The screens changed to a purplish symbol of a cobra drawn with circuit lines. The logo of a notorious group. The screens also started to very slightly rotate until I glared at Rina who stood behind me to stop. She didn’t move but the screens stopped moving too.
“The hacking of the door to the inner chamber was done by the Lazarus group, a North Korean government affiliated team of hackers. Finding this out was the easy part. Obviously the existing vulnerabilities to the systems have since been patched, and the players who were paid to deploy the virus, a group which had previously reached that door, have been arrested and secretly tried for treason. Of course, when releasing new content new vulnerabilities may arise. That is inevitable in a system as complex as this one and will not change even if you replace us with a different group of administrators.”
Arthur raised his small gauntleted finger.
“The hard thing was to find some kind of motive. Obviously, we could not question the hackers in North Korea, and the useful idio— I mean sacrificial pawns in Britain who the government has apprehended have no idea about any of the details of the investigation. This has been verified and fact checked through the use of truth serums and electrodes, and other means of memory extraction. In any case, the Lazarus group usually acted in the interest of their government and was involved in any kind of crime as long as it was to secure funds for the North Korean government. Thus, I concluded that someone paid the Lazarus group to do their job, meaning that the culprit is much closer to home.”
Then the screens changed to an illustration of the flow of money in this transaction. The illustrations were like those you’d see on traffic signs including the arrows which pulsated showing the flow of money.
Arthur was too short so he used an excessively long retractable pointer.
“Let’s look at it in reverse order. The players who blocked the exit by installing the program were paid with in-game gold to commit their crime. The player who paid them was a ‘german-chinese’ national and also one of the top ten players but has not logged in since making that payment and has in fact fled the country to China, and probably to his real home country of North Korea. So we can assume that the only reason he created the account was to inflict this attack.”
“Can’t we just block players based on nationality?” asked Lain. “That would be the easiest thing to do.”
“No, obviously that would be illegal, and you would know that since you were trained on British law.” I replied.
“Yes, I know that father, but since we now have the man who is the law here—”
“Ohohoho. I am not as important or powerful as you think I am Miss. However thanks to Arthur, Helen here was able to follow through the investigation in the real world. Obviously there was no data left but that was nothing that some old fashioned detective work couldn’t get around, right Helen?”
Cough.
“Yes, although the credit for this goes not to me but to the London Metropolitan Police force who simply forfeited all of the CCTV camera recordings from businesses and homes that the individual frequented in London. The videos were then submitted to the Arthur Pendragon program to examine.”
“Correct, and by analysing over 3000 hours of video and audio, I was able to find four possible affiliations which could lead us to a culprit. Unfortunately, I feel that he knew that he was being monitored, since nowadays everyone is monitored, and so he used this to his advantage by regularly frequenting several political organisations with no connection to each other.”
