Maybe Patrick was a wizard after all.
* * *
Brody was still astonished by what he’d seen.
Spying on a beautiful young girl masturbating in the bath had really brought home how real this was. He shouldn’t have been surprised. People got up to all sorts of stuff in the privacy of their own homes. But it had still been an eye-opener.
And, he had to admit, very enjoyable.
So much so that he’d connected a spare laptop to his wall-mounted, 56” LCD television and left it displaying the Au Pair Affair streams in the background. Perhaps the girl would repeat the show later on. Or maybe the wife would catch the husband and the girl at it. Or maybe there were other locations on the site that were just as interesting.
As these thoughts passed through his mind, he realised how clever the whole SWY concept was. It had the drama of a soap opera crossed with the allure of secretly spying on a stranger. The global, long-standing success of the Big Brother television show had amply demonstrated how voyeurism hooks the public. Each series, contestants lived together for three months, with their every move observed by cameras and broadcast live to the public, who then voted to evict contestants each week. But the contestants were all too aware of the cameras and often played up for the audience. SWY was Big Brother for real. No cheap games and gimmicks to spice up the activities, just intimate, real-life moments on display from hundreds of contestants all over the world.
Brody checked the television screen. Not much was happening in the Au Pair Affair household. The Scandinavian girl was fully dressed and leafing through a magazine in the lounge. The baby was sleeping soundly in the cot in the nursery. No sign of the baby’s parents anywhere.
Brody restarted his randomised movie soundtrack playlist, careful to ensure it didn’t wake Leroy again. This time it picked ‘Gabriel’s Oboe’ from Ennio Morricone’s The Mission. Perhaps a bit too gentle, but good enough for now.
Brody pressed ‘Enter’ on the WhoIs lookup command he had typed in earlier. It ran with the parameter of the website’s domain name: SecretlyWatchingYou.com. Every domain name on the Internet is unique and registered in a central database along with certain key information such as IP addresses and contact details for the site’s administrators. Brody read through the results, which showed that the IP addresses for SecretlyWatchingYou.com were located in Russia. The contact details were for a Russian Internet Service Provider. This did not necessarily mean that Crooner42 himself was Russian; just that he was being smart by hosting the site there. Internet Service Providers in the Eastern Bloc countries did little to help police forces.
Armed with the IP address, Brody could begin his pentest — he corrected himself — he could begin his attack. Simply identifying and reporting on the site’s weaknesses was no longer his objective. He needed to break in and take control. He looked at his watch and automatically drew air in through his teeth. He had wasted too much time. Matt_The_Hatter could be way ahead of him by now.
Brody’s standard approach was to sneak through the outer perimeter of the site, find a vulnerability within its local network and then exploit it. The first defence of any network is the firewall, which is designed to only let certain types of traffic through on certain ‘ports’. His first task was to scan the firewall to identify which ports were open. He had to be careful to ensure the firewall did not detect it was being probed. It would automatically block the originating IP address. To counter this he, like many accomplished hackers, had set up his own ‘botnet’, hundreds of remote programs on servers distributed around the globe, ready to carry out his instructions.
On every system Brody had compromised over the last few years, he had left a small remote Trojan horse program running, known as a daemon. The daemon sat idle awaiting Brody’s bidding. The administrators of these networks had no idea the daemons were there. In his penetration test result reports that he presented to his clients, he conveniently forgot to inform them that he’d left a little piece of code behind. Brody thought of it as a tip automatically added to a bill for providing a good service. Not that he declared it or offered them an option to remove it.
Brody coordinated the activities of his remote daemons from a program running on his computer. He kicked it off, instructing the remote daemons to cycle through all ports on the firewall protecting the SWY site. The firewall had no idea this was a coordinated probe as the individual port scans were coming from hundreds of different IP addresses all over the world. Acting as one botnet, they sent their results back to Brody’s computer.
In the black hat community, botnets are used maliciously to run Distributed Denial of Service, or DDOS, attacks. Instead of subtle probing, the botnet would be set up to fully interact with a target website and flood it with legitimate looking communication requests. The website, unable to determine which were real and which were fake, would attempt to respond to them all, ultimately leading to degraded performance or even a complete system crash. Even when restarted, the DDOS attack would resume, crashing the site over and over. Many famous sites have fallen victim to DDOS attacks, including Twitter and Facebook.
Brody read through the logs from the port scan and frowned.
The scan had run smoothly, but the results gave Brody the first indication of the considerable strength with which Crooner42 had secured SWY. All non-essential ports were blocked, which meant he had no way to take control of the firewall itself and open up any port he needed. Instead, he would need to mask all his activities through port 80, the standard port used for website traffic.
He thought of himself as an archer trying to fire a grappling hook from a crossbow at the keep of a castle across a moat at night. Instead of firing over the walls to the keep in the centre of the castle, he had to fire through the huge gate, the firewall, which was closed to most traffic. But there was a small access hatch open within the gate, port 80, that he could fire the hook through. If he could snag the grappling hook onto the keep beyond, the web server, he might then have a something to work with. The question was, were the granite walls of the keep hardened to an impenetrable, smooth diamond, or were they rough slate, with small cracks that his grapple hook could snag onto?
To figure that out he first needed to map the grounds of the castle, the network, behind the firewall. He tried a simple trace route command but, predictably, the firewall blocked it. Instead, he fired up an advanced network sniffer program. He set it to work through port 80, and pointed it at the SecretlyWatchingYou.com IP address.
Brody left it running and went to the kitchen to make a coffee. The kitchen had every conceivable appliance installed and the bean-to-cup automated coffee maker did a fair job, but not good enough to prevent Brody popping over the road to Bruno’s Coffee House a few times a day.
Brody rented the flat fully furnished. The owner was a City broker who had spent a year refurbishing it, sparing no expense. A month after it had been completed, the broker’s bank had relocated him to Hong Kong, forcing him to arrange a quick lease.
Conveniently, Brody had walked into the letting agent’s office just minutes before they were about to publish the flat’s details on their website for all to see. The letting agent had stressed how incredibly lucky Brody’s timing was, as the area was very popular and flats like this were snapped up very quickly. Little did the agent know that Brody had surreptitiously hacked into their desktop computers a month before, and every time any new digital picture was added to their computers, a hidden program covertly emailed a copy to one of Brody’s anonymous email accounts. He spotted the flat within minutes of the agents transferring the pictures from their digital camera to the computer. Their camera even had a GPS positioning feature enabled and so the location of the flat was encoded within the JPEG file. He converted the GPS longitude and latitude to an address in Upper Street and checked it out. Within minutes, Brody knew this area was where he wanted to live. He fell in love with the lively vibe, the unusual restaurants and the proximity to central London. And the two-bedroom f
lat itself was the ultimate bachelor pad. It was a no-brainer. His higher than requested rental offer had sealed the deal, without it ever being advertised by the agent.
Espresso in hand, Brody returned to his computer in the living room.
The network scan had finished. It had found a router, a web server, a proxy server and three other unidentified servers. They were all Unix based, which were usually slightly harder to crack than Microsoft Windows-based servers. Brody’s priority was the web server. He ran some scans to work out the versions and patch levels of the Unix operating system. Knowing this would allow him to figure out if there were any published weaknesses that he could exploit. A few minutes later the results were displayed.
Brody took one look and buried his head in his hands. It was patched to the most current versions: the defences were solid. The walls of this keep were a smooth diamond. There was nothing to hook onto. He hoped Matt_The_Hatter was finding this as troublesome as he was.
He decided it was time to get creative. No more shortcuts.
He would dig a tunnel.
CHAPTER 5
“Okay everyone, can I have your attention, please.”
Jenny looked up from her desk. DCI Da Silva stood alone by the far wall of the Murder Investigation Room, a whiteboard stretching from one side of the room to the other behind him. Grisly shots of Anna Parker’s body in situ were grouped in the centre, held in place by magnets, captions written in marker pen underneath. A map of Paddington and a floor plan of the top floor of the office building were mounted to the right. Plenty more space was available on the left, but Jenny knew from experience this would fill up quickly. Once the post-mortem was completed later that day, a grotesque art gallery exhibition of Anna Parker’s corpse would appear, close-ups of her fatal wounds taking top billing.
Jenny looked around to see if anyone else had taken any notice of Da Silva. Uniformed officers and an interweaving of plain clothes detectives and civilian staff had begun to shuffle towards the front of the room, dragging chairs behind them or perching on the edges of desks. Jenny sighed, stopped making notes in the incident management log, decamped to the front of the room and stood facing the gathering in her place to Da Silva’s right.
Da Silva waited patiently until everyone was settled. The general hubbub gradually died down, as the group waited expectantly for Da Silva to take charge. Jenny saw that her core team sat in a huddle together to her left. DS Alan Coombs whispered something to DC Karim Malik, the back of his hand shielding his lips. Karim sniggered under his breath and passed on the witticism to DC Fiona Jones, who smirked briefly then resumed her straight face.
“Thank you,” Da Silva said. “I think it’s time we gathered our thoughts.” His words wouldn’t have been out of place in a church service.
Jenny wondered how Da Silva was going to pull this off. The last time he’d addressed the full Holborn Murder Investigation Team, on his first day in charge, he’d instantly damaged his credibility. It had been a fatuous speech full of empty corporate-speak: how he was assured he could rely on the same professional standards the team had given to his predecessor; how he needed two hundred per cent from everyone each and every minute of the day; how, under his leadership, they would quickly cut down their team’s monumental backlog of outstanding lines of enquiry, which, he stressed, was very visible in HOLMES — the computer system used by all forces nationwide to aid in the investigation of serious crime; and how, together, they would positively improve their team’s ranking on the dashboard of statistics reviewed monthly by the Met Commissioner, whom he happened to know personally.
Jenny heard Da Silva cough deliberately. An obedient hush fell across the room. She stared down at her feet.
“DI Price, would you be so kind as to take us through the case so far?”
“Me, sir?”
Shit, what a fool. Why had she asked that? She caught sight of Karim whispering to Fiona again, but Fiona ignored whatever it was he had said. Alan mouthed silently to her, “Go on.” Goaded, she continued speaking before Da Silva had a chance to reply. “No. Of course. Right.”
As a delaying tactic, she turned her back on the audience and selected one of the coloured whiteboard marker pens, tested the ink ran smoothly on the board, wiped it with her wrist to make sure it was non-permanent and turned back to the crowd.
“Anna Parker,” she stated, her voice catching. She cleared her throat and continued, far more clearly. “Second year music student at Trinity Laban Conservatoire in Greenwich. Raped and murdered by persons unknown during a fake cello recital held in a meeting room on the top floor of an office building in Paddington Basin.” Jenny paused and then said, almost to herself, “You know what, saying that out loud makes you realise how bizarre this case is.”
Nods of agreement around the room. Da Silva took a seat at the front of the crowd, facing her along with everyone else. She noticed that Jason Edmonds, the Crime Scene Manager was at the back of the room. He nodded at her; his usual smirk still evident.
“I see three main lines of investigation. The first is the crime itself.” She scrawled ‘CRIME SCENE’ on the whiteboard. “Second, there’s the location choice. We’ll dig into each of these in a minute; let’s just get the headings for now. Lastly, is the way Miss Parker was lured to the location.” Jenny had written two other headings: ‘LOCATION’ and ‘LURE’.
She had their attention now. Not bad for someone thinking on her feet. At least no one had disagreed.
Karim spoke up, “Jenny, what about a catch-all for all the other lines of enquiry? You know, other witnesses and suspects not linked to those three areas. Like her flatmates and the all the dodgy one night shags she’s had?”
She spotted Da Silva frown at Karim’s choice of language, but he said nothing.
“Good thinking, Karim.” Jenny wrote a fourth heading: ‘OTHER’.
“DC Jones,” said Da Silva to Fiona, “would you mind taking over the pen from DI Price?” He looked at Jenny and explained, “Struggling to read your writing.”
“Oh, sorry,” said Jenny, a flush of red rapidly spreading across her face. Bastard.
“Looks fine from here,” said Alan, coming to her rescue as always. “You can borrow these if you like, guv.” He held his glasses towards Da Silva by one of its arms. A few snickers sounded around the room.
“I can see fine, DS Coombs,” said Da Silva.
What an arse. Just as she was getting going, Da Silva had to reassert his authority by humiliating her in front of the whole team. Fiona joined her at the front and accepted the pen, shrugging to indicate she was just following orders.
Jenny put Da Silva’s comment to one side. “Let’s start with the crime itself and then work backwards.” She caught the Crime Scene Manager’s eye. “Jason, would you mind summarising what you’ve found so far.”
“Sure,” said Edmonds.
Jenny had rarely seen Edmonds without a crime scene suit and respiratory mask covering all but those bright blue eyes. Uncovered, his closely-shaven head was evident, which Jenny guessed was designed to defocus attention from early onset baldness.
“Based on initial assessments, the victim was killed between 6:00 and 8:00 p.m. last Friday evening —”
“It was definitely after 6:30,” Fiona jumped in. “We’ve got a witness to classical music being heard after then.”
Edmonds stared down Fiona. “As I was saying, based on crime scene evidence, absence of rigor mortis, body temperature, and a hundred other little things, that is my initial assessment. But thank you, it’s great that good detective work can corroborate my team’s findings.”
Someone whistled a sarcastic woo-wee. Fiona held her hands up in apology to Edmonds.
“Being a meeting room, lots of people have used it. At this stage, we cannot narrow down from fingerprints and other trace evidence how many people were in the room at time of death.” Edmonds looked at Jenny and then Da Silva. “We’ll need your team to go through the room bookings, find out everyone who
’s been there in the last month or so, and obtain samples for elimination purposes.”
Da Silva nodded. Fiona dutifully wrote the action on the board.
“But won’t we need to go wider than just the people who work in the building?” asked Karim.
“Absolutely,” said Jenny. “We’ll get Flexbase — that’s the company who runs the building for all the paying tenants — to give us a list of who booked each meeting room. Then we track them down. Take their samples for elimination. Find out who else was in their meeting, which could well be visitors. Track them down. Eliminate them. A lot of work.”
Fiona scribbled further actions across the whiteboard.
“If we’re really lucky,” continued Edmonds, “Dr Gorski will be able to lift prints from the victim’s body during the post-mortem and we’ll be able to match them to the surroundings. But don’t hold your breath. With the air conditioning, the humidity levels are low, which makes it harder.”
“Have you figured out the order of events?” asked Jenny.
Dr Gorski gave a slightly updated version of the same monologue he’d given that morning at the crime scene, describing the ordeal that Anna must have endured at the hands of the killer. As before, a hushed silence fell across the room.
And then, almost as one, everyone began talking. Offering thoughts, comments, ideas. Jenny took control and flowed them through to Fiona, one by one, for noting on the whiteboard. The contributions came from everyone, some of the best from the uniforms and the civilian staff. Jenny was pleased that the team was beginning to work as one, despite Da Silva’s unorthodox leadership style.
The list of actions under ‘CRIME SCENE’ reached the bottom of the board.
“Okay everyone, let’s move on to the location,” said Jenny. “As we all know, the choice of any location tells us a lot about the killer, particularly when it’s pre-planned — as it most certainly was in this case.”
Invasion of Privacy: A Deep Web Thriller #1 (Deep Web Thriller Series) Page 10