Tonight on CBS FBI airs with an all-new Tuesday, September 28, 2021 season 4 episode 2, “Hacktivist,” and we have your FBI recap below. In tonight’s FBI season 4 episode 2 as per the CBS synopsis, “Maggie, OA, and the team must stop a hacker who is disabling life-saving equipment in several New York City hospitals; Jubal’s son waits for important surgery at one of the impacted hospitals..”
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Tonight’s episode begins with New York Children’s Hospital being hit by a cyberattack. Some hacker locked the doctors and nurses out of the system and was telling them to await further instructions. FBI Special Agent Jubal Valentine suspected that the hacker or hackers wanted money. However, he was willing to against the federal policy of refusing to pay ransoms because his son was a patient at the hospital and his son was too sick to be moved. Jubal’s son has cancer. Jubal has been doing his best to keep his son’s spirits up when the cyber attack happened and the hospital was forced to use their reserve generators to keep the lights on. There were over five hundred children at the hospital. It would be impossible to transfer them all and so the only way forward was to either pay the ransom or find the hacker. And the FBI chose to find the hacker.
New York’s Children’s Hospital wasn’t the only hospital that was hit. Five more hospitals were targeted by the same malware and the FBI soon found out who uploaded the viruses. The person who carried it out was Jason Cook. He was a technology salesman. He was also speaking in a chatroom with some guy when the guy offered twenty grand in bitcoin to follow his instructions and that’s what he did. Cook didn’t create the software. He merely uploaded it and took his money. He’s now claiming he didn’t know what the software was going to do. Cook put the software into the system with a USB drive that had been sent to him by his friend and he never saw the person. The person dropped it off at his door and Cook later retrieved it.
Cook was no help to the FBI. The FBI needed to find the person behind the hack and their first clue in doing so was the ransom demand. The hacker didn’t demand money. He or she demanded that the FBI found a serial killer. This serial killer was targeting a newly released member of the Burwell Psychiatric Facility. Seven people that were released from the hospital had died and someone reported it to NYPD but they ignored the call because they thought it was from a conspiracy theorist. It wasn’t until the FBI started looking into it that they found out there was something there. The seven people that died had no drugs in their system or mark on their bodies. They just died.
There was no investigation into their deaths. The facility they all left had also claimed that not every patient had been sane and so the director tried to claim that some could have committed suicide. Either way, the facility began receiving threatening notes and complaints after Anna Lewis died. Anna didn’t have any family. All she had in this world was her best friend and roommate. Her former roommate is Lydia Ryan. Ryan was also a former patient of the facility for her bipolar disorder and she was also a software engineer. Once they knew who she was, they looked for security footage around Cook’s house and they found an image of her in the area. The FBI later arrested Ryan.
They also confiscated her computers. Only Ryan told them there was no use because her computers had been wiped and she was the only one that knew how to remove the malware. Ryan also wasn’t talking until the murder of her friends had been solved. Ryan had known all six of the deceased. They were friends and she wasn’t going to stop her cyberattack until their deaths were solved. The FBI had thought she was paranoid. It was when another former patient of the facility died that they started to believe maybe Ryan could be right. The newest victim was James Oster. His death had looked like an overdose and still, the FBI investigated because of his connection to the facility. And it’s a good thing, too.
Oster was murdered. He was injected with potassium chloride which mimics a heart attack and that leaves the system after a certain time. This is why no one found it without knowing what to look for. Special Agent in Charge Isobel Castille ordered that the bodies of the other victims be exhumed and so the feds were testing the remains for the drug but Jubal didn’t have time for it. Jubal’s son needed surgery. They couldn’t do the surgery without getting access to their blood bank and they couldn’t move Tyler because it might rupture his spleen. Jubal was told the news by the doctor. He began panicking and so Jubal returned to work. He tried to reason with Ryan. He tried to tell her his son was at risk and she replied that she’s gone too far to turn back now.
Ryan wanted the murders solved first. She wasn’t going to back down until the murders had been solved and so Jubal used his position to lean on the facility in order to get the patient records. It was illegal. He could get in trouble for it and he didn’t care. He was solely focused on saving his son. Jubal’s actions got the FBI the records they needed and they found their suspect. His name is John Maguire. It wasn’t the only name he’s known by. Maguire’s late father has schizophrenia-like all the victims and he died of a suspected heart attack. Like all of the victims. John clearly murdered his father first and then he started killing people. He had worked at a hospital until he was reported because his patients kept dying with unusual frequency.
Then he started working at the psychiatric facility. People began dying two weeks after he started working there and he was only an administrative assistant at the facility. There was no reason for him to access the patient files weeks after their release. He also harassed them while at the facility. Several patients complained of someone telling them they weren’t going to get better or undermining them. They also complained about Maguire. They said he was asking intrusive questions about them and the director of the facility knew this. He dismissed it as paranoia. Again, the victims all suffered from schizophrenia. They wouldn’t be believed. Their allegations wouldn’t hold wait against a seemingly rational person.
It’s how Maguire was getting away with it all. They couldn’t arrest him at his home because he wasn’t home and he wasn’t at work. He called out sick. He’s been doing that each and every time he was going to murder someone. They tracked his phone. They found him outside of his latest victim’s house and they were able to stop him before he was murdered again. They just weren’t able to arrest him. He escaped. They were later found near the airport. Tiffany and Scola got cornered him and they were forced to kill him once he got a hold of Tiffany’s gun.
Maguire was dead. He confessed before he died that he was “helping” his victims achieve peace and so they told Ryan what happened but she didn’t believe them because she thought it was a trick and the only way to get through to her was for Maggie to reveal her own sister suffers from a mental illness. This got Ryan to trust her. Ryan freed the hospitals from the malware. But it was too late for one patient. An eleven-year-old girl died because her monitors were working and so Ryan was going to be charged with murder.
THE END
