Cracking The Nut: Part 3

This is Part 5 of my "The Nut" series. This is the last piece of mine to be written exclusively for Glipho.

After all the guards ran away, I climbed down off the server rack and started walking through a dark hallway.
In the hallway, I find a guard watching a door. A quick zap with my taser knocks him out... and his radio starts beeping.

Dispatch: "Everything OK down there?"

Me: "I think the microwave set off the radio." (talking away from the radio) "Vlad... Your popcorn is freaking out dispatch." (talking into the radio) "We're fine down here dispatch, don't send backup."

Dispatch: "Yeah, but what's going on down there? All these alarms going off and we have problems with two server rooms."

Me: "I think it's sun spots... that's my only accounting."

Dispatch: "Yep, just a minute."
(After a minute)
"Sorry about grilling you like that, you know protocol... just don't let it happen again."

After that interesting conversation, I find that the guard I tased has a keycard. No telling what this opens, but I'd better take it.

I open the door he was guarding to find a wall of circuit breakers. This must be the main power room.

I've already wreaked some havoc on the base by sabotaging two sever rooms... but a power outage will cause considerable meltdown. I remind myself to come back here before I leave to throw the whole place into chaos.

I move past the power room to find the head dispatch office. The person manning the office seems to be gone.

I decide to disable the camera views so I won't have to worry about bumping into cameras anymore. I'm just about to leave when the person manning the dispatch station comes back and draws his firearm on me.

Dispatch: "What are you doing here?"

Me: "Whoa, whoa! Relax... I'm here because head office wanted me to do a pen-test on your system."

Dispatch: "I would have been notified."

Me: "You didn't get the memo last week? Well someone messed up. Either way, you passed the test."

Dispatch: "Alright, that's great. Now get out of dispatch command."

Me: "OK. Also the cameras are down for maintenance. Some idiot tripped the breaker on them and now everything is just showing a loop."

After leaving dispatch, I find a room containing nothing but a lot of cubicles and phones... It's anyone's guess what is actually done here.

I find a door that has a keycard lock on it, and try to open it with my keycard.
The door opens and I walk inside.

This room has all the markings of a panic room. This might be used for executives in case something goes wrong.

I then move to a room containing hard drives, and an industrial shredder. They must destroy electronics in here to make things harder for court cases or something. Might be good to come back here.

I walk into a room that appears to be a guard station... But all the guards are asleep. One of them is holding a flash drive, which I slip out of his hand.

I check the contents of the flash drive to find names of high ranking government officials. It looks like these guys are on the malware purveyor payroll.

This is a major find and is worth the operation just for this. Mr.Bill will be pleased.

After this flash drive, I have run out of space in my burlap sack.
I find a phone in a nearby room and call my escape ride.

The ride will take a few hours to get here, so I have time to go back and do a few things.
My first stop is the server room with the propane tank that I blew up.

Boss: "Whose idea was it to put a propane tank in a server room. I want that person fired for having such a stupid idea."

Guard 1: "Um... sir... that was your idea."

Boss: "...On second thought, it was a great idea."

Now I move to the room that had all the flash drives and find that someone has taken the flash drives and put hard drives in their place.
After looking at the contents of the hard drives, I find them exactly the same as the flash drives from before.

I decide to throw a grenade at the pile of hard drives. Sure, the noise would likely alert someone, but at this point it almost does not matter. Besides, odds are that a lot of people think that there is someone here by now.

I run to a safe distance and watch the explosion.
The resulting fire will burn any hard drives left.

I then make my way to the server room whose A/C system I sabotaged.

Boss: "What's the report? What caused this?"

Guard: "Um... a paperclip, sir."

Boss: "A paperclip... Who would... You know what? All this stuff going wrong in one day can only mean one thing."

Guard: "What's that, boss?"

 Boss: "There's an unfriendly here. Put out a call to the entire base, tell them to be on the lookout for anyone suspicious... We have an intruder in our main base."

Guard: "Really... How did he get in... In through the window?"
The way he said "in through the" sounded like intruder.

Cracking The Nut: Part 2

This is Part 4 of my "The Nut" series.

I awake in my safe spot to the sun beating down on me. It's a beautiful sight indeed. But I have no time for beauty... Time to get on with Operation Nutcracker.

I emerge from my safe spot, half expecting to be surrounded by guards... No one has caught me, time to move on.

I make my way to a room housing servers. A quick look at file manifests shows that there is no malware on the servers. But if I can disable them, it might draw guards over and therefore will lessen my chances of being found.

I sabotage the A/C system in the server room. How ironic, a $100,000 A/C array rendered useless by a 10 cent paperclip.

A guard walks by the same computer I used to check the manifest. I am able to subdue him with my taser.
His radio starts beeping... time to act like a Russian again.

Me: "Dispatch, I am reporting a Code Number 2. Vlad destroyed the bathroom...again."

Dispatch: "Sure, please hold on."
(About a minute later)

Dispatch: "Alright, we're sending a cleanup crew down there, just hang in there."

I walk outside the server room and find a room containing lots of flash drives. Putting one into a nearby
computer shows that it contains malware.

Score!

I bag up as many flash drives as I can and move on. Hopefully I can come back to destroy the rest later.
After about 15 minutes of avoiding cameras, I find a room where several guards are watching TV. This must be the break room.

Dispatch: "All guards report to server room #3 now. The temperature alarm went off."
All the guards stand up and move past me on their way to the server room. It's like they didn't even see me.
One of the guard's radios drops, and of course it starts beeping.

Dispatch: "Hey, everyone to server room #3, we've got a situation here."

Me: "Keep the comm line clear dispatch! I'm on my way there now."

Well, now that the guard situation is taken care of, I can move on.
I find a room that has nothing but one desk in it. And on that desk is something that looks like a high-end laptop.

I sit down and open the laptop. Open on the screen is a text file containing what appears to be a list of locations that malware is stated to go out to.

I make a copy of it, and make space in my bag for the hard drive. Who knows what else is on this thing? Blueprints, records, maybe even the password for Area 51.

After walking for a few minutes, I come upon another server room.
A computer monitoring temperatures of the server and the room itself shows that the hard drive also contains backups of what I recognize to be some very nasty malware. I've used my only paperclip, so I will have to improvise.

I see guards coming into the room and hide behind a white container.

Guard 1: "Spread out. We need to make sure nothing else happens to the servers."

Guard 2: "Someone opened the tower case over here by the computers."

Guard 1: "Probably just one of the guys. Leave it alone."

Well, it seems like I am in quite the pickle. I sneak my way past the white container and climb up one of the server racks.
I see that the white container I was hiding behind was a large propane tank.

Whose bright idea was it to put an industrial sized propane tank in the same room as a bunch of servers?

Well I'm about to use it to my advantage.

I throw a grenade at the tank and wait for the explosion.

The grenade itself explodes and causes a small fire on the propane tank.

The small explosion causes some of the guards to check it out.

They see the fire for about two seconds before the big explosion knocks them back.

After the explosion, a large fire is raging in the room and only one guard gets up.

Guard 5: "Dispatch! We have a large fire in server room 7, send help. We have men down out here."
The guard regroups with the surviving guards in the room and they all run away.

Cracking The Nut: Part 1

This is Part 3 of my "The Nut" series.

It's a nice night for a stealth operation.

After months of planning and intelligence gathering, my hit on a Russian mega-base for malware purveyors is a go.

This base is codenamed "The Nut" due it us malware fighters being unable to crack the base... Until today's operation... I hope.

I am in a burlap sack in the cargo hold of an unmarked airplane nearing The Nut. The official story is that we are a plane being piloted by a novice (read: incompetent) pilot. We need to land in the perimeter of The Nut to get our bearings and make our way home to Moscow.

The malware purveyors, rather than blowing us out of the sky, buy the story and clear us to land.
It is when we land that Mr.Bill starts talking through my earpiece.

Mr.Bill: "OK, they bought that story, the op is a GO.
Priority 1: Remain undetected for the entire operation.
An inside man guarding one of the gates is asleep on the job. Hopefully you will be able to make it inside The Nut without setting off an alarm.
Your mission is to find as much malware in the base as you can. Bring back as much as you can carry, and destroy the rest.
If you are discovered throughout this operation, we will disavow knowledge of this operation and you will be branded as a rogue operative."

Me: "Thanks for the vote of confidence. Over and out."

After the flight crew gets their bearings, they "accidentally" open the cargo hold for a second and drop the burlap sack I am in.

I open the sack from my side and start towards the unguarded entrance to The Nut when I see our inside man asleep. The radio he is carrying starts beeping and a voice is heard.

Dispatch: "What, are you drinking on the job again?"

In my best impression of a Russian accent, I answer the radio.

Me: "Heard unauthorized helicopter. Checked schedule, helicopter is authorized."

Dispatch: "Alright, talk to you later. Just don't do that again."

I move past the gates of The Nut, knowing that this is the point of no return.

I get out my weapons, my trusty Taser, and a silenced pistol.

Normally I would not resort to killing malware purveyors... But these guys murdered my friends and just kept on like nothing happened. They then had the idea to send us the bodies back. I know they will kill me without a second thought... So it is me or them.

Also in my inventory tonight are a few frag grenades, strictly used on an as needed basis to cause distractions.

After walking for a while, I stop short of a camera.
I am able to shoot it and disable it.

A guard nearby hears dispatch reporting that a camera is down and makes his way over to check it out.
The guard sees me.

Guard: "Dispatch, we have a-"

He is silenced with one shot to the head from my pistol.

Dispatch: "Heard something down there. What's going on?"

Me: "Might want to get someone down here to check out the cam. It looks fine to me."

Dispatch: "But there was an alarm from your radio. Is something going on down there?"

Me: "I think the power station nearby is interfering with the radio. Nothing is going on down here... In fact, we need less guards.

Dispatch: "O...K... Sure. I'll dispatch a camera crew to take a look."

Me: "Have a nice night dispatch."

Dispatch: "Yep, you too."

It hits me that I have just killed someone. I do my best to hide the body from any guards that might come by.

"He had it coming, they all have it coming." I say to myself... not believing my own words.

I find a safe spot to hide for the night, hopefully I can get a little sleep before tomorrow when the operation goes into full swing.

Continued in the next Part.

Getting Intel on the Base

This is Part 2 of the "The Nut" series originally published on Glipho.

If I am to wreak havoc on the largest base used by malware purveyors, the first step is to gather intel, like weaknesses in the base that I can exploit. After making a few inquaries with my fellow malware fighters, I find that if I want any answers, I need to go to the head malware fighter.

This person, Mr.Bill is a malware fighting legend and has been fighting malware the longest in our band of malware fighters.

So I make my way to Mr.Bill and tell him about what I found.

Mr.Bill: "Not many malware fighters know about this base."

Me: "So how do we destroy it?"

Mr.Bill: "Short answer, we don't. We sent a team there a long time ago, and security has only increased since then. It embarrassed us when they came back."

Me: "The team came back before completing the mission?"

Mr.Bill: "Yes...In body bags."

Me: "Oh."

Mr.Bill: "They were able to gather some good intel before they...came back. The base is under heavy guard from all sides. And the anti-air defenses were top notch. We all knew that there was no way to get in without major losses. After two tries, the team pushed through and entered the base, which they had half-jokingly named 'The Nut'"

Me: "The Nut?"

Mr.Bill: "Owing to the difficultly of getting through, someone made the obvious statement that it was a tough nut to crack. The name stuck and became our unofficial codename for the base."

Me: "It there any way we could get through today?"

Mr.Bill: "Not likely. We could try a stealth operation, but there are way too many guards to hope that the operation stays stealth. And an air attack is out of the question. Once our jets pierced the perimeter, the air defenses made short work of them."

Me: "So I want to go in somewhere where several of our own have died, take whatever malware I can, and generally cause havoc on the base?"

Mr.Bill: "I can't authorize such an operation. We would lose too many men."

Me: "What if just one went through? Could the operation stay stealthy then?"

Mr.Bill: "At this point, that could be possible if the one person was able to get through without sounding alarms... Wait, you're not thinking of..."

Me: "That's exactly what I'm thinking."

Basest Base

So I'm going to publish the whole Basest Base/The Nut series here from the first blog post so no one new misses out on what I think is a good story.

This was originally published on Glipho on July 20th.

I never thought that it would come to this.

I had finally uncovered the secret location of a base of operations used by malware purveyors.

This base was their largest base, and all malware coming from different countries came through the base to be sorted out to wherever it was slated to go. The base's location is somewhere in Russia.

If I hit this base directly, it will deal a major blow to the malware empire.

I do have to be careful, considering as the base is likely to be under heavy guard.

And thanks to all the noise I have been making, I will be recognized if I am seen.

They will most likely have the elites guarding the malware. The type of people to shoot first and ask questions never.

Preparations will have to be made, and I will have to call in some big favors.

Here we are.

This is just a quick post to put something here. If you're reading this, odds are you came from my glipho handle.

There's not really anything here right now, and things seem a bit bare, I know. But as I mentioned in the gliph, I'm planning on importing all my gliphs over here once I'm done with the current series... or at least until the parts I have written are done and published.

If you are here now, welcome. You are one of the first few. Make yourself at home and things will be picking up shortly. Do expect changes to the layout at some point, because I kind of made this blog in a hurry.

Anyways, here we go again.