Hack (14 page)

When I looked up, Grace was sitting at her desk, transferring music to her player.

“Did you eat yet?” I said.

“Not yet.”

“Wanna go out?”

“You want to order pizza?”

“Again? No, I wanna go out.”

“Where to?”

“They have these things called coffee shops.”

“Duh. I mean the only good places are in town.”

“So?”

“So, it’s a long walk.”

“They have these things called taxis.”

“They have these things called taxis,” repeated Grace, acidly. I took my phone out, and dialed the local cab company.

“I’m going out,” Grace shouted down the hall, as she put on her jacket.

Fifteen minutes later, we were in Java Hut, sipping drinks and discussing entropic aspects of the non-existent universe, while we were waiting for the pepperoni to arrive. But I was thinking about Knight once again. I had found a safe haven for my hacking exploits, and a willing accomplice. But I hadn’t quite sealed the deal.

“Grace, can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“How would feel about me coming over to study, after school, for a few nights?”

“To study?”

“Yeah.”

“At my house?” There was something odd in Grace’s voice.

“Yes.” Now that I had said it, it sounded dumb. We had no classes together, and there was nothing to study.

“It’s just for a few nights,” I said, stumbling on when I should have shut my mouth, until I had figured out what I wanted to say.

“I could pay you.”

“Pay me?” Grace frowned.

“Yes. A hundred dollars for the rest of the week.”

“What are you talking about?”

I took a deep breath. Time to level.

“Look, you know I just moved to Elmwood, right?” No answer. Grace had stopped eating, and was looking over toward the nearest exit, ready to bolt when the weirdo made a grab for her.

57

“Well, part of the reason that my family moved here was because I got into trouble.”

The two girls at the next table suddenly stopped talking.

I lowered my voice. “I got caught computer hacking. It wasn’t anything major.

I didn’t steal anything. But I was doing something that I wasn’t supposed to be doing, and I got into trouble.”

“How much trouble?” Grace said quietly.

“My dad went crazy. He’s in security, and he had to leave his job. We came out here, and now he makes sure that I don’t use any computers unsupervised.”

“You just bought a computer,” Grace said, the unattractive line in the middle of her forehead getting deeper.

“Yeah, and I keep it in my locker, where my parents can’t see it. If they knew about it, I’d be grounded every night for a year. I can do some programming at lunchtimes, but I have to get it set up, do some downloads, and things. If I could just come to your house for a few days, I’d be able to get it ready.” It still sounded suspect.

“Why didn’t you tell me the truth?” Grace said.

I shrugged.

“I didn’t want to tell you that I had got into trouble.”

“Did you get arrested?”

“No.”

“Then what’s the big deal?”

“Ask my dad. He went off the rails. He said we have to move. He even banned me from having a mobile phone.”

“Is that why you wanted a phone?”

“Yes. How about it? Would you let me use your place just for a few days?”

“A few days?”

“Yeah.”

“So, let me get this straight, you want to be a computer programmer, but your parents won’t let you, and you want to come to my house and program computers there.”

“Yes.”

“But how can your parents stop you from programming computers?”

“I guess you’ve never met my dad. I am banned. Totally and completely. He wants me to go to medical school, but I can’t stand that sort of thing. I just like computers. It’s the only thing I want to do.”

“Okay.”

I breathed a sigh of relief.

“Thanks. You won’t tell anyone, will you? About my getting caught hacking?

It’s a shameful family secret, never to be uttered.”

“I won’t say anything. I guess that’s why you have that aura of mysteriousness about you.”

I didn’t reply. If there was a good answer to that one, I didn’t know it.

“Why don’t you want to go to med school?”

“It’s just not me.”

“I wish I could go.”

“Yeah? Doctor Mack?”

She shrugged. Then she picked up her coffee and drank some. That was a good sign.

I had to change the subject to something else.

58

“So, what do people do in Elmwood, when they are not eating pizza?”

“Oh, you know, movies, bowling . . . computer hacking.”

Funny. I let her have that one, and finished my pizza.

As we got out of the taxi back at her house, I asked, “Can I leave my stuff at your house?”

“Sure. No worries.”

59

The next day, after school, I went to Grace’s house. I unpacked my computer, and went through the motions of getting everything set up the way I wanted it, and then started dry running through possible scenarios. I was surprised at how easily I had got back into my old habits. It was as easy as getting back into bike riding.

I was also surprised at how quickly I had got used to being in Grace’s small shabby house. The place was old, and it was occupied by at least one criminal. But there was something easy about being there, and it certainly beat being at home with Hannah and Richard. Not that they were difficult to live with. But knowing that I, a convicted felon and an almost convicted terrorist, was cooped up with two medal-winning feds was a bit much. It was nice to be somewhere I wasn’t looking over my shoulder constantly.

“Want to go out later?” I asked Grace.

“Where to?”

“We could get some food.” She frowned, in a distinctly we-did-that-last-night way, and I switched to plan B. That was one of the lessons I had got from Olivia’s tips: always have a plan B.

“I could do with a look around the mall.”

“Okay. What time?”

“Later.”

“I’m going to turn on the TV, okay?”

“It doesn’t bother me,” I said.

Grace switched on her TV, and flipped through the channels. I put the noise out of my head, and got busy hacking. For the next hour, the world, the TV, and Grace all dissolved and vanished.

A hack goes like this: First you identify your target, which was simple in this case, since Knight now ran his own company. Then you do your research, start phoning the business and asking innocent-sounding questions, or dumpster diving.

After that, you find a flaw in the network’s security that allows you to run a program.

That program can give you a user account. You start guessing passwords, with the intention of giving your account administrator privileges. After that, you install your own backdoor, wipe the security logs clean of any traces, and don’t go there for a while. After you’ve laid low for a while, you go back and look around, and usually discover that while everybody else was looking in Area 51, Area 52 was where the government really stashed the alien spaceship. That essentially is how a hack goes.

In this case, I didn’t have the time, resources, or even the space in which to work. I had to break all the rules about breaking the rules. All I had was a week or two at the most, a stolen computer, and a girl’s bedroom complete with stuffed animals, perfume bottles, and Road-Runner-shaped slippers.

So, the first task was to have a quick look at Knight’s operation. I assumed that there was no way in, but part of me had to confirm that at least I hadn’t been complacent. Even if I failed, at least I had worked systematically, without overlooking the obvious.

Companies like Knight’s connected their servers to the Internet by registering with the authorities. I executed a script that pulled registration information for Knight Securities Inc. from the registrar, and got an immediate hit for his DNS (domain name service, which converts numbered Internet addresses to regular names like spods.com). The DNS value would be something I could put into a scanner. Such scanners can be incredibly fast, testing thousands of Internet addresses in little time.

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But in cases like these, the scanner I used was very slow. It had to be, because any storm of activity would be picked up by Knight. If you just scan slow and wide, fewer alarm bells go off. I also modified it to switch wireless connections at every failed attempt. That way, a different source address would show up on Knight’s server.

Again, that would cause fewer alarm bells to go off. But it meant waiting for several hours, while the results came in.

I left that running, and turned my attention to J. B. Enterprises. I tried the same series of steps, and got the same results. Nothing immediately obvious was showing as open.

I did a direct scan, not as worried about creating noise as I would be with Knight. After all, most companies can expect several such scans daily. It would just be lost with the others. But I got nothing from it anyway. I knew that Knight had a preference for Microsoft operating systems and the Cisco networking kit. I telnet-ed into the gateway, just to see if I could get a banner, but got nothing. I picked up my phone and rang J. B. Enterprises.

“Hello. J. B. Enterprises. How may I direct your call?”

I asked to be directed to the network manager.

“John Baxter. One moment, please.”

“Hello,” said Baxter in a slow drawl.

“Hi, there. I’m David Johnson. I’m calling from Network Solutions, Inc. We currently have a special offer on network switches.” I heard Baxter sigh. He was a busy network administrator. He didn’t need some cold-calling sales jerk to bend his ear.

“I don’t want anything,” he said bluntly.

I saw Grace looking at me. She must have heard me, and wondered what I was doing.

“That’s okay, sorry to have bothered you.”

“Yeah.”

“Before I go, do you mind if I ask if you have considered using Network Solutions hardware . . .”

“We use Cisco exclusively. I couldn’t buy what you are selling, even if I wanted to. Company policy.”

Well,
I thought,
at least I know you’re using a Cisco kit.

“Goodbye.” The phone went dead. Grace was looking at me, as if to ask,

“What was all that about?”

“You don’t want to know.”

I ignored her and went back to looking at my computer. I wasn’t disappointed by these early failures. For a start, I knew that Knight was always going to be hard.

Also, I knew that somewhere on one of his client’s machines, someone will have left a port open, ready and waiting for me to talk to it. Some office genius would have invented his own backdoor, so that he didn’t have to actually drive to the office to check his emails. Or some office slacker somewhere will have dismissed the notice every time it had popped up to tell him to update his machine. Finally, there were sixty-five-thousand ports on each machine, and I had several days to explore them.

Most computer delinquents I had met had more self-confidence than skills, and most of the hacks I had witnessed were not especially clever. They didn’t replace kernels with almost identical twins, they didn’t find clever ways to trip up Tripwire.

They just had more patience than the system administrators had time.

But in this case, I had no time, and I would have to use some smarts. While I left the script running, I racked my brains for some inspiration. One idea was to see if 61

anyone had previously attempted an attack on Knight, and left a few details somewhere on the Internet.

I surfed around, and while there were a few mentions of Knight having gone into business and becoming a marked target, there was nothing useful.

I carried on looking, typing on my notebook’s keyboard. Hack, hack, hack.

That was the sound I liked. It was the sound of the golden age of computers, of the old teletypes and line-printers. Maybe that was where the word ‘hack’ had come from—

those noisy machines.

It must have been something else to have lived in those difficult days. I read that artists appreciate their restrictions (presumably not including the restriction of not working), and such circumstances must have forced a programmer to be simultaneously creative and exacting—two opposite talents—while working on such ancient hardware, trying to find ways to knock a few bytes off of a program to save space.

“Do you want something to drink?” I came out of hack mode to see Grace walking back into the room, now wearing a T-shirt.

“Yes, thanks.” Grace went out, and came back a few minutes later, holding two cups of coffee. She put mine down on the desk, without saying anything.

“Where’s the bathroom?”

“Last door on the left.” She turned to the TV. That was something else I liked about Grace. I couldn’t really put a name to it. But my mother and her friends always seemed to be on guard when I was around. Everything would go quiet, but I could sense a certain tension. But Grace was relaxed. Normal. As if she wasn’t even thinking about me. I didn’t get it, I didn’t understand the difference, but it was a very good sign. I went down the hall, and into the bathroom. When I came out, I nearly collided with Grace’s stepdad.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi,” he replied, walking past. We left it at that. I went back into Grace’s room.

“I nearly crashed into your dad,” I said. Grace, who was leaning her head on one side to comb her hair, rolled her eyes. I picked up my cup of coffee, took a sip, and then went back to my computer.

Hack, hack, hack. Maybe the sound referred to the act of persistently chopping away at something. I checked the Knight scan, which had turned up nothing at all. He was firewalled and patched to the max. As a hacker, he knew all of the tricks in the book.

It was past nine o’clock when I came back down to planet Earth. I looked around. Grace was now lying on the bed, staring blankly at some serial drama on TV.

I was just going to say something when I noticed two long white scars, one on either side of her spine, where her shirt wasn’t covering her back. Each of the jagged lines was patterned with little white points, and it looked like her back had been cut open and sown back together again, Frankenstein fashion.
She probably had a childhood
illness, and had surgery,
I thought.