by J. D. German
Chapter 20 – Hacker School
The airport taxi pulled up in front of the Recurse Center at the corner of Broadway and Grand in Manhattan. Lynn wanted to drive Jack’s truck up here, but once she heard how bad the traffic really was she was glad Dave talked her into taking a plane. The cab driver pulled her suitcase from the trunk and wheeled it over beside her. She gave him a good tip and stood back to take in the front of the Center. It wasn’t new or impressive – it was just another old building repurposed to be a computer school.
When she walked in the front door a friendly young woman looked up and said “Hi. I’m Melanie. You must be Lynn Preston.”
“Yes, that’s me.”
“We’ve been expecting you. I’ll show you to your room, then you can stroll around and get the feel of the place. The new class orientation starts at nine in the morning.”
On the way to the room Lynn asked her “Is there a class schedule I can look at?” Melanie looked confused at first, then smiled. “Oh, we don’t have classes here. There is no structure. Everyone is given an assignment to complete, and when they’re finished they get a more difficult assignment.”
“I don’t have a lot of computer experience, What if I don’t finish the course during the six week session?”
“No one ‘finishes’ the course here. You learn as much as your intelligence and perseverance will let you in six weeks, then you leave.”
As they reached Lyn’s room she asked, “What time is dinner. I’ve had nothing but airline pretzels today?”
“That’s another part of our free-form philosophy. We have a small cafeteria that’s open 24/7 – you just walk in and tell them what you want. We call it the Recharge Station. There are small tables, couches, stuffed chairs scattered around. That’s where much of the interaction among our students happens.”
“So other students are allowed to help me if I get stuck?”
“Discussions with other students is where 90% of the learning happens around here. It’s a totally interactive environment – all day and all night. You sleep when you need to and spend the rest of the time working on your assignments.”
“Wow. I like it already.”
Lynn showed up at the small classroom just before 9 a.m. and took a seat in the back. She wanted to be inconspicuous around all these brilliant computer geeks. After three more students showed up Melanie came in.
“Good morning, everyone. Would you all please move down front here. I want you to get used to being close to other students from the beginning. Most very smart people grew up as loners, but you have to get over that here since interaction is essential to our learning plan. To break the ice in that regard, I would like each of you to tell us a little about yourself. Lynn, would you go first?”
“Well . . . to start with I don’t think I belong here. I’m not a computer genius, just someone who does computer investigations for a private investigative agency. My boss thinks I can be more useful to him if I learn about getting into financial records.”
A woman sitting next to her said, “Your talking about hacking. Right?”
“That’s not something my boss wants known, so we don’t use the word hacking. We call it special investigation.”
They all laughed at that. Melanie said, “We’re all familiar with the stigma attached to the word. By stigma I mean the illegality of most hacking. But around here, we’re not shy about admitting we’re hackers. The Government hires many of our top students to do their hacking. We run a special course twice a year for Government programmers to learn how to hack the hackers – to trace exactly who and where the foreign hackers are.”
After the other new students talked about their backgrounds, Melanie gave a run down of how things worked at the center, then brought in the four leaders who would mentor each of them through the learning process. Lynn was assigned to Lawrence, a thirty something man who seemed to be all business. He must be one of the loners, Lynn thought. Maybe I can help him come out of his shell while I’m here.
Their first assignment was to learn the major computer languages used by hackers and the computers they hacked into. Lynn and one of the other new students, Alyssa, spent the day in the classroom with an instructor who showed them that all computer languages are basically the same, with the same subroutines and structures. The differences were in the symbols and syntaxes used for each. He showed them some simple subroutines written in five different computer languages and ran them on the classroom computer to show that they all got the same result. Then he gave them some homework to do the same thing themselves, but with more difficult subroutines. He told them that the forty-two computers at the center all had the languages available on them, and they could pick any one they wanted to work on. Alyssa asked, “Will there be computers in our rooms so we can work there?”
“No, we want everyone to work together down here. Loners don’t learn much here.”
Lynn had brought her laptop and wanted to keep in touch with Dave and the others, so she asked if there was internet access available in the rooms for personal use. “We only use encrypted Ethernet cable access points, so there’s no Wi-Fi available. Wi-Fi is the easiest thing to hack into from the outside, and we don’t want anyone to know what goes on here. If you want to use your personal laptop there’s an internet café around the corner on Broadway that our students frequent.”
After class, Alyssa and Lynn headed for the Recharge Station to get something to eat. They chatted about why they were here at the Recurse Center. Lynn told her about her job as a computer investigator and her occasional interactions with hackers on the Darknet. Alyssa’s eye’s got big at the mention of the Darknet. “I’ve heard about the underground network of hackers, but I thought most of them used their skills for illegal purposes. I also heard that it is an exclusive group that won’t accept anyone but top-notch hackers into the club. How did you get in?”
“My husband got me in.”
“Oh, you’re married. What does your husband do?”
Lynn thought that it might not be good to tell her about her husband’s death, so she answered “He . . . he’s a retired Federal Agent.”
“An agent? You mean like FBI or CIA or something.”
Lynn gave her the standard answer that usually cut off that line of conversation. “Yeah, something like that. But if I told you any more, I’d have to kill you.”
Alyssa looked at her in surprise. Apparently she hadn’t heard that joke before.
“I was only kidding. . . . But I would have to give you a lobotomy.”
Alyssa laughed at that one, but quit asking questions.
Lynn sat down at an available computer in the main room and pulled out her notes from class. It didn’t take her long to come up with an algorithm – a set of rules that would take the input data, perform mathematic and logic operations on it in a certain order, and create the desired output. Lynn spent a little more time tweaking the algorithm, making it shorter and more efficient, before she turned it into a BASIC language subroutine. After that, she wrote similar subroutines in the other four languages; C, C++, SQL, and Java. After running them side-by-side to compare their performance, she made a couple of changes and declared her homework assignment complete.
It was still early, so Lynn got up to speed on a couple other languages, C# and JavaScript, and wrote subroutines to work the problem in those languages too. After that she decided to go back to her room and get some sleep. She lay in bed thinking about good times she and Jack shared and smiled at each one. Then the memories turned to their intimate moments – the ‘courtship’ when they kept their feelings in check, waiting until they could get married. The honeymoon at her Telluride home. She thought, The honeymoon was never over for us, was it Jack. She replayed some of the more delightful times in her mind – relived them in her imagination, until she noticed a familiar tingle. I’d better stop thinking about intimate moments – they’ll leave me with an empty feeling.’
Lynn switched memory gears to the
times they went cross-country skiing, enjoying the fresh snow, the smell of the outdoors, and their breath turning into tiny snowflakes in front of them. A few minutes later she fell asleep with those thoughts. At some point during the night she was certain she could feel Jack snuggled against her back, arms around her, kissing her on the back of the neck. When she awoke she realized that it was just a dream brought on by her reminiscing . . . or was it?”
Class the next day consisted of each of them calling up their homework programs on the big computer screen up front. When it was Lynn’s turn she displayed her algorithm and explained how she went through a couple of iterations before she was satisfied with it. Then she showed how she implemented it, first in the four assigned languages, and then with the other two. The instructor gave her a hard stare. “Did you get help on this from the more advanced students? They’re not supposed to interact with new students this early in the program.”
“No, it was all my work.”
“Then you appear to have a gift for programming. Creating the algorithm first was brilliant. Most student blunder through the routine in BASIC, then try to adapt it to the other languages, which is much more difficult.”
Alyssa looked down at the floor. Lynn felt sorry for her because she had done it the hard way. Lynn leaned over and said to her “Why don’t we work together on the next assignment, Alyssa.” She turned to the instructor. “That’s okay for new students to work together, isn’t it.”
“Certainly. Alyssa, stick close to this woman and you will learn a lot.”
They had their new assignment by lunchtime, so they got together on one of the computers and started in on it. Again, Lynn saw straight through to the essential algorithms and created them, taking time to explain her reasoning to Alyssa. For this assignment, they had to create a web page for a fictitious business in whatever language they chose.
“Let me try this on my own in C++,” Alyssa said.
“Okay, I’ll use JavaScript and we can compare results.”
Lynn finished up in a couple of hours, but she noticed Alyssa was lagging behind. So she wrote her own version in C++ to see if she could give the other woman some tips.
Three weeks later, Lynn had moved to the head of the class. Not just the new students, but the advanced students often came to her for help with a tough programming problem. Her latest assignment was to create a computer firewall – one that would block a dozen different viruses from entering the computer. To evaluate the students’ work one of the instructors would try several different techniques to try to break through the firewalls. Lynn had been struggling for three days to come up with a really good firewall. She decomposed firewall programs from some of the leading commercial suppliers, but wasn’t satisfied with any of them. They had to work for hundreds of different computer configurations to be sellable. Hers needed to work on only the high end computers like they had here at the center.
She started down several roads to creating an effective firewall, only to find flaws that could be exploited by the average hacker. As she tried to come up with some kind of unique approach, she remembered Jack’s Mirror Firewall, the one that would reflect the virus back to the attacking computer and infect it. She went up to her room and downloaded the copy she had onto a memory stick, then installed it on the Center computer she was working on. She made a few changes so the program wouldn’t actually infect the attacking computer, but instead pop up a graphic of an ugly cartoon virus on the screen with the caption “You would have been infected by your own virus if I weren’t such a softie.”
The next morning she reported that she was ready for the trial attack. She watched as her instructor hacked into the computer she was using and launched a virus attack. She couldn’t help but smile when she heard him say “What the hell! Where is this coming from.” He went to another computer and tried again, using a different approach, but got the same virus cartoon on that computer. He called a couple of the senior staff members over and asked them to do the best they could to break into her computer, but they all got the same result. They turned to look at her. “How did you do this? Where did you get the routines.”
They gathered around Lynn’s computer as she let the Mirror Firewall code scroll slowly down the screen. They asked her to stop the scroll several time so they could examine some of the subroutines. Finally her instructor looked at the others “This is amazing. It’s pure genius. Did you write this?”
She was about to answer when a man from the back of the group spoke up. “No, she didn’t. I recognize the programming style. I’ve seen it before on some stuff created by the king of hackers. I know we’re on a first name basis here, but would you tell me your last name, Lynn?”
“It’s . . . Preston, Lynn Preston.”
“You must know Jack Preston. This is his style. Are you his wife or his sister?”
“I’m his wife – his second wife. His first wife passed away. Jack and I were married almost a year ago.”
Half the group, mostly the middle-aged ones who knew Jack’s reputation, looked at her in awe. Her instructor said “Jack has taught you well, Lynn. How is he doing now days. I don’t see him much on the Darknet anymore.”
“He . . . uh, has retired to his cabin in the West Virginia mountains.”
“Wow. A new wife who is a knockout and a computer whiz, and a cabin in the mountains. How can you beat a retirement like that!”