computers?”
“In theory it might be possible, but I don’t know enough to say. Juss might know, since he’s done some troubleshooting for IT.” Spence cast a significant glance over Sprue’s shoulder, a warning.
Sprue didn’t dare turn to take a look — too obvious. But there was enough metal around here to provide reflective surfaces enough to give him a good idea that Ken Redmond had come in and was talking with Harlan about something. No, Sprue did not want to get crosswise with the big boss right now.
Better wind it up, figure out how he could connect with Juss Forsythe. Although Juss was a clone of Ed White, which meant Sprue didn’t have lineage right to call upon, unlike with Spencer Dawes, who was a clone of Al Shepard’s Lunar Module pilot.