“What’s a bit more dangerous are DDoS attacks, where the bad guys flood a target server with traffic in an attempt to disrupt and perhaps even bring down the target. And I’m not talking some pansy denial-of-service attacks here—because most sophisticated firewalls kick their asses pretty easily these days—but superprograms that can hit multiple compromised devices belonging to the target and bombard them with traffic. We’re talking tens of thousands of emails, robocalls, text messages, and even social media posts. The target is buried and has to abandon their email addresses, domain names, and stuff like that. Kuga’s people usually hit them with political stuff from the opposing parties or, using the go-to they all like, filling the in-boxes and chats with kiddie porn. Then dropping dimes to whichever law enforcement agency has jurisdiction. It’s almost impossible to prove that the kiddie porn was planted, and by then, reputations are shot, jobs lost, security clearances removed, and lives destroyed.”

“Ugly, but I can see how it would be effective.”

“One of Kuga’s favorite tricks is zero-day exploiting. They are clearly following R&D on the latest business and e-commerce software, like when a new software-driven product launches, they slip in code to screw it up or totally hijack it. That’s bad enough for the good guys, but when they hit a major company doing some off-book shady stuff, like maybe doing backdoor deals with bad actors among the more negative foreign governments—then that company has to pay up or they’ll lose more than business. Or, if Kuga wants to screw up the flow of business, he has his people look for some vulnerability in the software—and there’s usually something—and then do as much damage as possible until a fix is found.”

“That sounds nasty but useful.”

Bug sniffed. “It’s okay. Not enough companies and organizations monitor for this, and done right, it creates a tunnel through a firewall. That’s a nice pipeline for introducing malware or other fun stuff.”

Wilson sat back and listened as Bug went on and on about the different types of cyberattacks, including business email compromises, cryptojacking, drive-by attacks, cross-site scripting attacks, password attacks, eavesdropping attacks, AI-powered attacks, and IoT-based attacks.

By the time Bug was finished, the chief of operations was somewhat dazed. He got to his feet, patted Bug on the back, mumbled, “Jolly good, keep up the good work,” and shambled out. He was back in his own office before he realized Bug never actually answered his question about what he was doing.

But Wilson did not dare go back downstairs for another round.

CHAPTER 40

CIVITELLA IN VAL DI CHIANA

AREZZO, TUSCANY, ITALY

Alexander Fong crouched behind his desk and listened to the gunfire. And the screams.

So much gunfire, so many screams.

But now … less of each.