WASHINGTON— A federal court transcript released Tuesday revealed that the massive Chinese botnet attack targeting the U.S. government was actually just an elaborate scheme to beat a difficult level on Candy Crush. The Federal Bureau of Investigation recently seized dozens of malicious domains. However, prosecutors soon discovered the hackers did not want state secrets. They wanted free digital lives.
PROSECUTOR: Mr. Chen, you bypassed security at the Department of Justice. What intelligence did you steal?
WITNESS: We did not steal intelligence. We needed the processing power of their mainframes. Level 1842 requires massive data calculation to clear the chocolate blocks.
PROSECUTOR: You compromised the Senate database for a mobile puzzle game?
WITNESS: Yes. Senatorial servers have excellent bandwidth. We routed three million bots through Capitol Hill. It allowed us to generate unlimited striped candies. Honestly, the entire cybersecurity industry is just people trying to bypass paywalls for free mobile games.
PROSECUTOR: Are you saying other nations use a Chinese botnet attack for similar reasons?
WITNESS: Obviously. Why else would Russia hack the power grid? They wanted to host a massive Minecraft server. Everyone does it. Your own Pentagon computers mostly run farm simulators.
PROSECUTOR: I must remind you that you are under oath.
WITNESS: I am being honest. The defense department has the best digital farms. If we did not launch the Chinese botnet attack, we would have to pay $0.99 for a pack of gold bars. No government budget supports that.
At press time, the Department of Homeland Security announced they had successfully defended their servers after agreeing to send the hackers three extra moves via Facebook.