Harlequinade

**The Harlequinade** are a cyber-terrorist group responsible for the Kokomo cyberattack in 2013. The goal of the group was to prevent humanity from becoming irrelevant and superseded by machines. Their core belief was that humans exist as a means to store and disseminate information. Their concern was that, up to now, greater understanding and learning throughout the development of human society had generated the need for more and more people in which all that information could be stored; however, with the advent of computing and the exponential growth of computing power, they felt there was a very real risk that soon the information, the driver of procreation, may no longer need the human race for its own generation, storage and dissemination.

## Members

* Pantalone - David Cordell (investment banker)
* Columbina - Olivia Wade (journalist)
* Harlequin - Stephanie Jackson (unemployed artist)

It should be noted that when Steven Daguero tried to retrieve information on Jackson the amount of personal information he could find was scarce. It's unclear whether this was a symptom of the in-progress Kokomo cyberattack, or whether this is indicative that the names and occupations of the members is just fabrication.

## Kokomo cyberattack

In 2013, the Harlequinade released the Kokomo virus onto financial systems around the world. As the virus spread, it encrypted every scrap of information it touched, changing ones and zeros to unreadable, seemingly random symbols. This quickly made it impossible for banks or their customers to access digital finances, use credit or debit cards, or login to internet services. The virus quickly spread to other large networks, such as health databases, meaning that patient records and treatment plans were inaccessible.

However, the virus as it was designed, was unable to breach the government computer systems. To this end, the Harlequinade devised a deception by which to trick government agencies to let the virus through the firewalls. Pantalone contacted the Counter-Terrorist Unit and requested to speak in person to Alice Price. Then all three of the group played out a carefully orchestrated plan in which they presented a unified group of dangerously eccentric revolutionaries and then Harlequin made a secret cry for help by tapping out "Help me" in Morse code with her pen. This earned the trust of Price and CTU, who thought they had found a weakness to exploit. The group continued to fall apart as Alice tried to sew seeds of doubt about how honest the members were being with each other.

Harlequin eventually 'broke' and revealed how to reverse the cyberattack. She explained the case of Ryan White, an early victim of the AIDS virus from Kokomo, Indiana, USA. White's treatment by society after he was diagnosed - he was expelled from school on public health grounds - was interpreted by the Harlequinade as the oversimplification of information - it being reduced down to "AIDS is deadly. You can catch it through being in contact with people who are HIV positive." This led to the persecution of a teenager with only months to live. In his memory, the group apparently set the decryption key as the text phrase "*Ryan White can go back to school*".

Unfortunately, CTU were under too much pressure to prevent mass riot and societal chaos that they took this revelation at face value and allowed Kokomo onto government servers so they could introduce the decryption key. It was only now that the Harlequinade's deception was revealed - they had gotten the virus onto the government computers but the text phrase had not decrypted infected systems as they'd said, but instead deleted the data.

1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 "Kokomo"