Runaway Heart

FIVE

Roland Minton had taken a room in the new Fairview Hotel, on the thirty-second floor, with a spectacular vista of the San Francisco Bay. He always stayed at the new Fairview, because he thought the place looked like a huge rectal thermometer jutting up into the San Francisco sky, round and silver-tipped, its lone, mirrored spire flipping off the whole town.

He was planning to hit the bricks later in search of some prime female tatta, but first he decided to pursue the downloads he had cracked from Gen-A-Tec. Trouble was, the more he studied the stuff, the lamer it looked to him. The bio-corn file seemed like it was just low-grade PR, not the kind of sophisticated technical material you'd put in a secure computer.

So what gives? he wondered. He had just clicked over to the e-mails and was fast-scanning the messages when something got his hackles up. He couldn't pin it down at first, but something was definitely skeevy here.

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.