Report #3316

By Bruce Ecole, ©1999


DATE: 02 June 1999
AGENTS: [redacted]
SUMMARY: A chilling warning of an assault on the electronic systems used by Delta Green.
CASE STATUS: Open


!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ATTENTION !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
By reading the rest of this message you are
exposing yourself and all immediate members
of your cell to possible incrimination and/or
exposure by parties unknown. Recommend
that you pursue dissemination and purge
protocols of the highest order available to you
and the other members of your cell.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Clea%& $or Tran#$ssio$#\\ D# EYE^ ON*&!

This $#$#age is $ Pri#rity Comm#@!cati*& T# All Del$# Gre%& Per#onn^l

Orig#na^ion: Cel# &^@

Desti@atio*: Al* Ope&ativ*s

—————- Bre@k Tr$ans^issio# —————-

I apologize for the excessive amount of noise in the first part of this transmission, I have had to piece this message together across several attempts and then recompile the message using antiviral software, but it may prove pointless in the end. Who I am is not important, nor is where I am currently located. What you must know, and what I only learned a brief time ago, at some cost, is that there is a new threat to our efforts being instigated by an unknowing third party. I am sure we are all in agreement as to the value of the Internet in communicating unclassified information between operatives, as well as sending ciphered instructions to persons who do not have or can not carry expensive SATCOM equipment. But this avenue of communication is no longer safe. Recently, the Local Area Network that our cell operated came under heavy viral attack by an outside source using several firewall-defeating programs. This would not have been unusual save for the occurrence of two things: 1) The network is strictly an unpublished and “buffered” domain, meaning that we have programmed it to work off of an architecture where the only access to our computers’ IP addressing scheme is by first hitting our “mother network”, a baby food bottling company of no repute, and 2) the viral attacks broke our fire wall WITHIN A MATTER OF SECONDS. The computer equipment in our “office” experienced severe damage. Our cell’s computer expert, suspecting foul play, pulled all of our hard drives and took them off-site to attempt data recovery. The rest of us removed the damaged equipment and began work on salvaging what we could from the remains, also off-site. We returned to the office after a few hours to find that it had been ransacked. Drawing weapons, both of us proceeded in to determine if a threat still existed, no one was present, but we did discover that several “bugs” had been placed (our detection gear is current issue, but we are concerned that we did not detect every device). We left the office and proceeded to where our computer expert had begun the data recovery. What he told us was not encouraging.

The hard drives had come under attack by a heavily coded macro virus that was able to perform several million simultaneous calculations that broke our fire wall’s code, and after it had gotten through, it apparently began extracting information off of our hard drives left and right, pulling several documents of a sensitive nature. We cannot ascertain whether or not the documents were in turn decoded themselves (we have home written most of our encoding, to disallow any known workarounds for the encryption on the market), but I can say that several of the documents dealt with our reports and case histories, as well as a list of friendlies in our area of operations. Apparently, after the hard drives had been “swept” by this information retrieving virus, an additional program then told our hard drives to perform a calculation that was “impossible” to sustain (our computer expert believes this was something in the neighborhood of calculating “pi” to the hundred-billionths place, but it doesn’t matter). We were dumbfounded, to say the least. We figured that a super computer or maybe a vast private company had targeted us, possibly affiliated with Majestic. We were, in retrospect, looking for the simple answer, but that was not to be. Our computer expert, after explaining that we HAD NOT BEEN ATTACKED FROM ONE SOURCE BUT FROM THOUSANDS, proceeded to inform us of his best guess.

Some time ago, according to what he was able to tell us, a project was initiated by the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI, that would, in theory, allow the millions of computer users across the globe to assist them in the analysis and interpretation of radio signals processed by their arrays. This would work by each user downloading a small program, that would then communicate with SETI at random periods and calculate data as time permitted (basically, a screen saver would kick in while the user’s PC crunched the algorithms, ceasing once the user moved the mouse, deactivated the screen saver, etcetera). On a hunch, our computer expert downloaded this program and began looking at the coding, line by line. Until he had downloaded his thirteenth copy of the program did it occur to him to string them together and THEN execute the resultant code. The results were as he expected.

BE ADVISED. THE SETI@HOME PROGRAM IS NOT WHAT IT APPEARS. OUR ENTIRE CELL WAS EXPOSED BY A VIRUS THAT WE COULD NOT ENVISION, MUCH LESS DEFEND AGAINST. EVERYDAY, HUNDREDS MORE PEOPLE ARE CONTRIBUTING TO THE DESTABILIZATION OF VIRTUALLY ANY INTERNET-CAPABLE COMPUTER OR NETWORK IN THE WORLD! DO NOT DOWNLOAD THE SOFTWARE, DO NOT STORE SENSITIVE INFORMATION ON YOUR COMPUTERS, PDA’S OR LAPTOPS! NO FIRE WALL OR ENCRYPTION MAY BE RELIABLE AGAINST THE COMBINED ALGORITHMS BEING RUN ON MILLIONS OF PC’S AS WE SPEAK; YOUR NEIGHBOR, YOUR COWORKER, EVEN SOMEONE IN YOUR CELL MAY BE UNKOWINGLY HELPING TO BREACH YOUR SECURITY AT THIS VERY MOMENT.

Of the friendlies in my area, all but one is dead. I am going to contact the last friendly personally, and begin “cleaning” the area. Of my two cell mates, I know little. My last contact with them was about four days ago, and they are now two days overdue for our last rendezvous. In the event that I will not make it, I have sent this message to anyone that I can think of, in the hopes that others will not succumb to this fate.

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