Hack (9 page)

At lunch, I decided to go computer hacking. I locked up my bike in the on-campus bike shed, and took a taxi into town. I used my new bank card to withdraw a hundred dollars, and then asked some kid on a skateboard where the nearest cybercafé was. I went in and rented a terminal for half an hour.

I had a dozen email accounts I had not checked for over half a year, which I had used mainly for keeping in contact with other hackers. But I wasn’t interested in them. I pointed “Internet Exploiter” at eBay, typed Elmwood High’s ZIP code, and a list of notebook computers for sale appeared. I spent five minutes going through dozens of listings, but one ad stood out as being suitable, especially because it was only a mile from the school.

“NeoTek GZA-1990 notebook computer. Like new. Very fast. Carry case included.” It was on buy-it-now for $299. It looked to me like the seller had copied the picture and the specs from the manufacturer’s website, and a quick surf to NeoTek.com showed I was right.

32

Some of the computer equipment that appears on the electronic auction sites is stolen, and you develop a sort of intuition about it. The way the picture had been lifted, the price (which was ridiculously low for the machine’s specs), and the fact that it was ‘like new’ (why buy it just to sell it?), along with a couple of other minor details, all came together to give me the idea that the notebook was probably filched goods.

That was why it interested me. I knew that petty criminals can be trusted to deny ever having sold anybody anything, at any time. I messaged the buyer asking if I could pick it up this evening, not expecting them to be in during the day.

While I waited, I checked out the best price for the model of bike I had just got, and also looked for local mountain bike routes. Fifteen minutes later, I got a reply from the notebook seller's girlfriend, saying that he was out, but if I paid by eCheck or cash, I could pick it up after school.

Before my arrest, I had stuck $1,000 in an eCheck account, hidden under a cryptic name and long password. Looking back, it was dumb of me to think that an emergency fund of one thousand dollars would be adequate. But it was enough to buy what I needed for the moment. I had to rummage around in my memory for the eCheck username and password. The money was still there. Somehow, the feds hadn’t got to it.

I quickly set up two new accounts, transferred all the money from my old account to the first new one, closed the old one, transferred the money from the first new account to the second new account, and then closed the first new account.

Paranoid? Maybe. But you never can tell.

I paid for the computer by eCheck, and messaged the seller once again, explaining that I would be around that evening to collect my new computer. I waited long enough to get the full address from the reply and print off a map of the seller’s location. At last, I had got myself something to hack on.

I headed back to school, and for the next few hours, endured more classes until the final bell rang. After unlocking my bike, and checking that it had survived its first day in the shed without damage, I set off.

I made my way down some side roads, into the neighborhood indicated on the map. This was the flip side of my new neighborhood. It was rundown, and some houses even looked abandoned. I pedaled slowly down the road until I came to the address I had memorized. It was a shabby, once-white, single-story house.

I made my way up the modest driveway, and pushed the doorbell. When that didn’t bring any reply, I knocked hard, and saw a shadow move behind the glass. A teenage girl opened the door, just enough to look out, and then stood, staring at me, without saying anything.

“I’ve come about the computer,” I said.

The girl gave me a gloomy once-over with her dark eyes, and then opened the door. I leaned my bike on the wall, wondering whether it would be safe in that neighborhood, and then went in. Without waiting to shut the door behind me, the girl walked off down the hallway, and stuck her head in a doorway. I heard her say,

“eBay.”

Then she came back toward me, and I got a better look at her. She was dressed strangely, and was wearing heavy black eye makeup. She looked okay, but odd. Her hair looked like she was in the middle of dying it, and hadn’t quite finished. I thought she was going to say something to me, but she turned suddenly, went into a room, and closed the door. I stood waiting in the hall.

33

For a minute, everything was quiet. Then a woman in her early forties came out into the hallway, and gave me the same gloomy once-over as the girl. She was dressed in what looked like overalls—the sort of thing I had seen the women from the paint factory in my old neighborhood wearing.

“Hi,” I said.

“He’ll be here in a minute,” said the woman bluntly, without smiling. I nodded, and the woman turned and went back into the room. For a minute, I stood there in the silence, looking around. Everything was old, but clean. The place looked like it had last been decorated at least two presidents ago, but steam-cleaned an hour ago. There wasn’t anything out of place—not a shoe or a paper clip.

I looked at the ornaments hanging on the wall. They had moons, stars, and astronomical patterns. I wondered again about my bike. I was just about to look out through the window in the door when a man walked into the hallway. He was tall, and had a long graying ponytail. He was dressed like a lot of truck drivers I had seen, and he was carrying a computer case.

“Hi,” I said.

“You’ve come for the notebook?” he asked. His voice sounded like gravel being trod on. I answered yes. He looked me over, and apparently came to the same conclusion as the girl and the woman, whatever that was. He handed me the case, still closed.

“Do you mind if I take a look?” I asked.

He seemed to mind, but I went ahead anyway. There wasn’t any place else I was free from prying eyes to switch the thing on, and no computer geek can resist a peek at a new gadget. I unzipped the bag, and slid the machine out. It was barely touched, not the sort that a guy from that neighborhood would have, but the sort that the boss on the top floor gets, just because the bigwigs always seem to want the best gadgets, and always seem to get them.

It was so hot that it nearly burned my fingers. The ad had said ‘like new,’ but looking at it, I guessed that it really was new, and seemed to be completely unused. A bit of the thin transparent plastic cover clung to the edge of the keyboard.

I can’t see the marks where it fell off the back of the truck,
I thought, but didn’t say.

“I like NeoTeks,” I said out loud, just to be saying something. I hit the power button, and the machine booted surprisingly quickly into Windows. There was no logon screen. I pushed the pointer around the screen to see what was installed.

Nothing. This was an untouched factory build, with no applications—not even freeware. No wonder it was so fast to boot up.

It always shocks me to think back to the equipment I used to hack on. When the feds busted me, they spent a lot of time trying to get me to tell them where the
real
hardware was hidden. They just couldn’t believe that some museum piece and a bit of free software were all I needed. They just couldn’t accept that I had done most of my best hacking on my little old Frankenstein, whose hardware was so old that it would not even run Windows properly.

“Great, I said, “just what I needed. Thanks for letting me pick it up.”

“No problem,” said the man, emotionlessly. I tried to stick the case into my backpack, but it wouldn’t go.

“Do you want to keep this?” I asked, putting the case on the floor. “I don’t need it.”

I turned and headed for the door.

“Goodbye,” I said as I left. The man didn’t reply.

34

I shut the door behind me. I got on my bike and pedaled down the road. A group of young men were standing on a street corner, apparently with nothing better to do than watch another young man with an expensive computer in his backpack riding an expensive new mountain bike through a crime-ridden and possibly violent part of town. I headed back to school, dumped my new computer in my rented locker, and then went back to the safety of my own suburb.

I got home, went to my room, and lay on my bed for a while, thinking things over. I had made a start on Zaqarwi, but it wasn’t enough to report about. I had also made a start on Knight, or at least I had a computer of my own. Tomorrow I would have a phone. I already knew roughly where Knight’s security business was, so that wasn’t the problem. What I needed to do was to find out the location of one or more of his regular clients. They were my way in, because I would never get in through the front-line security.

Whenever an ex-cracker sets himself up as a security consultant, he has to expect that he’s a hunted man. There’s nothing in the world that other crackers would love to do more than to break his security. It’s like conkers: If you win the game, you don’t just win one point; you get all the other guy’s points, too. He was at the top of the tree, and whoever toppled him got to be top of the tree. So there was no way Knight was going to let down his guard. But one of his clients might. That would be my way in—the one thing Knight couldn’t control: his own employers.

I smelled food, and went downstairs. Hannah had cooked dinner again. I got the idea, as we sat and quietly ate our food, that her life married to Richard was not exactly a bag of fun, and she had decided to put her concentration into domestic chores.

Hannah asked if anything interesting had happened at school. I shrugged and replied that it was going okay, that school was boring, and that I didn’t even know anybody there. We ate more or less in silence after that, and the rest of the night was a more sedate repeat of the first night, though Richard drank less beer.

After watching TV, I went upstairs and listened to the silence for a few hours.

Can I do it?
I thought, as I stared at the ceiling.
I now had a computer, but I also had
a constant audience. Can I get Knight, with everybody watching me?
I kept thinking.

I knew the answer was probably no, but I had to give it a try anyway.

35

The next day, I had computer studies again. In the previous class, I had set up two hacks. The first idea had been to get Logan’s password, and the other had been to hack into the electronic whiteboard at the front of the class, and get my skills noticed by Zaqarwi.

Logan handed out another assignment, titled “Using PowerPoint to Communicate Your Ideas.” With Zaqarwi sitting behind me, I did my best to look bored. It wasn’t hard. I became aware of a voice with a mild accent talking, at very low volume. I turned my head slowly, and found myself looking at Zaqarwi, who was holding a quiet conversation with another boy. I couldn’t hear what they were saying.

For the next few minutes, I stared at the whiteboard, but strained to listen to the voices behind me, without any success. Then Logan, noticing the conversation, said, “Excuse me,” to the boy who was talking to Zaqarwi. Just before he went silent, Zaqarwi’s companion said, “Gameworld on Saturday.”

I made a mental note of that.

When Logan was busy lecturing again, I quietly placed my memory stick into the computer’s port. Had they locked the port down to prevent it being used for transferring data to memory sticks? Maybe not. School system administrators are usually far too busy to follow all the security precautions that they would do in an ideal world.

I powered down the machine, and rebooted it from the memory stick, instead of Windows. Then I ran a program to dump the logon cache to the stick. That gave me a list of the last ten users to log on at that machine. That would include Logan’s username and password from the previous session. Of course, they were in encrypted form. But I had plenty of time to crack that. With the list safely on the memory stick, I turned off the machine, rebooted to Windows, and logged on. I typed in the assignment within a minute. It took another five minutes for the rest of the class to finish.

“Well done, David,” said Logan, as he passed by, checking on progress.

During the previous class session, he had done that after each assignment. That gave me in the region of ten minutes to do my own work.

After Logan wandered off, I opened the Windows file manager, navigated to my hacker tools directory, and got to work, using a tool for finding network devices.

Within a few minutes, I had discovered the sorry truth—that the school’s network server was running an old (cheaper and less secure) version of Windows Server. In addition, the domain controller was called ‘DC,’ the mail server was called ‘mail,’ the web server was called ‘web1,’ and the dial-in server was called ‘RAS.’

This was too easy. I actually prefer a challenge. There are hackers, and there are crackers. Computer hackers like to write programs to solve the most difficult technical problems they can find. Computer crackers like to write programs to break into the most secure systems they can find. Somehow, I managed to be both. It didn't matter to me what the challenge was, hacking or cracking. As long as the contest lasted, so did my interest. When it was like this, I got bored.

I checked the time. It was nearly the end of class. I opened a DOS box, and checked my machine’s network address. The network administrator had opted to use static IP addressing, for some reason, and the last digits of the IP were the same as the asset tag on the machine. I wandered over to Logan, and asked him a made-up question. When he finished giving me the answer, I sneaked a look at the asset tag of the whiteboard.

36

Back at my computer, I pinged the whiteboard, and it replied. It didn’t take much longer to hijack the remote control service. Now to make myself known to Zaqarwi. I put the whiteboard cursor in the middle of the board, and typed: “Logan’s Lectures: A Cure for Insomnia?”

I heard a couple of giggles from students who had been looking up at the front of the room at the time. I quickly deleted the text before Logan looked up. He gave a girl at the back of the class a nasty stare, and she put her hand over her mouth. Very quickly, I discreetly looked over at Zaqarwi, who appeared to have noticed what happened.