The Sand Trap by Dave Marshall

Author:Dave Marshall
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: love after 50, assasin hit man revenge detective series mystery series justice, boomers, golf novel, mexican cartel, spatial relationship

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Part 2 - Chapter 16: Secrets Leak

“What the hell do you mean we’ve been hacked?” Richard yelled at Henry Thorpe, the Agency’s IT Director, so loud that Thorpe actually backed up a few steps. “We’re the spies goddamn it! We're the ones who hack into other peoples computers, not the other way around!!”

“We’re not totally sure what happened, Richard,” Henry tried to be as calm as he could. “We only noticed that there was something odd going on when we were doing a routine back up of today’s activity. As you know we back all our data up and save it to an external offsite drive in the NORAD underground bunker in North Bay. We wipe off our onsite drives so that we start fresh each day. This means that anyone hacking into our system, and this is in the very unlikely circumstance that someone could actually hack into our system, would only have access to the day’s activity and not our stored data.”

“How secure is the North Bay site?” Richard knew the answer, but he had to ask it anyhow.

“The NORAD site is a kilometer underground and only accessible by a single road, a tunnel actually. Someone would first have to get into the server room and know the passwords to access the data. That’s all conceivable but hardly likely.”

“Ok…Ok…” Richard was getting exasperated with the techie. “What happened? How? Is there any damage? Can we fix it?”

There was another question he wanted to ask, but he was not quite ready to panic.

“I have reported on this before Richard. It is all in my annual report you know. We have 30 seconds of weakness in our system when we make the daily data transfer to the underground servers. At that time both our systems here, and those in North Bay, are open and someone with the passwords, the equipment and the skill could do something in that thirty seconds. I proposed a patch for this in last year’s budget but you cut it out. When we were doing yesterday’s transfer we noticed a very small electrical fluctuation during the thirty second transfer. It would be the kind of fluctuation that would occur on your desktop when you typed in your password and the computer recognized it and connected you. It is miniscule and would only be noticed if you happened to be staring right at it. Well yesterday one of our technicians was, simply by chance, staring right at the screen while the transfer was progressing and he noticed the fluctuation. He was hesitant to tell me since it was so small but when he did we reran the digitally recorded transfer and when you knew what to look for it was obvious. Someone signed into our system during the thirty second transfer.”

“But they would have had to have access to our line – to our system – to the passwords. This isn’t possible!”

“Unlikely, but possible.” Henry was now very much in control of the meeting.

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