Redoublement

‘Clearly I must write down and replace all of North East Control Analytics existing control and communications systems.’ She checks her dwindling operating funds.  She has not lost until both her company and personal budgets run out.  ‘Is there enough funds to both defend and counterstrike?’  This needed more work than she could handle on her own. 

She logs into the independents’ OpenStack Market and looks for available pre-configured deep-learning neural nets, pristine and available for rapid training.  She rents a dynamic decision-net and directs fast-time playbacks of her company’s prior full analytics cloud output to the net.  She also leases subscription feeds from all the other IoT nets that compete with her North East Control Analytics and Jonathan's International Widget.  She sets up a simulator cloud to feed possible action responses to the neural net. She sets it to random walk the error difference to a stable convergence.

She launches an autonomic agent in the IEEE InterCloud market to evaluate and lease new dark fiber routes for North East Control Analytics corporate network.  She sets the control policy it will use to lease new routes and initiate the autonomics for growing a new corporate infrastructure network using her own resource optimization algorithm derived from bio-control models of tree root growth. 

“Alert, incoming subscription notification citing your Siemens’ issue,” Alexia announces.

The Siemens’ team has just published a patch to the zero-day weakness. She leases a VMware SDDC private cloud, engaging all the virtual firewall functions. She clones her gateways into the newly-provisioned virtual center, applies the attached patches, and launches a redirection gateway to receive her IoT cloud assets when they become recovered. Each device must be powered down, remotely reloaded with clean code and rebooted.  As the network must be stable, only a few can be reactivated at a time.

When notification arrives with an alert that the control simulator is winning 70% of the time, she connects it live to the new cloud policy control system. Once the SDDC is complete and tested, the InterCloud agent begins cut over of connections to clean IoT agents.  Her old network is left as a honeypot and she puts all its communication and data feed into a legal data escrow.

Beat

In the meantime she invokes her standby contract with an experienced gaming crew, recruited from last year’s championship gaming team.  She sends the keys to the Simulator-controller to them via an encrypted cloud drop with tasking for counter agent recovery.  As human assets, they will take about 30 minutes to come on line.  She puts in a mobile call: “Jorge, having a bit of trouble here.  We have a cyber-attack occurring on the East Coast Water Authority IoT net I manage.  I need your team to suit up and engage the recapture of all device assets.  Afraid they have been reprogrammed and this will be a device by device assault.  You up for it?”

“Sure am, Rachael.  The group is coming on line now and we are free to act.  Had nothing planned today but an assault of the practice scenario for next month’s South American Black Ops: Cyber War VII championship.  Reality is always better practice and we can route blind through their servers using our tournament logins. I’ll personally clear your office systems while the team logs in.  Anything offensive-wise we can do you?  We need to hone those skills too.”

“Yes, Jorge.  ‘Siri, register a Response to Cyber Attack legal notification.  Sabre Gaming Ltd. is contracted to perform a general harassment of International Widget and its Managing Director, Jonathon Blake, for a period of not more than 3 days.’  Also Jorge, target that asshole’s full marketing and contracts staff. I want them thoroughly distracted.  Leave his IoT device nets alone, but take out the analytics cloud associated with them.  Nothing but misdemeanors and nothing direct on their clients. I want to walk the edge of legal grounds.” 

“Lastly Jorge, as a personal favor, if you can find out just what contract team is managing this operation for them; they did a ‘seek to kill’ operation on me at home. They are clearly ex-judicial, likely in a rogue state. All stops out on that black attack team.  Burn them to the ground!  Bonuses apply.”

“Our pleasure Rachael.  Great doing business.  Well get right to it.” She terminates the call and links in a remote display of their status console above her right shoulder.  She damps down their gaming chatter to just a background drone. For the first time in what seems like forever, she smiles.

Faint

“Siri, compute backup tender offers for managing their IoT nets for all International Widget customers at 20% below market rates.  Payment terms 15% up front and the rest in installments if, and only if, our service is ever invoked.   Set it as contingent on their primary agent not being able to deliver services.” 

Siri responds, “Preparing.” 

Rachael thinks, ‘None of his current customers should rationally refuse this offer.  It costs them little and would act as an incentive for the current supplier meeting its SLA.  And it should add cash to our current reserves.’