John was in discussion with the settlement's IT manager, April Williams. “April, we believe that someone is using our network from the outside to cause the 'accidents' we've experienced. We need a way to monitor the network and catch the intruder before he can cause more problems.”
“John, I have all the cyber-security countermeasures possible already implemented. If the intrusion was from outside, we can search the activity logs for verification. But whoever got in has to be really good to outsmart the software. It should have caught any intrusive activity and reported it to me not long after the intrusion.”
John nodded.
“As far as catching such an intrusion in real-time, I will have to mirror the log to a computer that's running some statistical sampling software on the continuous batches it’s sent. I can set up an alert when it spots a suspicious pattern of activity. But we will first have to find signs of the intruder in the logs to imprint that pattern.”
“Sounds good April, if you want, I can run the stats on the logs to find the pattern while you get the mirror ready.”
“Sure John, and thanks.”
John set up a computer to run the statistical analysis on the network logs sent to him by April. He decided to begin the run on the day before and the day of the incidents. Even on one of the fastest computers in the settlement, the analysis would take hours. He hoped he had time to find a pattern in the data before the next incident.
Abel got the answer he expected from Earth. His uncle Ephraim was involved in a movement to recognize Martian independence by the UN. Ephraim confirmed that they had a lot of opposition and a lot of it was at the higher levels of power and authority. He was sorry about any problems his activism may have caused Abel and the others. But he pointed out that no matter how much he agitated that was not an excuse for anyone to cause the dangerous and potentially deadly incidents that Abel had witnessed. He asked that Abel keep him informed, he would do what he could on his end to discover any connections to the incidents.
John was awakened by his Annie. The analysis was complete. He looked through the resulting numbers without any recognition. He switched to a two-dimensional view of time versus network traffic and still didn't see any obvious pattern. He used the terrain view to inspect the results. The resulting topographical representation made it clear that there were four repeatable peaks in the data which couldn't be overlooked. Using the cursor, he measured the time from peak to peak and found it to be seven hours and thirty-nine minutes for all four. The trace showed that the source of the peaks seemed to lead to the office of the local representative to the Republic's Senate. The Senator's office was close enough to wirelessly connect with the Jackson's network. But the office was probably just a proxy.
The periodicity of the data peaks was the real clue. Plenty of data could be downloaded or uploaded during those peaks. And the only reason John could think that the peaks would have that particular periodicity was that they were tied to the orbit of Phobos, Mars' innermost moon. There was no other reason that he could think of for such a period, except as maybe a subterfuge. But there was a way to check that.
He called up a planetarium program on his Annie to see where the moon Phobos was at the time of the data peaks. As he expected the moon was over the area of Candor at those times. High enough in the sky for line-of-sight communication. Someone at some time had established at least a repeating station on Phobos and used it to break into and interfere with the settlement's net.
Before he showed the results to his dad, he wanted to run more analyses to find further corroborating evidence and the identity of the perpetrator.
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