What was it?
He slowed his scan and began to page the e-mails one
sheet at a time.
Hold it! Stop!
The e-mail he was looking at was a communique from the head of
personnel. He'd seen that e-mail before, somewhere else. He selected a
different e-mail box and searched through it.
There it was again. The same
request to submit credit forms for reevaluation.
What is going on here?
Roland wondered. He tried a
few more boxes,
and each one of them had the same e-mail loaded in with a bunch of other
worthless clutter. Come to think of it, none of these e-mails looked legit.
There were no letters containing specific project names, and that same, damned
e-mail from personnel was in a half-dozen inboxes.
Okay,
he thought.
So
maybe the company sent this same request to a bunch of employees.
Roland
switched to the outbox files and started scanning.
There it was again!
The same e-mail requesting credit forms.
What is going on?
He
could see how a group of employees could all have
received
the same
e-mail, but how in the hell did ten or twelve people all
send out
the
same e-mail, each message worded exactly the same?
What the fuck is this? Am I getting chewed here?
Was this whole system he'd accessed just an elaborate shadowbox of some
kind? Had he been tricked? He sat back and scratched his purple hair, all
thoughts of poontang gone. His credentials as "master of the game"
had been severely called into question. Maybe the systems administrator at
Gen-A-Tec wasn't such a Barney after all.
As Roland scanned through his stolen material he became more convinced
that he'd been scammed. The lousy security, the holes in the version software,
the easy password file—the whole thing was dogwash. Roland Minton, Cyber Hood
of the Internet, had gone down in front of this scam like a broken deck chair.
The systems administrator was smart, but in the end he'd gotten lazy and
started to fill up his dummy mailboxes with the same memos—and Roland caught
him.
The shadowbox is a nice little piece of security,
Roland thought.
But what are they protecting? Whatever it is, they sure don't want anybody
outside the company A-list to see it.
Roland decided he would find a way
in, even if it meant forgoing the belly ride in Berkeley.
As he continued to scan the e-mails, another line popped out at him:
We should put in
a request for additional funding before darpa closes its budget in the fall.
Roland had heard of DARPA. It was a black-ops U.S. government defense
agency that developed advanced weaponry. The acronym stood for Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency.
In composing his phony e-mails, Gen-A-Tec's SA had obviously cut up some
real ones and scattered them around in the boxes as filler. This reference to
DARPA was ominous and interesting.
Why does DARPA, a weapons research
agency, fund genetically enhanced foods? Damn strange.
. .
Roland sat back, glared at his screen, and tried to devise another way
to gain access to the mainframe of the Gen-A-Tec computer. He needed to get
around the shadowbox that protected it. He sat on the edge of his bed and ran
through his options for almost fifteen minutes.
In the end, he decided it would be best to go in the way someone at
Gen-A-Tec would go in if they were working from home.
Would they go in via
the Net?
He decided the security system looked way too slick for that.
Gen-A-Tec would have layers and layers of safeguards to protect them from the
millions of nosey Net users.
So, how then?
After a half hour of more brain-drain he decided to use the company's
own phone lines again. Most big companies have lines with some sort of remote
phone access, usually for the bigwigs who want to work at home.
Roland knew that, no matter how state-of-the-art a Local Area Network
was, Murphy's Law assures that if something can go wrong it will. Roland hooked
up his laptop to the modem jack in his hotel room and brought up a piece of
software called a Tone-Loc. It was also known as a War Dialer, or Demon Dialer.
Roland then told the Tone-Loc to dial every number, beginning at
555-6000, through 555-6999, and to log the results on his laptop. When his
dialer called each of those
lines, one of six things would happen: If it got a live person,
the dialer would immediately hang up, it might also get a no-answer, a fax, an
answering machine, voice mail, or a busy. Roland was looking for busy signals,
and he particularly wanted one on a line that belonged to a high ranking
officer at Gen-A-Tec—someone with A-level systems access.
He knew this process would take a few hours, but he had gone into killer
mode. He viewed his defeat earlier that day as a personal challenge. Roland
Minton was about to kick some cyber-ass.
Two hours later, he printed out the results of his demon dialer:
5556000.........ANSWERING
MACHINE
1734 HRS
5556001.........DISCONNECT
1734 HRS
5556191.........VOICE
1840 HRS
5556198.........VOICE MAIL
1842 HRS
5556195.........BUSY
1842 HRS
5556309.........BUSY
1915 HRS
5556419..........V. 39
FAX
1915 HRS
It went on like that for twenty pages. Now Roland concentrated on the
busy lines. He noted who was talking, or if they were talking at all. Often a
busy meant somebody was working from home on a computer. Roland needed to
phreak the phone system and eavesdrop on each of these busy connections.
Feeding a specific sequence of paired tones much like touch tones down
the phone line, Roland was able to get a behind-the-scenes look at the local
system. A little more phreaking and his computer was acting as a terminal to
the phone company System-7 switch-operating software. In essence, he now had
the same access and capabilities as a
611 Repair Operator. Next, he brought up the Gen-A-Tec numbers that were
busy and sampled them one at a time. Several were conversations, but then he
got one with the distinctive sound of a modem hiss, indicating that the person
was hooked to the mainframe computer inside Gen-A-Tec from his home computer.
One by one, Roland went down his list of busies, accessing each, checking
against his management list, looking for the right password, searching for a
Mahogany Row guy with total access.
After an hour of sampling lines, Roland finally hit upon exactly what he
was hoping for. It was his old bud, Jack Sasson. He was working on-line from
home.
Roland set a monitor on Sasson's phone line to steal any data that
crossed that port, then kicked Mr. Sasson off the system.
Roland smiled. He could imagine the CFO at home, cursing the computer
system that had just fed him a line error and unceremoniously logged him off.
Now Sasson would have to go through the complicated relog-on process with all
the damned security checks just to get back in, and Roland Minton, master of
the game, would vacuum up the entire security code.
Roland waited patiently in his hotel room for Sasson to log back in.
Within seconds, the CFO was coming back online. Now, Roland's little sniffer
captured all of Sasson's secure data, line by line. The access and security
code would give Roland a red-carpet ride right past the shadow system, straight
into the main data bank at Gen-A-Tec.
Once he had the code, Roland turned off his computer and looked at his
watch. It was 7:40 in the evening. He picked up the hotel phone and requested a
wakeup call for 2:30
a.m.
He
figured by then Mr. Sasson would long be off the system and Roland could jump
on and take his place.
He lay back and laced his bony fingers behind his neck. He couldn't help
but smile, because he knew he had assed-out the systems administrator, big
time. The Robin Hood of cyberspace was back in charge, about to jack some
serious shit.
S
usan watched through the window in the
cardio unit as her father was placed on the bed next to the defib machine. The
nurses removed his shirt and had him lie back on the table, then smeared gel on
his furry chest. Herman looked up and saw her worried expression through the
glass. He stuck his tongue out at her. She couldn't help herself—she laughed.
Then she put her thumbs in her ears and wiggled her fingers back at him. She
was scared out of her mind, but as she'd predicted when she suggested the more
intrusive operations to him twenty minutes ago, he had just listened with a sad
expression and shook his head no.
Now Dr. Lance Shiller and two nurses manned an electro-shock machine.
They hooked Herman to a negative ground and placed a rubber plug between his
teeth to prevent him from biting his tongue. Dr. Shiller picked up the defib
paddles, put them against Herman's chest, and let him have it.
Susan jumped; she actually cried out when her father arched his back
under the current. Then she leaned forward, trying desperately to read the
faces of the people in the room. Did it work? She couldn't tell.
They did it three more times and Susan thought she was going to faint.
Tears of relief came to her eyes when Dr. Shiller turned and gave her the
thumbs up. A few minutes later he left the room, joining her outside where she
was still glued with her nose to the window.
"Okay. He's converted," Dr. Shiller said.
Susan nodded and smiled, but she couldn't speak. Her eyes were still on
her father, who was being disconnected from the negative ground and getting the
goop cleaned off his hairy chest.
"We'll keep him here overnight on an EKG monitor to make sure he's
all settled down. Then you two can go roll the bones with his life, if that's
still your plan. Go fight your damn lawsuit, Miss Strockmire, but this is, in
my opinion, an extremely high-risk idea. So you keep your eye on him. Here's my
pager number. If he goes into an arrhythmia I want to know immediately."
She took his card. "Thank you, Doctor." She said, finally
looking away from her dad and fixing her reef-water blues on Dr. Shiller,
seeing anger flash in his dark browns. "Don't be mad at him; he's only
trying to do what he thinks is right."
"So am I," the young heart surgeon said.
Susan brought Herman a tuna sandwich on
a tray from the cafeteria. The cardio unit food was bland, vitamin-enhanced
pabulum. While she went over the pretrial briefs and motions Herman revised his
opening statement, eating and scribbling notes on a yellow legal pad. He had a
nine o'clock appointment to prep the last of his three butterfly experts.
Dr. Deborah DeVere was a world-renowned entomologist Herman had flown in
from the University of Texas. He was going to put her on the stand first, to
explain the monarch butterfly's eating and migration pattern. He had another
doctor and a university professor on retainer to describe the deadly effects of
bio-corn on the monarch's genetic structure and reproduction. Dr. DeVere, whom
he hadn't actually met but had briefed over the phone, was scheduled to arrive
in about twenty minutes.
Herman continued scribbling on his yellow pad, scratching out phrases,
reconstructing ideas and arguments, while Susan worked on her laptop retyping
the new version and printing it out on her portable printer. She glanced at the
heart monitor
beeping ominously from his bedside table.
"Stop looking at that thing, it's not going to go off. It is in my
control," Herman said, switching to his spooky
Outer Limits
voice:
"We control the horizontal. We control the vertical."
She reached out and took the hand that was still finger-clipped with
several electrical feeds. She squeezed it carefully. "I still don't see
why you won't just ask for a continuance."