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| - Fred told me that he had gotten an email from Dave warning him to expect Brad Emphrone early on Monday. I reminded Fred that Judy had promised to be in by 8:00 on Monday. “The three of you should figure out which shifts you will each have.” We both knew that Judy would probably want to go back on night shift because it meshed with her husband’s work schedule and allowed her to spend days with her son. I handed Fred a draft of a job description for the permanent network administrator. “Let me know if you have any suggested modifications.” Fred read the job description right then and said, “It might be tough getting someone with experience for what they pay us.” I had not told Fred about my impending pay raise. “With this new project getting under way, there seems to be a new flow of cash. This might be the time to suggest that you, Judy and the new hire all get a boost in pay over what we have been getting. You and Judy now have experience, and if they want to hire someone with experience, the company is going to have to pay more.” Fred went to the door, ready to leave. He turned back, with a little grin on his face. “Check the system diagnostics log. I left you a note.” With that enigmatic line, Fred left for home. Rather than do as Fred suggested I continued my usual routine and I checked the webcam image files. There were two more roach sightings. Then I watched the custodian enter the server room the previous night. He went right to the back of the room and was out of sight for ten minutes. Then he came back into view of the camera, pulled the suction hose down from its ceiling mount and began vacuuming all of the equipment racks. Finally he vacuumed the floor then went around setting insect traps in all the corners of the room. I went to the server room and tried to figure out what the custodian had done in the back of the room behind the server racks. I found that he had spackled shut the hole in wall. I picked up one of the insect traps and saw that there were two bugs stuck in its adhesive. I went back to my desk and checked my email. Chloe had sent the new project members a first draft of a report on plans for completing the project. I started going through the report and filling in what I knew about the new software and its incredibly heavy memory and CPU requirements. Chloe had written into the report that we would need new hardware for the project to keep the new software from draining computing resources from other company operations. I was surprised by Chloe’s estimate of how much new hardware would be needed. She was recommending that we roughly double the equipment now in the server room. I started plotted out the growth in computing resources that had been devoted to the new project over the past two days. As I started to review the data, I was astounded by the amount of computing activity being driven by the new software and originating from the IP address of the team in the Czech Republic. Over night there had been a rapid rise in their demand for RAM, disk space, and CPU cycles. I stared in disbelief at the network diagnostics. During the past three months we had gradually increased from an average of 35% resource utilization to nearly 40%. At peak times we approached 75% utilization of available CPU cycles. Fred, Judy and I had tentative plans sketched out for a new hardware upgrade in about six months. But now, with the new Czech software up and running, we were at a constant 95% utilization of CPU cycles. At first I thought there was a bug in the system diagnostics. Normally CPU utilization changed with time as various clients of our network services placed demands on the system. But for the past seven hours, the diagnostics showed a steady 95% CPU utilization. I set up a plot of resource use by the VirileMail software and saw at once what was going on. Computer resources for VirileMail exactly varied with all other resource use, keeping total CPU utilization at 95%. That meant that the team in the Czech Republic was monitoring available resources and matching their demands to what was available. My heart started to pound. There was no way anyone outside of our facility could know what our available computing resources were. We had been hacked! Somehow the Czech team knew what they should not be able to know. I pulled up the network administration log and saw the note from Fred: “System resource use has gone into the red. Chloe says this was approved by Geisler and that we should accelerate plans for purchasing new hardware.” Why had Fred been so subtle about warning me? This was not a trivial matter. I went back to my computer and sent Chloe an email: “There is something strange going on with the VirileMail software. The company site in the Czech Republic has been relentlessly maxing out our computing resources for the past seven hours. Did someone give them administrative access to our network? Fred left me a note saying that Geisler approved this. Is that true?” After sending the email, I set about trying to detect a new admin account on our network. Unless it was some cleverly hidden hack, there was no new admin account that would allow the Czechs access to our system diagnostics and resource utilization reports.
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