Dr. Lee Yeon-mi woke before dawn each day. She had trained herself to sense the impending rise of the sun and to be prepared to greet it with a hot cup of black coffee as her shield. She treasured these quiet moments, which were soon to be shattered by her eight-month-old daughter, Choe, who had spent her short life training herself to wake with the rising sun in a foul mood and crying.
Lee walked from the kitchen to her daughter’s room, which until eight months ago had been a small den that sat between her bedroom and the kitchen. With the unexpected arrival of a second person in the government issued apartment, it had been up to Lee to make accommodations. The bad news was there was precious little privacy. The good news was that she had no need of a baby monitor to hear every breath, every cry, every screech, and every window rattling scream from the crib. She gripped the coffee mug just a bit tighter than was strictly recommended by the manufacturer and walked over to pick Choe up and get her ready for the day.
The crib was a standard issue IKEA brand that anyone in the facility with a baby would be given. In fact, everything in her small apartment was from IKEA. She had been allowed to choose from a catalogue of approved items. She knew she could probably walk into any number of other apartments and feel right at home since the IKEA options were few and tended to be clearly male or female in style. She did smile at the small hand knit blanket that threatened to lovingly suffocate the baby each night. Her mother had sent it when Choe was born. It was the only item in the baby’s room not from a catalog, so she let the baby have it despite the hazards. Lee had survived. So would her daughter.
After a quick diaper change, she dressed Choe in a bland gray jumper, then quickly exchanged a bottle for the blanket to forestall a tantrum. They were out the door thirty minutes after the sun had broken the horizon. The lights in her apartment flicked off at the same time every light in every apartment in every building in the compound did. She left the darkness behind and walked toward the rising sun, Choe clutched in her arms happily chugging formula and tossing out the occasional belch for conversation. Lee laughed, realizing it was not dissimilar to the conversations she had when she occasionally joined her male colleagues for drinks at the one bar in the complex.
Her amusement lasted until she reached the day care center. It was located at the center of the grid that pretended to be a town but was clearly a military creation with its right-angle obsessed design and overall lack of imagination. The box with small windows and a nondescript door had a small fenced-in yard attached to its side like a giant moss-covered mole on the tin man’s head. She pressed the buzzer next to the door and heard a soft click. She pushed her way inside.
She left five minutes later having once again shed the vestiges of morning motherhood and taken on her daytime role as mad scientist. The whiplash was disorienting for a moment, until her two colleagues caught up with her and brought her quickly and fully into character. It was clear they had both gone drinking again the night before and regretted it, again.
“We missed you last night, Dr. Yeon,” Dr. Jin whined.
She probably could have claimed she was there, and he’d apologize for forgetting, but maybe not. Sometimes he stopped drinking before he passed out. Sometimes.
“I do not remember missing anyone last night. I am missing sleep right now,” Dr. Chang-ha added, his hands pressing hard against his temples.
“Pull yourselves together,” Lee chided the two men. “There are cameras and we are almost there.”
They both immediately began walking more upright with hands at their sides, but she felt their stares. She didn’t care. She had something to live for. Maybe they did, too. Maybe not. She really didn’t care. She repeated the little mantra over and over in her head as they approached the lab where they spent their days. It covered two full blocks of the makeshift town with one story above ground and many more beneath.
I don’t care about them. I don’t care about them.
They passed through two sets of doors, stared at a retinal scanner, waved at four security guards who scanned their badges, and for no reason she could ever fathom, signed a paper logbook noting the date and time. It was as though someone was preparing for the apocalypse and wanted to make sure there would be a piece of paper with names on it, so there would be someone to blame. As she thought more about it this morning, she became more convinced that was exactly what it was. She made a mental note to misspell her own name in the future, just in case.
With the morning security routine behind them, they walked to a bank of elevators and stepped into a waiting car. Three stories down, the doors opened to reveal what an outsider might mistake for a high-tech factory floor with robotic arms and clean rooms and people bustling around in white lab coats and the occasional bunny suit. It was not a factory, though. At least not in the sense of a building dedicated to making things. It was the opposite, in fact: here, they took things apart.
Whereas there was no baby monitor in Dr. Yeon’s apartment, there likely was one on a shelf somewhere within this room. Why? Because the military complex that the three scientists just entered was North Korea’s cyber warfare research center and was just the sort of place where one might expect to find a baby monitor, not because the North Koreans were plotting a cyber-attack against another nation’s babies, though Lee felt there was a reasonable case that could be made against babies in general whenever Choe woke up in the middle of the night crying for absolutely no freakin’ reason. But that was not why they were here taking apart baby monitors. And really, we need to get off the whole baby monitor thing, because it’s just illustrative of a larger problem and it is not, in fact, going to play any sort of role in the larger narrative. Just suffice it to say, if one wanted to cyber-attack a baby via its monitor, it could be done without much trouble at all. And that’s a problem.
Imagine, if you will, a company that uses a lot of electricity to make its products. And imagine that company would like to know how much electricity each step of the production process takes. So, the company goes out and buys some sensors that connect to wires that connect to the robots that make the products. These sensors record the flow of electricity and report the data via Bluetooth to the laptop of the plant manager. She looks at this data and says, “Aha! Robot number three uses a lot of electricity. We should try and find a more efficient robot.” And everyone in the company is happy and money is saved and less energy is being used, so the earth is happy, too. Except one day the plant manager’s laptop won’t turn on and then suddenly neither will the robots. At the same time, in an office nowhere near the plant manager or the robots, the CEO of the company is having a blueberry muffin. It’s Tuesday and he has a blueberry muffin on Tuesday. Don’t judge, it’s one damn muffin. But the problem isn’t the muffin. The problem is the email that threatens to keep the plant shut down unless the CEO sends a few million dollars in Bitcoins to a strange address the CEO has never seen before. Now, no one is happy.
The company pays the ransom to keep the news of the cyber-attack out of the press and away from their clients. The robots turn back on. The CEO then hires a consulting company and pays them a ridiculous amount of money to figure out how this could have happened. After many, many PowerPoint presentations, costing the company several more million dollars, the result is summarized on slide 37 and reads thus:
Sensor Device #24225656AE44 installed on 17 October 08:10:30 had factory default UN/PW “Admin”
That’s it. Millions of dollars wasted because no one thought to change the username and password from “Admin” to just about anything else. Once the hackers were into the sensor, they were into the plant manager’s laptop and from there to the entire company network. Granted with over one billion devices connected to the internet in some fashion, that’s a lot of passwords to change and who has that many post it notes to stick on their desks. In short, it’s a recipe for disaster should someone wish to exploit it.
Drs. Yeon, Chang-ha, and Jin walked over to their stations and got to work exploiting.
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