Start at the Prologue and First Chapter here

Frank was peering at the BankCoin program on the screen of his air-gapped system. He was impressed that the original commercial release of BankCoin included an easy to understand dashboard able to display all kinds of data. It was pretty slick, too, and that was unusual. Open source software was usually developed by and for techies who didn’t care about such niceties. Even in a big, well-funded project like BankCoin, the suits usually deferred 100% to the T shirts on all technical matters. If a company needed open source software to be user-friendly to make money from it, it would usually have to develop it itself, or wait basically forever before the project team got around to it.

But BankCoin was a sort of hybrid project, with a business steering committee as well as a technical one, and the former was entitled to ask the latter to honor design requests, and to establish development priorities, too. Frank imagined there must have been a lot of grumbling about that among the developer community. It had certainly limited the number of coders participating other than employees of the BankCoin member banks and the IT companies that hoped to sell hardware and software to them. Now that he thought of it, Frank wasn’t sure he’d run into a non-employee developer yet other than Schwert himself.

Be that as it may, he didn’t expect to discover anything of note at the interface level anyway. So where should he start? It’d seemed like such a great idea to set up a testbed system that he’d put off thinking about exactly what he’d use it for until later.  Now that “later” had arrived, what could he do with it? He started drumming his fingers on his desk.

Well, he could try attacking BankCoin. Of course, each of the banks running the software was already undergoing “penetration testing” every six months, as required by the BankCoin participation agreement they’d all signed. That meant hiring a firm to try as hard as it could to get past the firewalls and other cyber-defenses a bank had put in place. If any flaws were found, they had to be fixed immediately and any breaches thoroughly investigated.

But that was a different kind of attack than he was concerned with. Systems – even heavily defended bank systems – were successfully attacked all the time, sometimes not long after they’d successfully passed a penetration test. That was often because all a bank had to make was one little mistake. That’s what the bad guys were waiting for; they had robots pounding away at the banks’ networks all the time, just waiting for their targets to slip up so they could slip inside. Even a few minutes of vulnerability could give them the chance.

So, the real question wasn’t whether a system running BankCoin could be hacked. Any rational cyber security expert would agree that being hacked was a question of “when,” not “if.” The important thing Frank needed to figure out was what could a bad guy do once he had gotten past a bank’s firewalls.

So, what could they do that would be really destructive? Frank leaned back and started tapping his feet, now that his desktop was out of range. Well, since the BankCoin code was open source software, it wouldn’t be hard for an attacker to figure out a way to change a BankCoin system after he got access to it. The question was what kind of change would an attacker make?

That was a tough one. Besides removing the need for a central authority, like a bank or a public deed registry, the beauty of Nakamoto’s vision was that it was impossible to make any changes to any information in an existing blockchain. If they did, it would immediately be obvious that the hacked copy of the blockchain had been tampered with. Why?  Because changing even one block anywhere along the line would change the next block, and so on right up to the present. That block would now fail to match up with the same block on the other copies of the same blockchain, and that would wave a red flag that something was seriously wrong.

So, what could a hacker do to cause havoc? Was there some kind of attack Frank had so far failed to imagine?

He leaned back towards his screen and resumed his finger drumming. What would he do if he was an attacker?

So, that would depend on his goal, wouldn’t it? If he was trying to steal money, he’d go after the wallets, not the blockchain itself, because those would be the easiest targets to crack. That was something to worry about, but you wouldn’t need to hack BankCoin itself to steal something from a wallet.

What else? Well, he could try and redirect someone else’s’ money from their wallet to the hacker’s wallet instead of the wallet of the person who was supposed to get it. But that wouldn’t be a huge problem, because unlike bitcoin, Ethereum and the other alt coins, not just anyone could host a BankCoin wallet. Only participating banks could do that. Once the fraud was discovered, the transaction could simply be reversed. That wouldn’t even require forking the BankCoin blockchain to change the block containing the fraudulent transaction, the way it would with the other altcoins. Instead, the bank holding the hacker’s wallet could just initiate a new transaction to send the money back to the original wallet, or the wallet of the person it was supposed to go to.

Of course, that assumed the hacker hadn’t withdrawn the stolen money yet. If they had, and then used it to buy, say, bitcoin, there would be no money available to be returned.

That seemed promising. But a black hat wouldn’t necessarily have to hack BankCoin to redirect funds. So, following this any further would be just a diversion from his current task. He typed some notes about the scenario so he could come back to it later.

So, what other goals might an attacker have? How about if the bad guy was a state actor rather than a common thief? What kind of BankCoin mischief might a country like Iran or Russia want to cause?

He started tapping away, making a list. It looked like this:

• Cause financial chaos
• Undermine the financial credibility of the target country
• Divert the attention of a government so that some other mischief could be achieved

He stalled out at that point. More finger drumming.

Well, that was enough to start with. Now that he’d identified some goals, what would an attack look like that could achieve one of these goals? Well, the enemy could try and take the BankCoin system down for a while. That would certainly create havoc until it was up and running again.

But wait a minute – if an enemy country found a flaw in BankCoin and exploited it, would it be able to limit the effects to just the targeted country? There was only one BankCoin blockchain, and it was now supporting 90% of all international and US domestic bank transactions. The big investment firms on Wall Street, in London, and elsewhere were now a part of the system, too. For the moment, Frank couldn’t imagine any kind of attack on BankCoin that could be directed against just one part of the whole system. And even it could, it would undermine confidence BankCoin globally.

That would certainly narrow down the list of potential attackers, wouldn’t it? China had never asked to join BankCoin, true. But still, it was far too dependent on global trade to want to throw its foreign customers and suppliers into chaos. It also holds over a trillion dollars’ worth of US bonds in its portfolio. It wouldn’t want to do anything to endanger the value of those assets.

So, who was isolated enough from the global financial system to represent a realistic threat?

Well, North Korea, certainly. But the Hermit Kingdom finally seemed to be more interested in establishing a less confrontational relationship with the west rather than blustering about blowing it up, either physically or virtually.

That only left Iran and Russia to consider, and despite the history of western sanctions against them, both countries were still engaged in enough global trade and finance that taking down BankCoin would harm them as well.

So, where did that leave him?

It left him drumming his fingers and tapping his feet, too. It seemed that every time he looked for a credible scenario for massively assaulting BankCoin he came up dry. Was Schwert really brilliant enough to come up with a foolproof, self-policing system that no state actor would want to damage because its own loss would exceed the gain? It was a bit like a virtual nuclear weapons standoff, if you thought about it – launch an attack and you were doomed to Mutually Assured Financial Destruction.

So maybe state actors weren’t who he needed to worry about after all. Maybe it was just the thieves. If there was a flaw to find, doubtless some shadowy black hat would discover it. Creating an invulnerable network asset was simply against the rules of physics, or something like that. The smartest developer in the world was as likely to achieve cybersecurity perfection as an engineer was to develop a perpetual motion machine that went beyond the kind of magnet-driven gadgets you could find on YouTube.

So, he’d failed again. Enough for one day. He shut down his testbed system and stood up to leave.

*  *  *

“And how are you today, Mr. Adversego?”

“Just fine, Jim. How about you?” At first Frank had been uncomfortable with having an assigned driver in New York. Surely the chauffeur would become chatty sooner or later. Then Frank would never get any work done during the drive. Worse, he’d be trapped into trying to sound intelligent discussing topics he knew nothing about, like sports and reality television.

But his driver was the soul of discretion. Polite, respectful and never assuming Frank wanted to talk. At the same time, Jim was happy to chat with Frank as much as Frank did, and not one word more. It was like having Alexa as a driver. Frank decided he could get used to this chauffeur business, too.

“I’m good, Sir. To the airport?”

“Yes please.”

Frank felt uneasy about no longer looked forward to returning to Washington. His DC apartment seemed small and tawdry now, like the divorced male, Ikea-dominated flat it always had been, but which he’d never been embarrassed by before. After all, virtually no one except Marla and Tim ever saw it. Over the last few weeks, he’d actually bought some new furnishings, something he hadn’t done in years.

His wardrobe embarrassed him, too. So, the fancy new suitcase he was carrying – no longer just a beat-up, old backpack – was transferring some sports shirts, slacks and shoes to Washington. Someone must be monitoring his closet in New York, because anything that disappeared from it was immediately replaced. That was a bit spooky, but convenient nonetheless.

Still, Frank was happy to be returning this time. Marla and Tim were coming over for dinner. His daughter was showing now and seeing her looking healthy and happy would make him happy as well. Not to mention less nervous over how her pregnancy was progressing. He wondered whether she would notice the snappy jacket he was wearing?

The answer the next evening was yes, and his new shirt, shoes, belt and slacks as well.  When he met them at the door, she took him by the shoulders and turned him around, whistling softly as she did.

“Well, will you look at that!” She said, “He can be taught! Scratch that – what am I saying? He can be dressed up.”

“Don’t expect a ‘thanks’ for that,” Frank said, tilting his nose upwards. “I’ll have you know I’ve actually bought a few things myself.”

“Really?” Marla said, marveling. “Like what?”

“Like a new dining room table and chairs. And a few other things, too.” He pulled his phone out of his pocket to show her the pictures. “If you start treating your father with a little more respect I might even ask you over after they’re delivered.”

Clearly, he couldn’t wait to show her. “Okay, point taken,” she said. “I’ll see if I can behave.”

When he handed her the phone, she saw an expensive dining room set, and behind it, an oval mirror on the wall with a gilt frame. The mirror was flanked by a pair of candle sconces, which in turn were accompanied by a pair of pictures of an English hunt club pursuing a fox. Everything was of very high quality and would look thoroughly ridiculous surrounded by everything that hadn’t been replaced.

Her father frowned. “You don’t look impressed. I’ll have you know that furniture cost –”

“Five times’ as much as everything else in your apartment combined,” she said.

Frank frowned more deeply. He’d bought the furniture in New York, and the multiple was closer to ten.

“Well, what’s wrong with that? You’ve always told me I should quit living like someone in a college dorm.”

“Well, I guess,” she said. “That’s a fair point.”

After they said goodnight, Marla turned to Tim. “So, what do you think of my new Dad? The one in the pressed pants and the furniture from the English country house in his eight hundred square foot condo. Do you think he’ll be posing wearing an ascot in front of a fake fireplace when we visit him next?”

“No,” Tim laughed. “I think he’s just getting used to having some money for a change. And he’s right – you have always been been riding him to get some real adult furniture.”

“Okay, okay,” she said, looking out the window of the car. “But I don’t want to see him make a fool of himself, either. Or try to change from who he really is.”

“How so?” Tim asked.

“I don’t know,” Marla said. “It’s just a feeling.”

*  *  *

Author Notes for this Week: Those who have followed these author notes and helpful reader comments for a while will note that we’re finally getting into the territory where Frank is getting closer to finding out what might be going on with BankCoin. With the word count so far at about 40,000 words, though, it’s too early for him to have his Aha! moment. But, like Cyrpto, I may start playing around with him a bit.

Crypto’s part is growing in my mind as well, playing a much bigger part so far and ahead than I had originally intended. In fact, without him, this might need to be a much shorter book, so I’m quite happy to see him creep more deeply onto the scene.

Faithful readers will note that this is a very different approach than the one I took with The Doodlebug War, where Mullah Mohammed Foobar remained a prop throughout the book, and I never made anything of him at all. That was fine, because there was plenty of other action to carry the narrative. There are many ways to build a book, and it’s nice for the author and reader alike for the author to have a lot of options to choose from. Otherwise, things would become to formulaic, and therefore boring.

As to the second theme in this weeks chapter – the materialization of Frank – I still don’t have a lot of creative thoughts about where to take this. That’s largely because I haven’t spent much time focusing on it. How broadly and how far to take it remains to be seen. For a peek where that might be, I’ll share here some of the notes I’ve set down as thoughts have occurred to me. Some, or perhaps none, of these may actually make it into the chapters ahead:

• With his new wardrobe and attractive escort at Bank functions, suddenly women are noticing and paying attention to Frank
• Takes him five minutes to realize a fashionable woman is interested in him. Then he’s really nervous.  Then it becomes frequent. Starts to go to his head. Suddenly he’s a security pundit whose name shows up on gossip pages. 
• Frank is torn between embarrassment and violated privacy and enjoying the respect and attention.
• Back track and rewrite the Lola Logan parts. The sexist Bank president wants to keep tabs on Frank, says, “we’ve got plenty of Lookers. One of them must have a brain and wants to get ahead.” Audrey picks one. She’s the sultry but out of reach tease who tells him hands off but then drives him crazy.
• Starts to get invites and is cultivated but doesn’t realize he’s just part of the furniture. Eventually realizes he’s being laughed at as an IT hick, something like the Elephant Man – a fashionable curiousity rather than someone anyone takes seriously.
• Marla monitors tweets and social media. Realizes her father is being played for a tool. The ultimate is when some twenty-something very minor celebrity, desperate after a last minute cancellation by her date, wears him on her arm on the red carpet at some event and then spends the rest of the night rolling her eyes to her friends whenever he opens his mouth.
• When Frank finds out, he falls big. 

As they say at the end of the NPR show “Wait, Wait – Don’t Tell Me!”, if any of this happens, you’ll hear about it hear next week at the Tales of Adversego blog.

Next week: I’m thinking we’ll check in with Crypto to see how he’s progressing with his demons, but we’ll see.

 

Continue to Chapter 19