Roland Minton looked up the street at the rest of the block. The science
lab was in Sausalito, across the bay from San Francisco. From where he stood he
could just barely see the top of the Golden Gate Bridge fading away into the
late afternoon mist, the orange-red suspension cables arching like the top of
an amusement park devil ride.
Gen-A-Tec was in a commercial neighborhood a mile from Sausalito's
shopping district. Several small, low-roofed factories and warehouses lined the
remainder of the street. Gen-A-Tec was the only secure layout on the block, but
he knew from previous research that they had enough security to make up for
everyone else. Roland could hardly wait to try his skill against the Gen-A-Tec
systems administrator. The guy was probably money. Roland was ready to put his
game in play. He loved going up against cream because he knew he was boss dawg.
The ultimate big guy— master of the game.
He backed the rental car out of sight of the blue tile buildings, then
got out dragging his cracking equipment with him. He buckled his utility belt
around his bony hips and started up the street, looking for the telephone
company junction box. Usually it was located somewhere around the middle of the
block and pretty easy to spot. Halfway down the street he found it in the ivy:
a four-foot high, one-foot deep, green metal rectangle that served the
telephonic needs of the entire neighborhood. It was camouflaged behind a
scraggly hedge near a warehouse park, under the shade of an old pepper tree.
Roland stepped carefully through the ivy and kneeled down next to it.
"We be strollin' with Roland," he whispered as he opened the box. He
wanted to do his hacking from a number that seemed like it originated inside
the Gen-A-Tec building. To do that, he had decided to work from here because
the junction box had the easiest terminal access. He had elected to do this
hack in the late afternoon in broad daylight for two reasons: First, most
electronic
security shifts
turned over at 5:30
p.m.,
and
during the first half hour after the changing of the guard the new crowd would
not be up to speed. They'd be getting coffee and checking attendance logs.
Second, phone company techs normally work around junction boxes only during
daylight hours. To attempt the crack at night would automatically arouse
suspicion.
Roland studied the box and its myriad of terminals. Using his lineman's
handset to connect to each phone jack, he phreaked the terminals, breaking into
them in sequence to find out which lines belonged to whom. After five minutes
he had the Gen-A-Tec phones isolated. Their lines were in a block of numbers
beginning with 555-6000—the main switchboard line, and going to 555-6999.
Roland unzipped the Cordura case, lovingly took out his laptop computer, and
hooked it up to one of the science lab's phone lines.
Earlier that afternoon he had visited Gen-A-Tec's website and downloaded
the company prospectus. He now pulled it out of his pocket and laid it on top
of the junction box where it would be handy. He had memorized most of the
important corporate officers, the cheese who would have unlimited access to the
computer system and had written down their e-mail addresses—that were also
thoughtfully supplied by the same prospectus.
Before driving out here, Roland had logged on to Gen-A-Tec's e-mail host
and asked it what version it was. When the host answered he quickly logged off.
Now, as he crouched behind the hedge, he began looking for several notorious
security holes in that particular software version; holes that sometimes went
unpatched by lazy dick-smack systems administrators. But he didn't really
expect to find any, because Gen-A-Tec seemed so security-conscious. He was sure
this systems boss had probably patched them all over, but he was wrong. Roland
was surprised and delighted to find several unpatched holes in the software.
"Bust on, Super Daddy," he murmured to himself as he picked
one, wondering at the stupidity of having full-boat
security and
leaving such easy access through systems defects. He accessed the Gen-A-Tec
home page, but instead of signing on with them he went through one of the
security holes. It let him slip past all of their warning alarms and access the
company e-mail system. "Kickin' ass," Roland smiled as he crouched in
the bushes and worked. But he was also slightly let down. This systems
administrator was whack. Their security was a joke. He liked to ply his trade
against the best, but this SA wasn't going to present him any challenge.
Bummage.
Roland quickly went through his next few cracker steps. He needed to
access his ISP—where he had already set up a phony account using a stolen
credit card number. "Man, what don't I do for the Strockmeister?" He
smiled as he thought of the overweight attorney. When he first met Herman he
thought the dude was a complete drudge, but Herman had slowly won him over with
his passion for causes and his fairness.
Roland's mother, Madge, had found Strock while Roland was fielding
grounders in the federal joint, convicted of computer crimes. Strock took his
case on appeal and got it overturned. In exchange Roland had volunteered his
hacking services. The two became an unlikely pair, as different emotionally as
they were physically, but they shared a blistering intelligence, and now there
was very little that Roland wouldn't do for Strock. He thought Strock was the
bomb—finer than frog hair.
Roland dialed into his ISP using one of the phone numbers from inside
the Gen-A-Tec phone block, then logged on to his new phony Internet account. He
had already composed a special e-mail message. The Gen-A-Tec e-mail host was
only supposed to pass e-mails on to the recipient it was addressed to, but the
hole Roland was using allowed him to add a few commands that the host would
automatically execute. He sent an e-mail request to send a complete list of
Gen-A-Tec's password files to the bogus account. All he had to do now was
settle back and wait.
The late afternoon sun was hot on his skinny shoulders, but Roland
didn't mind. He was thinking about pussy now,
wondering how he was going to open some
clam after work. He was thinking about cruising the bars, looking for cream,
maybe making a trip out to Berkeley to flash his new sash out there, let his
awesome purple headdress vacuum up the skank, throw those college girls a
sausage party.
While he was pursuing those fantasies his computer beeped and he looked
at the screen that flashed:
you've
got mail
.
He opened
the e-mail and, sure as shit, there was the Gen-A-Tec password file. Among
other things, it had pairs of user names and encrypted passwords for the 3,500
Gen-A-Tec employees:
Rhyde
OROTHu
Pzimmer
2Bfib7
Bnorton
SEoblp#w81
Flieter
COM725M
Jsasson
13Jen45
Klezso
1415ube
It went on for pages. Roland knew it was mathematically impossible for
him to decipher these encryptions, but he also knew that most corporate
executives were pretty sloppy about what passwords they used. Usually a wife's
name or a child's was a good candidate. Roland picked a program out of his CD
case. The one he chose first had the two hundred most common adult names
already encrypted. He quickly ran that program against the list the e-mail host
had just supplied him. Nothing. Then he picked out a second CD and did the same
for the two hundred most common baby names.
Bingo! Two matches popped up. One was a secretary and not worth working
on. She wouldn't have top-shelf security. But the other match was
jsasson.
He already knew from studying
the corporate prospectus that this was probably the user name for Jack Sasson.
Sasson's encrypted password was "2Bfib7," which matched the
encryption in Roland's baby-name file for "Brandon."
"Go no further, my man," Roland told himself. Jack Sasson was
major corporate cheese, Gen-A-Tec's chief financial officer.
Now Roland could go right through the front door, right past their
bullshit security system directly into the company e-mail. He logged in with
the user name
jsasson,
then typed
the password
brandon.
The e-mail
host immediately displayed a Gen-A-Tec welcome screen. One of the choices
listed was
systems prompt.
"Fuckin' A," Roland giggled. This system has more holes than a
military rectal exam, he thought. Roland quickly clicked on
systems prompt
and was immediately into
their Local Area Network inside the Gen-A-Tec building. Roland was losing
respect for this systems administrator at warp speed. The fool hadn't patched
the known security holes in his software. He hadn't even guarded against
frequently used passwords. The guy was a complete pant-load. Butt toast.
The Gen-A-Tec nighttime systems
administrator's computer beeped a warning and Lincoln Fellows, a skinny,
twenty-three-year-old African American, master geek and computer nerd, whose
net handle was
Darkstar,
ambled over and pushed his ebony features down
into the blue-lit screen.
"What have we got here, my man?" he said softly as a window
popped up on his screen with the warning:
CRACKER IN THE
SHADOWS. MONITOR?
Lincoln clicked on
ok
and
the alert window went away.
Line got one or two of these a
day. Kids mostly, trying their skill against an organized security system,
trying to see if they could break in. Everything here, the holes in the version
software, the easy-to-crack password files, everything was put there
intentionally by Lincoln Fellows. Just hard enough to seem real, just easy
enough to let them in. Once the kiddy crackers thought they were in, they would
bounce around
inside his BS shadow system thinking they had found the real deal, but it was
just an elaborate stage set designed and orchestrated by Lincoln Fellows,
master of the game. The crackers would screw with worthless data, download
dummy files, do their best to steal or change shit, and leave their mark on the
system. But as soon as they logged off, the shadow system went back to the way
it was before they came in, waiting for the next moron to try. The cracker
always left without ever getting past Lincoln's little funhouse to the real
computer and data systems beyond. Brilliant. Unorthodox. Devastating. "I
am de man. I rule." Lincoln smiled to himself as he watched the intruder
move around in his shadow system.
Outside in the bushes Roland decided to
try to find out how employees might be organized into work groups at Gen-A-Tec.
He tried looking at the
/etc/group
file and the systems administrator
let him do it. Roland's contempt for this SA was becoming enormous. The guy was
a beast, a Barney, an e-jerkoff.
Roland could see that Jack Sasson's systems access rights were pretty
high. In fact, he was on all the key user groups, including the one called
reshcorn,
that probably stood for
Research Corn. "There we go, my man. We is strollin' with Roland . . .
hittin' wid Minton." Roland grinned as he downloaded the entire corn file,
but as it came in on his screen it seemed pretty damned ordinary. The kind of
stuff you'd find in the newspaper: descriptions of bio-enhanced corn, stories
about its new insect-repellent qualities and increased vitamin content—nothing
that the Strockmeister could use in court. Roland shrugged. At least he got the
goods as promised. Before logging off he downloaded a few of the company's
"Mahogany Row" e-mail boxes for perusal later.
He disconnected his laptop, closed the phone junction box, packed up his
equipment, then calmly walked back to his rental, got in, and pulled away.
"Adios, dickhead. You've just been kavorked," Roland said to
the five giant blocks of blue tile as he drove off.
Lincoln Fellows watched as the cracker
in the shadows logged off. The hacker had downloaded some newspaper articles
and dummy e-mails. "Good crack, butt-munch," he said softly to the
empty screen. "Come back any time."
"
H
e's not
converting as fast as I'd like," the solemn-faced Dr. Lance Shiller said,
slapping nervously the metal clipboard in his right hand against his thigh. He
was looking at Susan Strockmire and she, not her father, was the one causing
his nervousness. The woman was exquisite. He was determined to impress her with
some medical wire-walking, maybe take her downstairs for a cup of mud and a
little case consultation, get her away from the manic frenzy of the Cardiac
Care Unit at Cedars.