THE BROTHERHOOD (4 page)

At that moment Sam opened the door and walked in, a couple of serious-looking men wearing dark clothing and leather jackets following close behind. Aazim knew they were not staff and certainly not building security, but their faces were familiar. No employee at Aust Global Fund would be allowed such long, ungroomed facial hair. Kareem looked stunned when he turned and saw them, and the blood drained from his face.

‘I need to speak to you, Kareem. Would you come with me, please?’ Sam grabbed the man by the elbow. ‘Would you excuse us, Aazim?’ he added with a fake smile.

Kareem opened his mouth to say something but Sam intervened, fixing him with a piercing gaze that demanded attention. ‘Now please, Kareem.’

‘What’s going on here? What’s happening?’ Aazim asked, bewildered.

‘Everything’s all right. We just need to have an urgent chat privately, that’s all. We’ll pop into the meeting room to sort out a couple of issues.’ Sam’s attempt to be reassuring didn’t convince Aazim, who knew that something was definitely up.

As Kareem was taken away he tripped slightly and bumped into Aazim. He was trying to indicate something with his facial expression when Sam took him by the elbow and led him away. While the two walked off to a meeting room, the leather-clad men remained behind. One took Kareem’s laptop while the other gathered all the notes he could find on Kareem’s desk and
in his drawers. It all seemed very bizarre to Aazim. It was inappropriate behaviour by a manager and he would confront Sam as soon as the opportunity came up.

Leaning against the desk and keeping a watchful eye on the two men, Aazim put his hands in his pockets. He felt a scrunched-up piece of paper. Not wanting to take it out in front of the two men, he left it where it was. They rifled through Kareem’s drawers without a care for his personal belongings. Once satisfied they had covered everything, they followed Sam into the meeting room without saying a word to Aazim or acknowledging his presence in any other way. As they shut the door behind them Aazim took out the piece of paper and laid it out on his desk. It seemed to be a password of some kind, but Aazim had no idea what it was for. He would have to ask Kareem about it later.

Hours went by and there was no sign of his colleague. Aazim was beginning to worry and he was having trouble concentrating on his work. He checked the meeting room and found it empty. No one else had seen Kareem, and Sam wasn’t in his office. Aazim wondered what Kareem had seen that had scared him so much. Sam’s behaviour was also unusual, taking Kareem away like that without an explanation. And who were those guys with him?

Towards the end of the afternoon, Aazim opened an email sent to all IT staff. It read: ‘This is to notify you all that Kareem has decided to continue his career with another company. Due to the employment conditions of his new employee he has resigned as of today and left on a road trip. He will be sorely missed but we all wish him good luck in his new adventures.’

Sam’s secretary had forwarded the email on Sam’s behalf, but Aazim noticed that Sam’s original message was dated one day earlier than the one forwarded by the secretary. Sam’s message had yesterday’s date, when Kareem had still been at work.

Aazim was feeling increasingly uneasy. Remembering Kareem’s last words, he decided to check out the accounts server. He needed to find out what was so urgent that had kept his workmate up all night and scared him so much. Troubleshooting computer errors and bugs was the best part of Aazim’s job; this would be no different. Things always happened for a reason. If you used the right tools and followed the patterns, Aazim believed, you’d eventually resolve the issue and find a fix.

The AccountsClass01 server was a large computer that stored clients’ financial accounts Australia-wide and globally. Security was extremely tight, as it contained confidential details of transactions and clients’ names, locations, funds, withdrawals, deposits and so on. There were other servers where users had normal access for everyday business accounting but this one was different: the server was listed as Priority 1 Support in case of hardware failure, and the highly sensitive content as Critical 1. This meant the server had to be running twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, except when outages were scheduled for maintenance and upgrades. Aazim didn’t know much about the financial side of the company and didn’t take much interest in the contents of data stored.

The server resided in a separate internal firewall connected to its own router and public internet protocol address, or IP. There were no domain name systems servers in the firewall and he couldn’t resolve the IP. All applications required users to authenticate before accessing and password resets on a monthly basis were mandatory. The server had its own separate internal domain and administrator access was local only. Such tight security made it safe from internal breaches and internet hackers.

Normally upgrades, bug fixes and other changes on the computers were automated, and scheduled tasks were created for after-hour deployment to all systems at the same time. As the AccountsClass01 server was separate from the main network, changes were done manually from the console in the computer room or data centre. It was a job they all hated: every piece of software had to be copied onto a compact disk and installed locally, the manager had to approve a written request form before the changes were done, and an audit trail was sent to the manager afterwards. Sometimes the staff flipped a coin to see who would do the next maintenance assigned.

Aazim set out for the data centre in the server room and logged in AccountsClass01 to see if he could discover what had spooked Kareem. Reading the log files was the only thing he could think of; it was a starting point when troubleshooting errors. Nevertheless it made him nervous, and he knew he would have to be careful not to alert his manager. If executing programs showed in the audit log he would have some explaining to do.

Traces in the logs showed Kareem’s sign-on account had accessed the Oracle database management application. All four databases contained twenty-four gigabytes of client information and Kareem had spent over five hours reading through the files. What had he been doing in there? Aazim wondered. Why had he risked his job?

Aazim had to find a reason for accessing the databases without raising suspicion. He remembered that the server was due for a general software upgrade and maintenance. A full backup of all data was required in such cases so as to revert to the previous state if upgrades were unsuccessful or caused corruption. This alone would give him a couple of hours at least. He immediately wrote up a form request and emailed it to Sam, marking it as a high priority. Hopefully this would get approved within a couple of hours, provided his boss was in the office. Aazim went back to his desk to get his USB flash disk. He always kept it at work as an easy and quick way of transferring data from one computer to another.

The approval to go ahead with the changes did not come until later that evening when everyone in the office had left for the day. Aazim figured Sam must have processed the request from his home office because there was no sign of him at work. This was fine by Aazim; apart from security staff he was on his own. He shoved the flash drive in his pocket and caught the lift down to the data centre.

Once logged onto the server, the first thing he did was check the logs to see what Kareem had spent most of his time accessing. A particular Oracle database that stood out was integrated with the SWIFTNet messaging platform. Short for Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, it was a messaging system established in the mid seventies for worldwide financial transaction between banks and other financial institutions. As one of the members, Aust Global Fund provided its own custom software, network infrastructure and services that linked over eight thousand financial institutions in over two hundred countries. Founded in Brussels, SWIFTNet’s main objective was to create a common communication language that would link the financial world globally.

As Aazim tried to open the Oracle database a message popped up asking for a password. He entered his administrator account but this failed to give him access. He used several other accounts, equally without success, and racked his brain trying to think of a way in. Secure access was the whole point to this server and Sam was the only one who knew the password to this application.

Suddenly he remembered the note Kareem had given him. He searched for it in his pocket and spread it out on the table. He looked at the sequence of random letters scribbled by hand: BhGYhhE. He typed it in the login screen and hit OK. He was in. He wondered how Kareem had obtained this password. Had he stolen it from Sam?

Four main services fell under SWIFT: Securities, Treasury and Derivatives, Trade Services and Payments, and Cash Management. A service allowing a secure transfer of funds from one point to another, Payments and Cash Management were of interest to Aazim and he could understand how they were managed. A few years ago his mother had taught him to use accounting software like MYOB – Mind Your Own Business – and showed him how to fill in his tax form. In return he fixed all her computer problems. He knew how to find his way around the program, and in any case, minimal on-the-job training with SWIFT was required for troubleshooting issues.

He knew that what he was about to do was illegal and breached customer confidentiality and contract obligations: he was basically prying into people’s bank accounts. On the other hand he was excited and couldn’t resist the challenge of going as far as possible.

He saw that financial trading was being conducted all over the world, but in particular European companies where large sums of money were being deposited by individuals into all sorts of institutions and businesses. Nothing unusual was revealed in the databases and it would take him years to go through all the transaction records. He decided to pick a handful of financial institutions Aust Global Funds was partnered with and a number of individual clients. Nothing unusual, but money transfers were displayed just as before.

After three hours of investigating he came up with nothing and the maintenance deadline neared. He was about to give up when he found something odd: the account balance and deposited funds by some individuals did not add up. In each case the transactions were recorded but the balance remained the same; money was diverted and siphoned off into a company’s account and then withdrawn. It hit Aazim like a knock on the head: the withdrawal records were all made by foreign accounts residing mainly in countries like Pakistan, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Indonesia, Somalia and Lebanon. The amounts deposited by individuals were exactly the same as the withdrawals. Records showed they originated from legitimate companies but all traces of the source had been lost.

Registered companies were presented as fronts for illegal activities. If that was the case it was cyber laundering of digital cash on a mass scale. For hard currency to get legitimised it required entry into the mainstream economy. Aazim picked names of individuals at random and the records showed them making simultaneous cash deposits into various businesses, but never over nine thousand Australian dollars at a time. He realised that was too small an amount to be picked up as suspicious. From there the cash was distributed by Aust Global Funds into other legitimate financial institutions and later withdrawn. Aazim found a list containing names of individuals, businesses, financial institutions and various other organisations that Aust Global Funds used to distribute electronic cash; there were close to a thousand entries. He recognised a couple of the larger finance companies but the rest were unknown to him.

He sat back to think for a moment and take in the enormity of the situation. He realised that Kareem must have uncovered it and had wanted to share his conclusions with Aazim. But was he wrong in this assumption? Surely Sam would have an explanation if he approached him. Then again, two employees responsible for AccountsClass01 had suddenly found jobs elsewhere and no one had ever heard from them again. In Aazim’s previous job he had worked on a contract for the Victorian police and learned enough to know how technology was used for illegal gains. Could he alert the partners and bypass his boss? He pondered the idea and quickly dismissed it. For all he knew the corruption was instigated from the very top.

Aazim looked at his watch. It was way over the maintenance deadline and he knew the audit report would be sent to his boss ten minutes after logging out, showing exactly what he had accessed. There was no going back to his desk, pretending all was well. If he planned to confront Sam and demand an explanation, take it to higher management or take it straight to the authorities, he needed evidence. He might well ‘disappear’ like Kareem and his predecessor, but having that data might give him some leverage. He took out the USB flash drive and inserted it in the server USB port. Selecting all four databases, he started downloading.

Drops of sweat trickled down his face as the progress bar dragged to eighty-five percent; it seemed to be taking forever to download the last database. When the screen flashed
DOWNLOAD COMPLETED
, Aazim hastily pulled the flash disk out of the server. With his shirt sleeve he wiped his forehead and logged out of the console. He shoved the USB disk into his pocket and headed for the data centre exit. Server fans, air-cons and all sorts of electronic noises filled the huge room, which contained technical hardware worth millions of dollars.

Aazim gave the security guard behind the glass window a quick nod. Without waiting for one in return he swiped his access card and hurriedly punched the four-digit code in the exit pad.
INVALID
flashed on the display screen.

Calm down, he told himself and shot a quick glance towards the monitoring room. He tried again, more slowly this time. After two beeps a green light came on and the heavy fireproof door swung open. He walked out and got into the elevator, avoiding eye contact with his colleagues. For a moment he wondered if he should grab his laptop sitting on his desk or just get the hell out of there. But the program he needed to run the databases was on it. It was early morning; he had worked beyond the time he predicted it would take and workers were coming in. A fast-paced stride to his desk should do it, he decided.