Posted by Lieutenant Junior Grade Avalise Rendana (Chief of Operations) in Jefferies tubes- Main Sim

Posted by Gamemaster Wombat (GM) in Jefferies tubes- Main Sim

Posted by Lieutenant Junior Grade Avalise Rendana (Chief of Operations) in Jefferies tubes- Main Sim
Posted by… suppressed (3) by the Post Ghost! 👻

(snip)

The very pleasant voice chirped out, “Level one diagnostic beginning. Time to completion, three hours and forty two seconds. Beginning examination of system logs now…”

With that the lights lit up as the system began its self diagnostic, occasionally spitting out pieces of reports such as fractured clusters, random code injections, and isolated command sets.

GM Wombat

Avalise wasn’t going to be able to manage all of this herself, but she also had no idea what was going on up at Operations. She sent a text message to Rivers:

||Rivers, I have set of erroneous data from the Level 1 diagnostic that needs sifting through and could use a second set of eyes. Let me know if you aren’t immediately occupied. ~AR||

Meanwhile, she’d get started while the rest of the diagnostic percolated. She had the computer start analyzing the isolated command sets to see if there was anything in there that a) shouldn’t be, and b) should have been flagged by the system as dangerous or unauthorized and somehow wasn’t.

Lt. (j.g) Rendana, COO

“Give me a few minutes and I can help.’

Rivers-Ops

Avalise exhaled and knew she was on her own for now. That was fine, so long as she could track the problem quickly enough.

Sneaky buggers, her engineers were. Sifting through the isolated scripts Rendana found entry upon entry of times when the engineers were messing with systems for some reason or another. Most of them were fine, simple edits to the code as things changed, patches to deal with system upgrades. Some were more sneaky such as programming that one replicator on deck six to produce tea whenever coffee was ordered.

Buried down in the stack however was a set of code commands that made a certain process have the equivalent of root access. It didn’t do anything else however, just escalated something to run where it shouldn’t need to run.

GM Wombat

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Rendana muttered. She ran a backtrace on the authorization ID so that she could do the necessary investigation later. It could be dealt with later.

But her focus was really on the root access protocols that stood out as very curious. She ran the trace on their source and also the affecting processes.

Lt. (j.g) Rendana, COO

The great Coffee Tea switcheroo was authroized by one NE Charles Whitaker. He had a record that Rendana could take up with Security later if she wanted.

The root escalation program seemed to have been loaded in in some sort of burst function, exploiting a vulnerability in how the comms array captured and processed the messages it received. As the program continued to spit out its results it became increasingly evident to Rendana the source of what the virus did: once the hook was in the system it escalated the message to be stored from local processing to root processing, where the main core handled the message as a piece of code rather than… well… a message.

From there the evil doers were exploiting the comms to send commands to the station’s computer to mess with things.

GM Wombat

Avalise moved quickly. Even though the computer had identified the program, it wasn’t yet secure. She worked on constructing a ‘shell’ around the program to hopefully ensure it would cease to function. But she knew that might not be enough. =/\=Rendana to Operations. I’ve found our malicious program, but it’s tethered to the comms systems. If I can’t contain it, I will have to shut down external comms.=/\=

Lt. (j.g) Rendana, COO

=^= Understood Lieutenant. If you have to, minimize shut down of external comms, as I’m going to be taking the Trinidad after our would be blackmailers. We don’t want to be out of contact if we possibly need backup. =^=

LtCmdr Foley - XO