Filed Under: Avogadro, FAIL, WTF.
As reported by many readers, all Avogadro sites went down as of 6am Saturday morning. After a complete outage for 8 hours and 15 minutes, the main Avogadro sites came back up, including Search, AvoMail, Avogadro Maps, and AvoOS phones data connectivity. Response time is slow. However, as many readers pointed out, the site is back up with last year’s features, look and feel, and data. There has been no comment from Avogadro, and no word on whether user data, such as recent emails, will be recovered. WTF Avogadro?
Clustered around a handful of computers running clean hard drive images, and communicating only over encrypted channels, the remnants of the Emergency Team huddled nervously in Sean’s office. Most of the team had dispersed to various sites for the actual action. Some, like David, went because they spoke a language. Others, like Pete, went because he could rewire a backup power supply. Nervous anticipation kept the small group talking, but in near whispers to avoid distracting the handful of people operating the computers.
Mike, self appointed coffee czar, wheeled a repurposed kitchen cutting board into Sean’s office and dispensed coffee into paper cups.
It was essential that when they disabled ELOPe by turning off computers, communication equipments, and power supplies, they do so as quickly as possible, simultaneously around the world. The problem was that if ELOPe could detect that it was being attacked, it would logically take some action to defend itself, or propagate to other computers. It would take seconds or less for ELOPe to propagate to other computers or alert copies of itself that it was under attack. If ELOPe was attacked and disabled in one location, but managed to alert copies of itself running on servers elsewhere before they were disable, then it would have even more time to take action. Seconds and minutes were an eternity for a computer which could take thousands of actions each second.
Sean and a few others used encrypted messages to synchronize the activities of the Avogadro employees at all sixty-eight land based Avogadro sites. On confirmation that everyone around the world was ready, Sean announced “Here we go folks” in a loud voice, and hit the virtual equivalent of the red launch button, signaling the teams around the world to commence action. A few bytes sent from Sean’s computer to a public website server had the effect of turning the web page background from white to red. This simple, language neutral signal would coordinate everyone’s activities.
Hundreds of people, using similarly cleaned and encrypted computers or smartphones monitored the purpose-built website, waiting for the color change.
In Boise, Idaho, Pete Wong sat in a rats nest of power cables in the main power supply room of the Boise data center. After arriving, he had made a quick stop at a hardware store and an electronics store, then drove to the data center site. He had spent the last four days routing around backup power systems, ensuring that the sole source of power to the entire site came through the four inch diameter cable next to him. On the other side of the power supply room, emergency battery supply systems and generators sat powered down and disconnected, a single computer mimicking them, so that they appeared alive. Pete had wanted to do something important, to be noticed by Sean Leonov, and now here he was.
Pete tried to ignore the throbbing coming from his right hand, which was wrapped in tape and bandages, the result of smashing his fingers with a sixteen inch wrench two days before, trying to disconnect a massive power conduit. Pete wiped grease from his face again as he anxiously watched the tiny screen of the kid’s toy laptop he had picked up at the electronics store. The toy laptop ran some proprietary operating system that the Emergency Team was fairly sure ELOPe wouldn’t contaminate. Buzz Lightyear incongruously smiled at him from the plastic frame. A long cable ran from the laptop, out a ventilation shaft, where it terminated at the prepaid smartphone he’d bought from a vending machine, still nestled in its packaging to protect it from the snow on the ground.
The website flashed red, and Pete instantly threw his weight on the massive power cutoff switch, repeating a move he had practiced a few dozen times before he connected the switch. With a horrendous, deadening, thump Pete felt the entire site shut down around him. Hundreds of thousands of power supplies stopped humming, CPU, power and ventilation fans whirled down to a halt, and hard drives clicked and clattered until suddenly everything was silent. Pete was the first to react by nearly a third of a second.
In the Shinagawa ward of Tokyo, Japan, Nanako Takeuchi hunched over to peer into the power supply tunnel. Fifteen floors up, Avogadro occupied the top half of the high rise tower supplied by this power conduit. Yesterday morning, David Ryan had arrived from America with a signed letter from Rebecca Smith, and ripped Nanako out of her carefully created routine. Now David waited in the power backup room. Unable to reroute power supply cables because of the building’s configuration, Nanako and David had to act simultaneously to kill the main power feed and backup systems. Nanako nervously peered again into the power supply tunnel, then sat back again on her haunches. The American spoke terrible Japanese. She hated him for doing this to her life.
Nanako saw the website flash red. She looked at the switch in her hand, and her thoughts flashed to her career at Avogadro. Then to an earlier time: her mother supporting their family when they were young. Her sister working so that Nanako could go to college. She remembered the look on her mom’s face when Nanako had told her about being hired by Avogadro, and her sister’s happiness that finally she could go to school, with Nanako’s support. She watched her thumb move slowly, inexorably towards the button. Seconds had passed since the screen flashed red. The tiny click of the button sounded, and a second later a roar of heated air flew out the end of the power supply tunnel as the explosive charge inside the tunnel disintegrated thousands of power and data cables. Forty-three seconds after Boise went offline, Tokyo was the last land-based data center to shutdown.
Dust filled the maintenance room lit by the dim glow of battery-backed emergency lighting. Ripping the hearing protection from her head, Nanako stumbled for the stairs. David would meet her in the subway, and they would head together for the airport. It would be a long time before she would go to Japan again.
While the attack on the land based data centers and offices could be carried out by Avogadro employees, the floating data centers required more specialized expertise. As the employees carried out the Emergency Team’s plans, private military contractors, the polite name for mercenaries this century, sprang into action at eighteen ocean locations around the world.
At ODC #4, off the coast of California, divers had spent the early morning hours approaching the floating platform, one of the original designs. They swam slowly, conserving their energy, towing heavy explosive packages. The submarine robots ignored them, since their recognition algorithms were programmed to respond only to boats. The deck tank robots ignored the divers in the water, since the deck robots were programmed only to respond to people onboard and boats in the immediate proximity. It had taken a dozen Avogadro employees, armed with paper copies of the specifications of the military-spec robots to find this chink in the robots recognition algorithms.
Drew Battel, ex-Navy Seal, swam to a point forty meters from the barge and rested, neutrally buoyant, thanks to small flotation packs. Pulling small, waterproof binoculars from his waist, he visually identified communications pod number three, his designated target. On his left, a similarly clad mercenary gave him a thumbs up that he had identified his own target, power supply cabinet number one. Drew returned the sign. On his right, the slimmer profile of one of the female members of the team also gave him a thumbs up that she had identified the power backup unit. Relieved that he could focus on his own primary target and wouldn’t have to cover either of his secondary targets, Drew swam closer until he was thirty meters from the platform. He pulled a speargun from his floating pack, and waited for the signal. Four miles distant, the communications lead for the mission monitored the location of each member of the team from their boat. When everyone was in position, he used a secure satellite channel to communicate back to headquarters.
When the red flash came, the communication lead had his shortwave mic in hand, and fingered the trigger. “Go, go, go,” he shouted into the mic.
Drew lifted the speargun, sighted again on the target, and fired. The thick magnetic head thunked onto communications pod number three, and held steady while the spear quivered from the impact.
On the platform, the deck robots evaluated the noises. The sounds were sufficiently out of the ordinary to trigger a higher level evaluation of the surrounding environment. The spears and spear lines caused the visual analysis algorithms to register changes in the environment. But on active scan, even synchronizing scans and dedicating additional processor power, the robots could find no sign of people on deck or boats in the vicinity. The robots took no defensive actions. They individually uploaded alerts of the noises and visual changes to the monitoring server.
Still treading water, Drew again confirmed on his left and right that each team member had hit their primary targets. From the floating pack, he withdrew a crawler, and snapped it onto the spear line. The crawler consisted of waterproof explosives, a detonator, and a cable-crawling mechanism. Synchronizing by short-range radio, Drew and the other six divers surrounding the barge triggered the cable-crawling mechanisms simultaneously.
The crawlers zipped up the spear lines as the divers swam away, taking less than thirty seconds to make their way up the steel cables. When the packages reached the end of the line, they continued up the spear shaft until the explosive package was resting directly against the magnetic heads.
On the boat, the communications lead waited for seven green lights to show on his remote monitor, and then triggered the explosives. With a roar felt through the water by the divers, now fifty meters distant, the communications and power modules they targeted disintegrated, sending metal shrapnel, electronics circuitry, wiring, and burning plastic all over the deck of the barge and surrounding water.
After waiting for a minute, the team swam back to the barge. Drew and his teammates used military grade electromagnetic frequency detectors to ensure all the computer equipment was offline. The EMF detectors showed zero activity. Then they swam back to a safe distance where they gave each other high fives while they waited to be picked up by the boat. Back on the boat later, the team celebrated, clapping each other on the back, passing around cigars that Drew handed out.
If the attack on the floating platform data centers was dramatic, it was nothing compared to attacking the more recent data centers rushed into production on the converted oil tankers. Everything about the tankers made them a technical challenge to shut down. The servers and power equipment were within the hull, protected by inches-thick metal. Unlike the simple barges, the data center containers were not sitting exposed on deck nor were they in known locations. The decks of the ships themselves were almost fifty feet above the water, so it was out of the question for divers treading water to target the deck with weapons as they had with the floating platforms. The location of the deck robots were not known ahead of time, and of course, the ship itself was large enough that it was not practical to blow the entire thing up, nor would it be impossible to quickly locate all the equipment that needed to be disabled. The financial records Gene had discovered showed that ELOPe had apparently hired contractors to make multiple visits to the ships, so the ships could contain any manner of defenses, communication equipment, and power equipment.
It turned out to be nothing less than a small war to disable the ships effectively.
ODC #15 was a 90,000 ton converted crude oil tanker, positioned in the North Sea, fifteen miles off shore from the Netherlands. At 800 feet long, and nearly 150 feet wide, it was representative of most of the ships that Avogadro had acquired. Divers swam up to ODC #15 and planted explosives on the fiberoptic cable connection. Helicopters hovered carefully outside of the maximum activation range of the robotic anti-craft defenses.
The propeller drone of two Aerostars, lightweight cargo planes, approached from two directions at once. Converted for the task as expendable autonomous drones, the two airplanes were remotely piloted from the helicopters. Each was loaded with an Electro Magnetic Pulse, or EMP weapon. The remote pilots sat in the passenger seats of the helicopters, where they had good visibility of the tanker, working their remote controls. Driving the two planes at high speed descents, and at different angles, the twin-engine Aerostars approached the ship quickly.
On the ship, antiaircraft robots picked up the incoming flights, and began to broadcast messages on multiple frequencies, warning them off. But the antiaircraft robots were designed to repel relatively slow speed helicopters intending to land on the ship — not airplanes approaching at terminal speed.
Before the robots finished the first iteration of the warning messages, the pilots triggered the EMP weapons, less than five hundred feet from the ship. The civilian grade onboard electronics of the two Aerostars were fried completely, turning the planes into inert missiles. One crashed harmlessly into the ocean, passing mere feet over the deck of the ship. The other plane, on a similar trajectory, hit a gust of air, and tipped, one wing hitting the ship, and sending the plane cartwheeling across the deck. Hitting a massive exposed pipe once used for loading oil into the tanks, the plane finally crunched to a halt then exploded.
While the EMP bursts didn’t affect the Avogadro computer servers due to the thick metal hull of the oil tanker and the metal shell of the cargo containers inside, the bursts were strong enough for their purpose: to temporarily disrupt the communication equipment and power converters mounted on deck, thus isolating it. While ELOPe might be aware of the attack internally, it would have no way of communicating with the outside world or triggering any external action.
Simultaneously, the three waiting helicopters launched long range missiles, targeting the satellite and microwave communication antennas on the surface of the tanker, as well as any defensive robots they could identify. As the missiles closed in on their targets, the divers triggered explosives on the fiber-optic connection.
As the explosives rained fire and metal shrapnel on the sea around the ship, the divers could hear the ship’s engines start, and the huge twin propellers on the ship slowly started to turn.
The copters approached the ship fast and low, hoping to avoid any remaining defenses. Once over the huge oil tanker, mercenaries rappelled from the helicopters onto the deck. Armed with high powered assault rifles to take out any remaining robots, and explosives to disable power supplies, they began the lengthy task of taking control of the neutered ship.
Ricardo Gonzalez, ex-Marine, was one of those mercenaries. Carrying a HK417 rifle with armor piercing rounds, which he had been assured would kill any of the armed robots, he made his way down the starboard side toward the stern. He struggled with a hatch opening, only to discover that it had been chained shut. Backing up, he took aim at the thick padlock with his rifle, fired three times, and advanced. The padlock was destroyed. Removing the chain, he opened the watertight doorway and continued inside.
The munitions from the initial helicopter assault had penetrated the interior, leaving the narrow walkways smoky. Ricardo tried his thermal goggles, then remembered the armed robots would not show up on thermals if they had been inactive, and switched to light-magnifying night-vision goggles. Cursing the poor visibility, he made his way down. His mission was to descend several levels toward keel, then head forward using a retrofitted service corridor designed for maintaining the data center.
Hard edges and sharp protrusions defined every step of forward progress, with pipes and assorted machinery in every available space. Keeping his rifle up, he watched for movement, as he followed the layout he had memorized. Ricardo came to a corridor junction, and peered both ways through the haze, orienting himself. He was slow to react when yet more unidentifiable machinery suddenly started, moving towards him. Only gradually did he recognize it as one of the robots. Ricardo was hit, once, twice, then a third time as the robot fired. All solid hits in his torso. Ricardo moved with the hits, then swung his rifle back into position, and loosed a burst of three shots at the robot, and then a second burst of three shots again as his aim steadied. The high powered rounds penetrated the defensive robot, shredding the circuit boards inside. The robot ground up against the corridor wall and came to a halt.
Just for good measure, Ricardo put another two bursts into the robot. Then he slumped against the corridor wall. He worked a hand under his Kevlar, and although the hits were painful, he was not bleeding. The military grade body armor had held up against the lesser punch of the robot’s ammunition. He readjusted his vest, wiped his forehead with a gloved hand, then kissed the cross hanging on a chain around his neck for good measure. He stood up straight, and resumed his trip. A few minutes he emerged into the converted oil tank where the data center containers were held.
He thumbed his mic. “Ricardo here.”
“What took you so long?” Sam asked. “The tank is clear. I’ve started on the forward end, you take aft. Time to party.”
“Sorry, took a few hits from a bot on the way here,” Ricardo replied as he looked for the aft-most container. Shots echoed from the forward end.
“You OK?” Sam asked.
“Yeah fine, body armor held up.” Ricardo lined up his sights on the power junction box at the left forward corner of the container. Five shots slammed into the junction box, and sparks shot out. He moved on to the next container.
“Well, this beats the target range.”
Fifteen minutes later, with fire and smoke boiling out of much of the ship, they were satisfied they had neutralized everything on board. The mercenaries re-boarded the helicopters, and took off.
At the temporary base of operations in Sean’s house, the engineers and managers who had planned the operation waited tensely for reports to come in from the people who had carried out the operations. Slowly, by text message, email, or instant message, the reports trickled in. “Houston data center offline at 7:31am,” one of the engineers monitoring the incoming messages would announce.
Sean entered them into the spreadsheet where he was tracking the overall status, while Gene marked off a huge paper map plastered to one wall of the office. “Six sites remaining,” Gene called off.
Finally an engineer called out “Netherlands ODC offline at 7:52am, no fatalities.”
“That’s the last one, folks. All sites are down,” Gene yelled hoarsely.
There was a moment of hushed awe, as the realization sunk in that the plan had worked. They had successfully taken the largest Internet presence in the world offline, the very thing that most of them, in their regular jobs, worked to prevent day and night.
“Avogadro.com is down,” Sean called out, and the room erupted into applause. Clapping each other on the back, exchanging hugs and high fives, or sometimes exchanging somber, quiet handshakes, they congratulated each other.
The expense had been massive. The coordination effort, given all the constraints, a miracle of planning. The accuracy and effectiveness of the planning, all done on paper, was a testament to the intelligence of the men and women involved. The scene of Sean’s house, their temporary base of actions, covered in paper and flip charts and hand-drawn timelines, recalled great accomplishments of the mid-twentieth century, when humans routinely tackled tremendous efforts in nothing but shirtsleeves and paper charts.
Human intelligence, creativity, and planning had prevailed. They won!