Free Zero Day: A Novel by Mark Russinovich, Howard Schmidt

stretching as she did.
    “No problem,” Jeff murmured. “I’ll probably lie down a bit later myself. I’ve still got some juice, though, and will feel better if I can get something definite before taking a real break. Your boss will ask, I’m certain.” He looked over at Sue; she was already asleep.

10
    BROOKLYN, NEW YORK
    MERCY HOSPITAL
    TUESDAY, AUGUST 15
    8:09 A.M.
    Daryl Haugen was given full access to the IT center in the basement of Mercy Hospital, where she found the staff cooperative. They’d taken the deaths of patients personally. Winfield had dropped by several times, but she had nothing to give him. Working not far from a furnace at an unused station, it had taken nearly a day of work to unlock the code she detected in the server. Yet, so far, she’d turned up nothing useful.
    She felt the adrenaline coursing through her despite the long hours. These crackers were so full of themselves, so certain they could fool everything, she went after them with a vengeance. She’d never been able to tolerate such self-satisfaction. She found it interesting that George Carlton, officially the man responsible for stopping this sort of thing, was no less egocentric. For some time she’d thought he was just pitching his department when he crowed about his accomplishments, but she’d come to realize he actually believed he was doing an effective job. Contempt scarcely described her true feelings toward him.
    Something had scrambled the hospital medication program; she just couldn’t identify it. Her staff in Virginia was on this, but thus far they’d come up with nothing useful. The more people of talent and skill she had engaged, the sooner they’d have a solution, so she’d been glad Jeff Aiken was available. He was bright, creative, and hardworking. From her experience she knew he had the knack of thinking outside the box.
    Daryl had located suspect code from a corrupted registry file and was now running it through a string analyzer, a program that dumped any data values in the file that could be represented with a printable character. Many code values translated to printable characters so there was a lot of garbage, but she also saw strings the programmer had in the code that referenced registry settings and files. Programmers often left debugging code that included messages in place that would be revealed in the string output. It took Daryl a few minutes to go over the strings, which largely looked like this:
    rX + %”/
    Lep
    }ccc
    oaaaa_ep
    LRI?9\
    z_____/VK<-
    XRG???
    m988m
    4TTTTTAWK-
    999877766mv.,0A@UTTTU
    hRU
    8877666.,,,&&&1TU
    YRIPPPF
    m\.1,,,,,2TW
    PPPP
    FFEEEDD
    As she scanned the text, Daryl spotted a few strings that vaguely resembled words, but weren’t quite English. One grabbed her attention because it looked as if it contained COM, the domain of most Internet sites:
    ABKCOM
    But it was missing a separating dot between ABK and COM that would show up if the string were actually a universal resource locator, or URL, such as ABK.COM. Had the programmer left out the period for some reason? Perhaps it was a mistake or an attempt to hide that it was a URL. Trying to find clues and vaguely feeling as if there was more to the snippet, she continued examining it, letting her mind take her where it would.
    Intuition struck. Picking up her pen, she wrote the letters backward in her notebook:
    MOCKBA
    Of course! That was “Moscow,” written in Cyrillic.
    Moscow! Why would that be a string? She searched for other clues in the text around it but found nothing. And why would a Russian hacker want to change the medication program in an American hospital?
    She shot out of her chair and began to pace. It made no sense.
    Of course the hacker could have copied code originally written by a Russian. But if it was Russian, the purpose of the virus should have been financial, since that’s what most Russian malware was about.
    Unless this was something else.
    Daryl had been a child prodigy, smart as a whip from