yelped with pain.
Vladimir said to Alex, “You have a black belt, I hear. Surely you recognize this stance. A quick shift of my weight and her
neck will snap like a rotten twig. Now, will you
please
get into the cab?”
As they were sure he would, without hesitation or another word, Alex climbed inside. A moment later, Elena was shoved in beside
him and landed awkwardly against his side. The man knew what he was doing; he was using her as a buffer from Alex’s hands,
and he squeezed into the backseat to her right. The woman in the nun’s outfit, obviously anything but one of God’s saintly
servants, slipped into the front passenger seat with her pistol in Alex’s face.
The driver, a trusted cohort and a skilled getaway man, gunned the engine, popped the clutch, and off they sped with a noisy
screech. Nobody said a word. As if on cue, the lady in the front shifted her gun at Elena’s face. The man in priest’s garb
said to Alex, “Hold up your hands, together.”
Alex did as he was told. The man bent across Elena and efficiently slapped thick plastic cuffs on Alex’s wrists, then with
a show of equal dexterity, Elena’s.
After a moment, Alex asked, “What do you want?”
“Be quiet,” came the reply from Vladimir. He withdrew two black hoods and clumsily covered their heads.
In March 1992, two months after the press frenzy over Alex Konevitch began, the initial attacks on his companies were detected.
Somebody was making repeated highly sophisticated attempts to break into Konevitch Associates’ computer networks. Quite successfully,
or so it appeared. The Russian Internet backbone, like everything inherited from communism, was shockingly backward and inefficient.
Alex had therefore hired an American company that specialized in these things and plowed millions into creating his own corporate
network, a closed maze of servers, switches, and privately owned fiber-optic cable that connected his companies. The only
vulnerabilities were in the interfaces between his private network and the Russian phone companies, interfaces that were,
regrettably, unavoidable. Naturally this was precisely where the attacks occurred.
That discovery was made minutes after a new American anti-virus software program was installed, a magical sifter that sorted
gold from fool’s gold. Tens of thousands of spyware programs were detected—like small tracking devices—that had penetrated
and riddled the entire network. The programs were sophisticated little things, impossible to detect with homegrown software.
They not only tracked the flow of Internet traffic, they caused each message to replicate and then forwarded copies to an
outside Internet address.
Private investigators easily tracked the Internet address to a small apartment on the outer ring of Moscow and burgled their
way into the flat. It was completely empty and wiped clean. Nothing, except a small table and dusty computer. The plug was
pulled out. The hard disk had been removed.
What was going on? Alex had anxiously queried his technical specialists. Somebody is mapping your businesses and transactions,
came the answer. For how long? he asked. Maybe weeks, more probably months, and it seemed fair to conclude that whoever launched
this attack now had an avalanche of information regarding how his rapidly expanding empire came together, how one piece interfaced
with the next, how and where the money flowed, even the identities of the key people who pushed the buttons. The computers
in the human resources department, particularly, were riddled with enough spyware to feed a software convention.
The programs were wiped clean, gobs of money were thrown at more protective software—all imported from America, all state
of the art, all breathtakingly expensive—and nothing was heard from the originator of the attack. Corporate extortion or any
of several forms of embezzlement had been anticipated—pay us off, the intercepted
Vladimir said to Alex, “You have a black belt, I hear. Surely you recognize this stance. A quick shift of my weight and her
neck will snap like a rotten twig. Now, will you
please
get into the cab?”
As they were sure he would, without hesitation or another word, Alex climbed inside. A moment later, Elena was shoved in beside
him and landed awkwardly against his side. The man knew what he was doing; he was using her as a buffer from Alex’s hands,
and he squeezed into the backseat to her right. The woman in the nun’s outfit, obviously anything but one of God’s saintly
servants, slipped into the front passenger seat with her pistol in Alex’s face.
The driver, a trusted cohort and a skilled getaway man, gunned the engine, popped the clutch, and off they sped with a noisy
screech. Nobody said a word. As if on cue, the lady in the front shifted her gun at Elena’s face. The man in priest’s garb
said to Alex, “Hold up your hands, together.”
Alex did as he was told. The man bent across Elena and efficiently slapped thick plastic cuffs on Alex’s wrists, then with
a show of equal dexterity, Elena’s.
After a moment, Alex asked, “What do you want?”
“Be quiet,” came the reply from Vladimir. He withdrew two black hoods and clumsily covered their heads.
In March 1992, two months after the press frenzy over Alex Konevitch began, the initial attacks on his companies were detected.
Somebody was making repeated highly sophisticated attempts to break into Konevitch Associates’ computer networks. Quite successfully,
or so it appeared. The Russian Internet backbone, like everything inherited from communism, was shockingly backward and inefficient.
Alex had therefore hired an American company that specialized in these things and plowed millions into creating his own corporate
network, a closed maze of servers, switches, and privately owned fiber-optic cable that connected his companies. The only
vulnerabilities were in the interfaces between his private network and the Russian phone companies, interfaces that were,
regrettably, unavoidable. Naturally this was precisely where the attacks occurred.
That discovery was made minutes after a new American anti-virus software program was installed, a magical sifter that sorted
gold from fool’s gold. Tens of thousands of spyware programs were detected—like small tracking devices—that had penetrated
and riddled the entire network. The programs were sophisticated little things, impossible to detect with homegrown software.
They not only tracked the flow of Internet traffic, they caused each message to replicate and then forwarded copies to an
outside Internet address.
Private investigators easily tracked the Internet address to a small apartment on the outer ring of Moscow and burgled their
way into the flat. It was completely empty and wiped clean. Nothing, except a small table and dusty computer. The plug was
pulled out. The hard disk had been removed.
What was going on? Alex had anxiously queried his technical specialists. Somebody is mapping your businesses and transactions,
came the answer. For how long? he asked. Maybe weeks, more probably months, and it seemed fair to conclude that whoever launched
this attack now had an avalanche of information regarding how his rapidly expanding empire came together, how one piece interfaced
with the next, how and where the money flowed, even the identities of the key people who pushed the buttons. The computers
in the human resources department, particularly, were riddled with enough spyware to feed a software convention.
The programs were wiped clean, gobs of money were thrown at more protective software—all imported from America, all state
of the art, all breathtakingly expensive—and nothing was heard from the originator of the attack. Corporate extortion or any
of several forms of embezzlement had been anticipated—pay us off, the intercepted
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