It had taken Jack all day to get Steffi’s phone set back up. Given how important one’s phone was in a lunar settlement — it was your wallet, your dining commons pass, your gym card, your keychain — being without it was a real pain in the keister. But with evidence that it had been hacked and someone had access to her contacts file, there wasn’t much else to do but reset it to factory settings. Then there was the problem of determining when the intrusion had occurred and finding a backup that predated it.
At least she’d been able to use her desktop computer in her office to call in lunch. The deliverybot had dropped it just outside her door, so having her phone down for the count didn’t mean having to go hungry. But it still left her more than a little shaken. If she, the head of IT, could have something as vital as her phone hacked, what did it say about security on everyone else’s devices?
Maybe she ought to look into the situation. Make some time to talk to Betty Margrave about a settlement-wide security assessment.
Now that Jack finally had her phone up and running, Steffi had to make final tweaks on all those things that never quite restored from a cloud backup.
As they were talking, she noticed a computer sitting on the counter. Not one of the big tower workstations the scientists used for number crunching when they didn’t need the real heavy iron down here. Just a little desktop box you might find in an administrative office.
“Where did that one come from?”
Jack looked it over. “Lou Corlin brought it down from the radio station offices. Said it picked up some particularly nasty malware from an e-mail, and he didn’t think he was up to cleaning it out.”
It took Steffi a moment to place the name, but as soon as she did, she remembered the dark-haired young man at the counter when she had brought the phone for Jack to look at. The kid was getting old enough that the distinctive thick eyebrows of a Chaffee were really getting noticeable.
The Admiral had already gone completely gray by the time Steffi met him, but she’d seen plenty of pictures of his younger days. And she’d hung out with Toni enough to be acquainted with Cather, even if he spent a lot more of his time with his buddies in EMS than with the JPL people.
Come to think of it, Lou’s expression had brightened noticeably when she’d mentioned Toni. Like he’d suddenly realized something important.
Maybe she’d better check in with Toni. Not necessarily mention Lou or anything, but just see what might be going on.