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Michael White, analyst at the NSA, looked at the box of hard drives on the hand truck that had stopped at his desk. With a resigned groan, he signed for the box and started hooking the first drive up to his write blocker. He could do data recovery, it was within his job description but it was at the bottom of his list of favorite ways to spend Friday night.
As the drive started spinning, White paged through the file that came with the box. The analysis was to be done for the FBI as a push for “interdepartmental cooperation.” This was the best digital forensics lab on the East Coast, so at least that part of the file made sense.
What didn’t make sense is how the FBI found these drives in some kind of… sewer tunnel? White opened the drive up on his workstation and was expectedly greeted with gibberish. He typed a command that ran LEAPFROG, one of the NSA’s new in house decryption tools, and turned back to read the file as the computer started churning.
The NYPD was tipped off to power thieves in the city sewers, which coincided with some FBI investigation which wasn’t mentioned. FBI being FBI, they demanded to help with the case, and the city happily invited them to go raid the sewer for them. All the agents found were server racks in a dried out tunnel, a spliced power connection from a grid cable, and some weird dust scattered all over the place. The power thieves themselves were nowhere to be seen. The instructions were to give the drives a look, and report about whom they could have belonged to. The decryption didn’t take long at all. Whoever they were, their encryption was as bad as their choice of a datacenter. Or LEAPFROG was just that good. White clicked the first file in the list.
>MOTD: Welcome, lick. You’ve just discovered SchreckNet v2.0.1, the Kindred internet! Pardon our dust (ha ha) while we fix the last few bugs in the new version. The v2.0.1 client can be downloaded here, and is required to access the newest sections of the net. No, we aren’t making any exceptions or custom clients. Even for you. Yes, YOU, the Kindred reading this. The entire system will be locked out to v1 users at the end of March, so download it and generate your keys while you can.
>Your Smelly Uncle
“What the hell is a Kindred?” thought White to himself as he skimmed through the rest of the hosted website. There were sections for an email client, some kind of experimental dating app plugin, file sharing, even a search engine. It was a weird duplication of the entire internet. On a whim, he clicked on the email section, and started looking at the sent history. A bunch of images caught his eye, and he opened them.
As the drive started spinning, White paged through the file that came with the box. The analysis was to be done for the FBI as a push for “interdepartmental cooperation.” This was the best digital forensics lab on the East Coast, so at least that part of the file made sense.
What didn’t make sense is how the FBI found these drives in some kind of… sewer tunnel? White opened the drive up on his workstation and was expectedly greeted with gibberish. He typed a command that ran LEAPFROG, one of the NSA’s new in house decryption tools, and turned back to read the file as the computer started churning.
The NYPD was tipped off to power thieves in the city sewers, which coincided with some FBI investigation which wasn’t mentioned. FBI being FBI, they demanded to help with the case, and the city happily invited them to go raid the sewer for them. All the agents found were server racks in a dried out tunnel, a spliced power connection from a grid cable, and some weird dust scattered all over the place. The power thieves themselves were nowhere to be seen. The instructions were to give the drives a look, and report about whom they could have belonged to. The decryption didn’t take long at all. Whoever they were, their encryption was as bad as their choice of a datacenter. Or LEAPFROG was just that good. White clicked the first file in the list.
>MOTD: Welcome, lick. You’ve just discovered SchreckNet v2.0.1, the Kindred internet! Pardon our dust (ha ha) while we fix the last few bugs in the new version. The v2.0.1 client can be downloaded here, and is required to access the newest sections of the net. No, we aren’t making any exceptions or custom clients. Even for you. Yes, YOU, the Kindred reading this. The entire system will be locked out to v1 users at the end of March, so download it and generate your keys while you can.
>Your Smelly Uncle
“What the hell is a Kindred?” thought White to himself as he skimmed through the rest of the hosted website. There were sections for an email client, some kind of experimental dating app plugin, file sharing, even a search engine. It was a weird duplication of the entire internet. On a whim, he clicked on the email section, and started looking at the sent history. A bunch of images caught his eye, and he opened them.
