The year was 2004 and I went to Hampton, Virginia to help run a technical cyber assessment of an emergency communications setup for one of the reserve military units there. What they did was take over a hanger at one of the airfields in Hampton and set up a command center inside it. Lots of computers, satellite links, the works.
My team’s job was to ensure they were cyber secure. So we sat off to the side and had lots of our gear to test and see if we could infiltrate or affect their communications during the test. We had done this numerous times before for different groups so this one was not expected to be hard or different.
Two things came out of this trip, one was an awesome steak dinner and the other was getting to see a Harry Potter movie on an Imax screen.
Let me start with the movie. We got there a day early to setup and then had most of the day to ourselves to relax. Right near my hotel was the Virginia Air and Space Museum which is one of my favorite types of museums. Part of the museum is an Imax theater which shows lots of Imax movies about space and flight, which are amazing to see. The day I went they were also showing the new HP movie Prisoner of Azkaban.
I HAD to see this in the big Imax format.
The surprise to me was that there were so few people in the museum and in the theater. It was literally me and four other people. I will say that if you get a chance to see the movie in Imax format, the Knight bus scenes are mind blowing when enlarged that big!
OK now to the Steak dinner…
We were doing the assessment and it was getting on into the evening. One of my team came over to me and let me know that the WiFi setup they were using for the command center had not changed the default password on the routers. This was a big finding and would not look good for those people who set it up.
I had gone out to the smoking area to find one of my team and we were standing out in the dark with about 6 other people having a smoke. One was smoking a nice cigar and I mentioned it to the smoker. At the time I enjoyed a good cigar now and then and could smell the difference between cheap and good.
After talking and joking with the cigar aficionado we went back inside and only when we got back into the light did I realize I had been joking with the Colonel who was running the whole exercise. As soon as we walked back in a Major ran up to the Colonel and started going on about how well things were going and how he, the Major, was the reason that everything was going great.
As the Major walked off the Colonel turned to me and whispered, “If you find any way to bring the Major’s ego down a notch, I will buy you and your team the best steak dinner we can find.”
Challenge accepted.
I told my guys to go into the WiFi routers and change all the passwords and then shutdown the network. I admittedly got a couple of questioning looks, but they smiled and got right on it. About 5 minutes later all hell broke loose in the command center and people were running around shouting and pointing fingers. The Colonel looked over at me with a “Is it you?” Look and I just nodded. He started laughing.
After about 30 minutes of mayhem the Colonel eased over to where I was sitting and said “That should be enough. Please put it back and we can finish this exercise.” Which we promptly did. Because it was not technically something we should have done it was not brought up in the after action report, and the Major never did figure out who had messed with his network that night. Needless to say his ego was much smaller afterwords.
True to his word, the Colonel took us all out for a fantastic steak dinner. Making this exercise one that I will remember for a very long time.