The Technology
That Saved America
From Military Disaster
The following report is taken from recently declassified military intelligence. The shocking details point to a rare opportunity few understand or even know exists…
It was the afternoon of Friday, October 24, 2008.
The NSA’s top network officer, Jack Schaeffer, was briefing President George W. Bush for the last time before the end of his term.
An aide interrupted to hand Schaeffer a note.
The NSA had just picked up a signal from deep inside the military’s top-secret global command and intelligence network. It was a signal that could not be accounted for.
Under any other circumstance, no aide would ever interrupt the president. But this was an emergency situation.
The rogue malware was “beaconing” coded messages back to its foreign creator…
Waiting for a response.
They dubbed it Agent.btz and kept it secret for years.
As we’ve just discovered a young analyst in the NSA’s Advanced Network Operations team (or ANO) was the first to notice the signals.
Working from a drab, windowless room in Ops 1, ANO launched operation “Buckshot Yankee” to find Agent.btz and shut it down.
They didn’t know what it was or who had created it… but…
NATO’s computers were infected…
So was the U.S. military’s secured network worldwide…
It was the military’s most serious cyber security breach to date… sending shockwaves up and down the chain of command.
“If you’re inside, you can change orders. You can do anything.”
An immediate news blackout was imposed for damage control as the ANO team searched for the spy.
Soon, the breadcrumbs led to Russian intelligence.
But how did they get inside an “air-gapped” system physically separated from the Internet?
The answer sent shivers down my spine…
The likely culprit was a thumb drive… one of millions used by soldiers, contractors, officials across the globe.
Someone, somewhere carelessly used his thumb drive at a computer café… and then hapharzardly plugged it into a classified military computer.
Agent.btz began cloning itself like a bee pollinating a field of wild flowers.
But in this case, the wild flowers were rogue cyber agents on millions of military computers…
Waiting for orders to steal sensitive files and transmit them to the enemy’s master computer.
Working against an unknowable deadline, the ANO team reasoned that if Agent.btz was waiting for orders… perhaps they could order it to shut itself down.
The ploy worked, and Agent.btz fell into a “permanent slumber.”
NSA’s top cyber warriors had prevented a security catastrophe of astronomical proportions. Again.
