Crey Watcher
From:
j.samson@stanford.edu
To:
bluenerd@talons.net
RE: Protecting the laptop
Will-
Ill help. Naturally, everything I do in protection of the laptop will be well within established legal boundaries.
I have a few tricks up my sleeve, but it will take a few hours until I can have a decent protection up for the laptop, and even more time to identify invasive hackers and shut them down. Your mention of Crey involvement is all the head start I need. I have some good weapons on my side. A T3 internet line, dual redundant servers, multi-core processing capacity, and a few cans of Red Bull. Thats all the help I need.
-Active Flux
Joshua tapped the send key and watched his message vanish into cyberspace. He leaned back in his chair and stroked his chin, churning over likely tactics to be used by the offense, possible counters, and various safeguards that could be used. Without delivering one of his custom circuit boards, it would be impossible to make the system perfectly secure, but at the digital level, he could provide very good safeguards. After a moment of considering possible approaches, he go tup and took a shower, then changed into loose clothes, removed a soda from the fridge, and turned up the air conditioning. There was a zen aspect to hacking, and he wanted his technique perfect. Hacking. Indelicate term. Hacking was a title scorned by the more accomplished in the field. Hackers blundered into networks and secure data storage sites, looking to either cause mischief, or simply to brag as to what they had cracked. Some had criminal intent, but most were mere copycats of what others had proved possible. No, the best at manipulating the digital plane were an elite group who called themselves slicers. The distinction between hacking and slicing was as simple as the distinction one could find in a dictionary. Hackers hacked, removing whatever they deemed necessary and leaving a mess behind when they removed their computerized blade. Slicers, on the other hand, operated much like surgeons, entering to remove or alter something troublesome and to leave no trace of their presence when they were done. They were the ghosts of data recovery. Few, aside from themselves and those rare few who caught them, knew that a slicer had ever been present.
It was that subtle variety of hacking that Joshua practiced. He fired up his computer, a dual Xeon rig with dual power supplies and 8 gigs of RAM, all clocked to carefully measured speeds and cooled by phase change hardware. It was far more potent than the gaming machine a few feet away, and Joshua never activated except to do what he was about to attempt. He cracked his knuckles and ran through a series of practiced moves, accessing Talons network and breaking into the laptop he was supposed to be protecting. That was always the first step. Determine weak approaches, and from there you can plug them. For starters, he opened the computers web access controls and shut down most types of external access, such as the method he had just used. One thing many people overlook about the internet is that it is merely a link between computer after computer, each able to access the other to a limited degree. Web pages are, in the end, computer files, and if one can get to the level of those files, one can access all that is on the computer. Fortunately, the laptop did not host a website, which eliminated the easiest way in.
Joshua used his access to the laptop to install 3 different security programs, all commercially available and easy to use, but therefore also possible to crack. The final program he installed was one of his own design, and it inserted itself in the machine in such a way that one who was looking for it would have to go down to the very byte code of the machine and know each individual bit and byte, plus how to modify them to remove the program. In 4 years of using the program, Joshua had never found any one who could manage that. He placed a fifth program, one that would report any attempt to upload or download data to him. The program also spiked the computer that was attempting access, thus telling Joshua where to go to work. That entire process took 90 minutes. Joshua leaned back and popped open his second Pepsi. Now all he could do was wait. It took 2 hours before the program registered an attempt at access.
Access ident: 82.96.71.253:10330
System stats: Intel Xeon, 96 cores, 192 Gb RAM, 10 Tb storage, Sun Microsystems RareBIOS v.9.7.1, Mandrake Linux OS
Internet connection: T3, bandwidth >10,000,000Mb/s
A single thought passed Joshuas mind; Holy [censored]. The system the request had come from was massively powerful, the kind of thing only a potent corporation could assemble. A potent corporation like Crey Industries. The Sun Microsystems RareBIOS meant that the system had been custom built and clocked by professionals. The Mandrake Linux OS was troubling, as that OS was open source, and could be damned near adamant when modified by an expert. Now that he knew what he was up against, Joshua opened his systems command prompt. They wouldnt be looking for an intrusion into their systems, only for ways to intrude into the laptop secreted in the Aerie.
C:>ping 82.96.71.253:10330
pinged 82.96.71.253:10330 with 4 mb of data
10 packets sent
10 packets received
0 packets lost
C:>
Excellent. The enemy server was not denying attempts at access. Pinging was just a communication between computers, seeing if they could successfully send data over the ether. Communication between the computers was the first step in cracking one. As Joshua pondered his next step, the enemy got smart.
pinged by 82.96.71.253:10330 with 10 mb of data
Joshua pounced on his keyboard to interrupt the enemy ping. The maneuver he performed next was known as a spike, and was a classic move with very little that could be done against it. What a spike did was replace the data that had been sent to his computer with a program of his own devising. It was an almost perfect method of getting a program into an enemy computer, but the catch was that the enemy had to give you the opportunity, and you needed to be fast to catch it. As a rule, the best hackers never pinged a target computer more than once.
C:>stop ping (82.96.71.253:10330)
C:>overwrite C:/Programs/Data Gathering/Ping Response/JollyRoger.exe to ping (82.96.71.253:10330)
ping sent
ping received
C:>
Excellent. Joshua had just uploaded his program of choice to the enemy system. It was called JollyRoger, and was written by a computer science instructor back at Stanford. There was no end to how clever it was. It automatically compressed itself to the size of the ping it was sent back on, so even though the file was over 100 Mb, it appeared as only the 10 Mb of the ping from the Crey hackers. A few seconds after the program was sent, a new window opened on his monitor. The label was Command Prompt: 82.96.71.253:10330. Joshua had just struck system-cracking gold. The command prompt allowed anyone who knew the proper commands to do just about anything with a computer, and he was now sending his commands to the enemy computer. The connection was two-way, however, so as long as he had the command prompt up, the enemy had a clear path to his machine. He moved quickly.
C:>print Nice try. Leave the Talons alone, or this wont be the last you see of us. Trust me, there are Talons far more dangerous than I.
The message he tapped into the keyboard appeared on the enemys command prompt, and an unspoken rule in hacking took over. Once your command prompt was accessible, you were beaten. There was almost no way to counter it. Sending a message, as Joshua had just done, was considered rude, but he wasnt really concerned with pissing off Crey. They had it in for heroes, and for that indiscretion, common courtesy would fall by the wayside.
C:>format C:
Are you sure? (y/n)y
formatting
That was the coup de grace. The Crey systems primary hard drive was even now removing the first few lines of code from all of its files. It wasnt as good as wiping the primary drive completely, but it would buy at least 48 hours. The problem with formatting a hard drive was that it wasnt permanent, but it did take a long time to determine which file was which. Data recovery specialists could charge up to 50 dollars per gigabyte of data recovered, and the Crey system had 10 terabytes of data, or 10,000 gigabytes. Joshua almost felt sorry. That was a fine system he had broken. With that, he shut down his machine, and any trace of his presence vanished from the digital plane.
[[A little something written for an RP storyline in the Talons of Freedom, and adapted for this contest.]]
