Chapter

1

SilasFoods’ Board Reticent about Apparent ‘Security’ Glitch’

Grocery World

SilasFoods Rumoured to be Delaying ‘Green Living’ Range Launch

Retail Courier

SilasFoods: Stock Slips after Delay over Global Launch

Investor-News

Jim Baines woke with a start. Something deep in his brain had alerted him to danger; a primal feeling that he was about to fall from a great height or faced an imminent threat from a predator. He blinked helplessly at the milky light that clung to the curtains in his room. His mouth was dry. His heart pounded. His whole body felt bound and he could hardly move.

How did he get here? How had his world changed so much in such a short space of time? It had only been a week since the breach. He wondered if he would ever again wake with the confidence in his own abilities and judgement he’d had for so many years. In spite of unpredictable business cycles and all the hard work to keep his company moving forward over the years, he’d always been able to look at himself in the shaving mirror – its fish-eye perspective enlarging his strong features impressively – and be certain that he would emerge stronger, wiser and more resilient.

But now he wasn’t so sure. And it was all because of some faceless hacker. Some shadowy individual who had violated his world – his very essence – and stolen not only his peace of mind but, maybe, his company, his reputation, everything he’d worked so hard to build over the last 30 years. And through him Hannah Simmons’ world had changed too. And through her perhaps many other innocent victims would soon follow: board members, managers, workers, investors, pensioners…

Jim buried his head in his pillow and groaned. A rush of cortisol pulsed through his chest and seemed to electrify his limbs – not with excitement but with dread. He had to face this. He had to ride out the storm. He had to take control. But how? If the story got out – the true story; his stupid mistake, his careless attitude to cyber security – no one would trust him again. And trust was what counted. No CEO – no business leader – could survive long without that.

Jim knew he had to make a choice: get ahead of the story, or be pulled along behind it. He hoped he could do the former, but he knew that the next few days would be critical. He had to believe that the rumours now surfacing in the trade press, and even some national papers, about a possible breach at SilasFoods would fade.

***

At that same moment, an hour north in Silas, Connecticut, Hannah Simmons resisted the urge to slam her phone down hard. She didn’t care if she smashed the screen. She didn’t care that, for the person on the other end of the call, the line would simply go dead. She knew that just pressing the little red circle would end the call as dramatically. But she wouldn’t feel better. She’d still be angry. She’d still feel completely lost and alone, like a wounded animal pursued by a wolf pack.

For a split-second Hannah imagined the pleasure she’d get from throwing the phone out the window, and the image seemed to calm her. She tapped at the red, end-call circle more forcefully than usual. She sighed deeply and closed her eyes for a few seconds.

Hannah was alone in her bedroom. Her ‘too-big’ bedroom with an en suite bathroom that had ‘His’ and ‘Hers’ sinks. She hated them. Her daughter, Frankie, had urged her to move out of the house, and do it quickly. Hannah’s husband, Arnie, had died of an aggressive cancer that took them all by surprise in the summer of 2005, and Frankie swiftly argued for a clean slate. “Get it all over with in one go, Mom, don’t linger, don’t pretend life will ever be the same again. Just start again. Dad’s gone. This is a new chapter. Go forward.”

The advice was too mature. So un-Frankie; so un-Francesca-like. The new Frankie was reading too many books about stoicism. She’d gone from being a wild teenager to a classical scholar in less than two years. She was a girl of intense passions; one day she wanted to save the world, the next she wanted to paint it red. Then, to Hannah’s surprise, she got into Bryn Mawr College and developed a sudden passion for Ancient Greek philosophers.

Hannah hadn’t taken Frankie’s advice. She’d kept the house, and all its vivid memories. Perhaps that had been a mistake. She wanted to call Frankie and ask her for a renewed supply of stoic wisdom. She needed it now more than ever before. More than when Arnie had fallen ill and withered so dramatically. That, somehow, had seemed natural in a terrible way. But this – this sudden ostracism was worse. Hannah’s career had come to a juddering halt and all because of… what? A cyber-attack? A USB stick with a malware program embedded somewhere inside its digital innards? That didn’t make sense. That didn’t happen to a CFO. A respected CFO. It just didn’t happen to someone who had worked their way up through the corporate ranks to sit on the board of a powerful multinational company like SilasFoods.

People in Silas looked at her in the streets now. They stopped chatting when her car glided into a parking space in front of the drugstore or Grandma’s Pie Shop. If they met her eye they smiled weakly and tried to pretend that their conversations had not veered onto the subject of a prominent resident of Silas who was… in the papers and mentioned on cable news. A woman who’d been compromised by her actions – because she’d been plain careless or, perhaps, even vaguely criminal.

And that’s why Lisa Terry had been on the phone just now. A Boston-based investigative journalist who had apparently decided to make cybercrime her specialist field. When Hannah had first met her – way back at a conference on obesity where the sugar content of SilasFoods’ products had been causing some controversy – Lisa had been a rookie reporter. She was tenacious but fair. Eager to get Hannah’s side of the story, she had written a good piece about the dilemmas facing corporate executives who had to balance the wellbeing of customers with the health of the company’s bottom-line. Hannah’s profile had been boosted by Lisa’s pieces – articles and blogs – and, for a while, they’d traded emails and Christmas cards, and Hannah sometimes gave Lisa commercial scoops to please her hungry editors.

Now Hannah had become the prey. Lisa wanted a deep story on a corporate casualty laid low by cybercrime. She wanted to prove that multinational companies did not have a clue about how to protect their data. She wanted to write about boards full of ‘whales’, clueless about basic resilience to cyber-attacks. Her angle was a powerful one: our financial data is in unsafe hands, and as customers and shareholders, we need to understand that our valuable intellectual property isn’t being protected effectively making it easy pickings for hackers.

Hannah wasn’t just angry because she was being targeted by Lisa but because she feared Lisa was right.

***

Jim Baines walked into his building feeling uneasy. Luis, the security guard, had said his usual, cheerful ‘hello’ but there was something different in his manner. Carol on reception was different too. Jim bounded up the stairs to his office, closed the door – something he hardly ever did – and stood very still, looking down at his desk. The hum of the air-conditioning was louder than usual, and the distant throb of the packaging line seemed to be missing a beat… Was it his imagination?

He threw down his briefcase and slumped into his chair. “I’m being paranoid,” he said out loud. He remembered the promise he’d made to Hannah, three days before, as they stood on the terrace of Olana watching the fall mist creep up the thickly wooded valley.

They’d embraced. For comfort. For stability and, maybe, a glimpse of certainty. And Jim had vowed he wouldn’t just sit back and let some shadowy hacker strip him of everything he’d worked for; the years of risk and courage; hard work and well-earned luck.

He hadn’t come to America from England to fail. He wanted to live his own version of the American Dream. And he’d been doing it comfortably for over twenty years. Was it an illusion? Could it really be ripped apart by some kid in a back bedroom?

No, it wasn’t just some socially challenged kid of popular cliché, ostracized by his classmates and determined to reap his revenge on the world. This was too surgical a breach. First the email about the Hawaii golf-trip, then the download, then the malware slithering through his company’s systems, and finally that USB stick he’d taken to the meeting with Hannah. This was a targeted attack by a highly skilled hacker, whose motives were still unclear.

It was all too neat. Unimaginably simple. Surely, it couldn’t work that way. He nudged the mouse on his desk and his PC came to life, the processor whirring softly. Jim’s stock ticker, frozen on last night’s prices, flickered and all the numbers changed. Jim stared at the figures in anticipation. He looked at his watch; the markets had opened ten minutes ago. Baines Packaging [BPG] appeared and then its price:

The numbers mesmerized him.

Jim’s trance was broken by Crawford Sykes, Baines Packaging’s CIO, who stalked into the office without knocking. “We can’t go out and admit this to anyone,” he said.

Crawford didn’t have to knock, and he didn’t have to be polite. He’d been with Jim since the beginning. His career spanned the Information Age – or so it seemed. His craggy face, ringed with wispy grey hair, was usually a reassuring sight. He never flattered Jim. He always told him the truth. Always put any technical decision into the right context and, usually, made the right choices. But the security breach had undermined his confidence. Crawford had been hurt by this. Personally stung by his failure to prevent it (or even detect it, for that he had Taryn to thank). No matter how often Jim protested that he’d been the one to act carelessly, Crawford still blamed himself.

“We have to be honest. We have to inform our customers about the breach. Be in control of the story,” Jim said. He pushed back from his desk and picked up the small, chrome aeroplane that had been given to him by his grandfather thirty years before. The cold, durable feel of the model reassured him.

“Once it’s out, that story is like a rogue elephant you can’t control. Come on Jim, you know once it’s in the public domain we’re as good as finished. We’ve got to contain the story; we need to go into lock-down,” Crawford said. He began to pace up and down on the rough cord carpet. He was wearing his signature sneakers. His old jeans were frayed at the pockets, and his brown belt with its heavy buckle, looked looser than usual. Crawford was losing weight.

“There’s already speculation, Crawfie; there was something in the Journal about Hannah stepping down as SilasFoods’ CFO and a speculative paragraph about why it might have happened,” Jim said.

Crawford stopped pacing and looked at Jim. His eyes were misty. His lips dry.

“Speculative?” he asked.

“Just speculative. Their PR people are working overtime to keep this whole thing under wraps. Hannah had ‘personal reasons’ for stepping down. But I don’t think that’s going to wash. There’ve been too many stories about cybercrime recently…”

“Come on, Jim, who cares if some regional packaging company in Peekskill, New York got breached? That’s not a story. We have no duty to reveal it. We don’t have consumer records; no one pays us with a credit card! We just have to find out what happened and recover our position. Only tell the people who really need to know, and then only tell them the bare minimum… the legal minimum.” Crawford splayed his bony hands on Jim’s desk and leaned forward. He was breathing hard.

“Your usual incident management policy isn’t going to cut it, Crawfie. We can’t just go through the procedures and pat ourselves on the back. The story won’t be about us but it will be about SilasFoods and it’ll come out that we were the third-party who infected them. Just being a detail in a story like that would be worse for us than if the whole story was about us!” Jim put the model aeroplane down and pulled his chair back up to his desk. Crawford retreated. He started to pace again.

“That’s what Taryn said.” Crawford reached into his pocket and pulled out his battered, virtually antique, phone.

Crawford dialled and said, “Taryn, where are you? What? We need to talk – you, me and Jim. Now. Where? OK.” Crawford took a deep, regretful breath. “Do you know a bar called Ludwig’s Rest?”

“Sure, it’s where Taryn’s band practises.”

“You drive.” Crawford turned and walked out of the office.

***

Ercan thought he was dreaming. The shots sounded like fire crackers. They didn’t sound dangerous enough to be gun-shots. They were too high-pitched. Too aurally flimsy. But then he heard rapid footsteps, men shouting, women screaming, and he knew that something bad was happening outside – on his street in Tottenham, North London.

He slipped out of bed. Leila stirred and then sat up as two more shots rang out. The sound slammed off the cancerous concrete walls of the apartment blocks which lined the narrow street on which Ercan lived. His flat was in one of the terraces of crumbling Victorian three-storey houses opposite the once notorious public housing estate.

“Don’t go to the window!” Leila said.

Ercan stood close to the gap between the two heavy, blood-red curtains Leila had bought impulsively from a thrift shop. Ercan peered out through the small gap and saw two police cars parked awkwardly across the street, and armed officers standing very still. Everything was suddenly very quiet.

“Maybe they found a terrorist cell or something,” Ercan said.

“More likely it’s weed, or coke. Get back from the window will you!” Leila was fully awake now and she wasn’t in a good mood. Police raids weren’t usual in their neighbourhood, but they weren’t unknown. Only a month before a teenager had been stabbed two streets away. And back in 2010 there’d been summer riots and a carpet warehouse on Lordship Lane had been burnt down. Leila’s mother had been distraught about it. She’d bought her first carpet there in the 1960s when she’d come over from St. Lucia. The carpet was still in great condition. It was a symbol of their new life in Britain. At least that’s what Ercan said – as a joke at first, but then to make a serious point. His parents had the same attachment to household goods that they never dreamed of owning back in Turkey.

Ercan knew it would be difficult to leave the borough in which he’d grown up; despite its problems it felt like a living, thriving and very real place. It had real human energy.

“Maybe they’re after you and got the wrong address,” Leila said. She stretched and then sighed. The clock said 5.30am. She knew she’d lost an hour of valuable sleep. “Can’t they do that kind of thing at… like, eleven or something… give people a chance to get to work?”

Ercan laughed. “Yeah, I’ll make a complaint. Do your raids at a respectable time!”

Leila turned over and pulled a pillow over her head and shouted something obscene into the mattress.

Ercan shivered. The heating hadn’t kicked in yet. But he wasn’t cold. Leila’s comment had made him edgy. What if, one day, he was the target of a raid just like this one. He knew the dangers that came with hacking. He was very careful. He covered his tracks expertly. But every crime was in a chain of trust. He had to believe that the people who sent him targets were just as good as he was at hiding deep in the Dark Web.

Wildcat8 for instance. Who was Wildcat8? Ercan had taken time to check that it wasn’t an undercover cop. He’d twisted and turned and Wildcat8 had twisted and turned with him. Then he’d carried out some minor, low-grade functions to test the guy out. Maybe it wasn’t a guy. Ercan didn’t actually care.

Then he’d started getting more complex jobs. The rewards were bigger. The praise was fulsome. Ercan certainly liked cash, but praise was important. He took pride in his work, in how clever he could be. Now a new target had arrived. A big pharmaceutical company. One of the jewels unlocked by his Baines Packaging hack. The one that had led to SilasFoods.

Ercan didn’t care about these companies. They were huge, rich giants who exploited everyone, from customers to whole countries. He wasn’t political, not like Leila’s cousin Andre. That guy was starting to get annoying. Leila had told Andre that Ercan had hacking skills and Andre was trying to get some protest going about housing in Tottenham. He had also started bugging Ercan for help to get a cyber campaign up and running.

Ercan didn’t have time for any of that. He wanted to build a better life for himself – and maybe Leila too – and that took cash. That’s what SilasFoods and all those other companies believed wasn’t it? All that counts is money. So, fine, Ercan agreed. And he was going to hack his way to a big slice of it.