Art and Arsenic
by
Valerie Murmel
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Company and product names mentioned herein are the trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment. It may not be re-sold.
Copyright© 2015 Valerie Murmel. All rights reserved. No part of this text may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Contact the author at: [email protected] .
Original cover art created by Evellean via Behance for Valerie Murmel. Copyright© 2015 Valerie Murmel.
Table of Contents
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
About the author
1
He was desperately hoping that I could fix his most pressing problem.
He had told me that, in so many words, as soon as I walked in. His pleading eyes confirmed that it was true.
I smiled benevolently. I was used to hearing it from people in his position.
“I think some quiet place would be better for debugging.” I said, looking around.
“Oh, no problem. Please come into my office. This way.” The large man led me across the spacious white-walled room to the office in the back. “Please, take a seat. Would you like some coffee?”
I refused the suggestion of coffee, requested tea instead, and thanked him.
He brought me a cup of steaming tea from a small kitchen further down the hall and left, closing the office door behind him.
I made myself comfortable in his office, putting my laptop on the solid wood desk and connecting it to the giant monitor, and settling into the big brown leather chair. The furniture in the room was all large, to match the size of the man. The office, besides the big desk and the chair, had a desktop tower computer on the floor, and book shelves along the back wall with art-related books on them. There were no windows. The room was at the back of a building that fronted one of the streets in downtown Kirkland. In the spacious white-walled area out front, a couple of guys in overalls were moving big bubble-wrapped rectangles of stuff and putting them against the walls.
Fred Nordqvist himself was a rotund man of above-average height in his late fifties, with graying hair, bulbous nose and blue eyes behind his glasses. His forehead seemed immobile and a bit shiny (Botox? I wondered), and when he handed me my cup of tea, I noticed that his nails were bitten down to the quick.
Fred had called my computer security firm’s office earlier in the day in panic. His art gallery’s website was not loading. He was babbling that he suspected the site’d been hacked, insisted that it needed to be fixed immediately, and agreed to pay our rates for a minimum 5-business day engagement, with the consulting fee upfront. So when I arrived at Nordqvist Fine Art, located close to the waterfront in Kirkland, I was prepared to trace a huge data breach like Target’s, but not really expecting to find one.
I was already annoyed by the time I got to the gallery. I had been in a bad mood from the time I woke up that Thursday morning, hearing the persistent drumming of rain on my roof and pulling more blankets over me in an attempt to keep from freezing. The late-March weather, which had flirted with spring and sunshine the day before, had turned bone-chillingly cold overnight. Bitty, my cat, was also discombobulated because she couldn’t sleep on her favorite sunny spot in the guest room (which she considered her room by all rights), for lack of sun, and had been expressing her displeasure at the fact with loud meows since dawn.
Then, when brushing my hair in front of the bathroom mirror, I found several gray hairs among my normally-brown shoulder-length coiffure. On one hand – what did I expect, after getting to my mid-thirties? On the other hand – I had thought that the face looking back at me in the mirror each day hadn’t changed since my teens – and now that my hair had obviously changed, maybe I was wrong about my face too? But I got carded in the grocery store just last week!
Twisting and turning in front of the mirror, I tried to imagine ways of dealing with the gray. I could get highlights – but that would mean going to the salon and spending at least an hour there. (Would it be an hour? I didn’t even know how long such a process would take. And I always felt like a fish out of water in a beauty salon.) And highlights would require regular upkeep – I frowned at the thought of going to the salon every (what? 3 weeks? I didn’t know that either). That was a world in which I simply didn’t belong, in spite of reading Vogue magazine occasionally. I liked seeing beautiful models on its pages, and admired how inventively-dressed they were, but was at total loss about how to apply that to my own appearance. The person I saw in the mirror didn’t look like a model – just over 5’6” in height, with long slim legs and neck, but short arms and a torso that books on “dressing for your shape” called an inverted triangle. I was an engineer living in the drizzly Pacific Northwest – which meant I wore rain gear, jeans and hiking boots almost everywhere I went, put up my hair in a ponytail and didn’t have much chance to wear dresses, skirts, heels or elaborate hairdos.
The other option was to dye my hair some strong color that would have no intention of looking natural. I had dyed my hair at different times before, as a teenager in high school, college or starting out in the software industry. I had purple, or black, or bright orange, or flame-red hair before, and I pondered which color would suit me best. I preferred the darker colors (I thought they made my blue eyes pop), but the problem was that my eyebrows were light, almost blonde. With dark hair and pale skin, my face would look washed-out. Hmmm, it looked like I had to re-commit to having my brows and lashes regularly tinted by a professional. So it seemed I couldn’t really avoid the hassle and time expenditure of going to some beauty salon. Having resigned myself to that, I decided enough time had been spent contemplating my looks, the beauty industry, and the expectations for women’s appearance in the twenty-first century, and headed to work.
At work, I had been tracking a new hacker collective that claimed to have shut down a couple of Bitcoin exchanges recently, and pulling myself away from that to go restore some art gallery’s website didn’t appeal much. A small unknown site just didn’t warrant the same level of excitement as anything involving a distributed cyber-attack, potential money laundering and a crypto-currency with an unknown creator referred to only by a pseudonym. But my boss pointed out that this client was local, more than willing to pay our rates, that getting out of the office might do me some good, “And besides, you might like some of that art stuff in the gallery.” Fighting my annoyance at the interruption of my normal work, I got my laptop and bag and drove to downtown Kirkland, a community of expensive houses hugging the Lake Washington waterfront, great views, fancy boutiques and tech start-ups. There were plenty of hair salons in the vicinity, I thought. Maybe I’d be brave enough to do something with my hair while I’m
there, if the assignment itself turned out to be quick.
To be totally honest, I was mildly curious about who would want to hack an art gallery’s web site and why: from my short conversation with Mr. Nordqvist on the phone, I knew that they were not selling anything through their website (so no processing of credit cards or other payments that the hackers would be interested in), had no customer log-in screen (so no possibility for harvesting of passwords to try to use on other sites), and only gave visitors an opportunity to sign up for a newsletter. So I supposed that an attacker could get a list of e-mails and mailing addresses of local art lovers – but that by itself hardly justified such an attack, I thought.
“Thank goodness you’re here! We are preparing for a big opening tomorrow. Seven works of David Cox!” These were the words that Fred Nordqvist greeted me with on the doorstep of his gallery. When he saw that the name didn’t elicit any signs of recognition from me, he explained: “The 19th-century painter. Works from a private collection. It’s a big deal. We want people to be able to find us, and attend! So the website has to be up! It’d look very bad on us if it’s inaccessible.”
It turned out that the gallery’s website was made using a simple template. I logged in with the password provided by Fred and checked the traffic coming to the site, still a bit miffed at the turn of events. To think that I was missing out on keeping close tabs on hacker forums, or trying to figure out what North Korea might be up to, for this, a two-page cookie-cutter website?! Oh well, the sooner I got through with this, the sooner I could get back to more interesting stuff.
I got the “signature” of the incoming traffic, and found that over 99% of it matched that of a well-known hacker tool available for a free download on the Internet, if you knew where to look – D3stroyZ (pronounced “destroys”). That meant that, most likely, whoever was running it was an amateur who just downloaded the tool and pointed it at the target, without any further tweaks, or any other signs of computer expertise.
I put in place a defense: a block for the bad traffic by configuring one of the web server modules to drop all incoming requests matching the signature, before any page rendering or any expensive server side processing had to happen. Then I watched the effect – immediately, I saw the number of requests actually reaching the web site, drop to normal and stabilize there. I clicked refresh on the website in my browser – it came up. The Nordqvist Fine Art web page was accessible again.
Having stopped the attack, I went looking for who the perpetrator might have been. A little more digging showed me that all the traffic originated from the same IP address. Geo location showed that it was a local address. This meant that whoever was running this didn’t even bother to disguise the IP, or run the attack from a different place – or didn’t know how to.
As I was contemplating that fact, I heard some noise – a door closing, perhaps? – out in the large main space. Footsteps crossed the entire gallery floor and were nearing the office door.
“Fred! Fred!” A man in his late twenties, in glasses, blue overalls and a black T-shirt opened the door and stood in the entryway. I caught a glimpse of him around the side of the monitor. He was one of the guys I had seen handling the bubble-wrapped rectangles – which I assumed to be paintings – in the gallery area. He glanced around the office:
“Are you in here?”
I realized that he couldn’t see me behind the giant monitor on the desk, and was about to look around the side of it, when I heard Fred’s voice coming from the adjoining space.
“Over here! In the inventory room.”
The man turned and walked out, leaving the office door open.
I heard his footsteps go down the hall, and then a door close – probably the door to the inventory room. Then voices coming from the next room. I looked up: the modular walls in this space didn’t go all the way up to the ceiling, and there was a small gap at the top, allowing the sound to carry.
“Hi, Alex. What’s going on?” Fred was saying.
“We need to talk.” The other man’s voice had an urgency to it.
“What about?”
“I told you before, – after this show, I’m gone. I don’t think I can continue to work with you.”
“I don't think this is the time to be getting into this.” Fred sounded impatient and dismissive.
“I do. I feel the current situation is unfair.”
“Are you done with setting up the show?”
“Almost. I’ll finish it, and do the opening tomorrow. But I’ve been working for you for more than a couple of years, and I think, all things considered, the money is not enough.”
I heard something moved along the floor – perhaps Alex or Fred got up and pushed back a chair. “I’m not going to be doing this any more. Just send me my payment for this month, and I am done.”
“Are you saying you will actually stop working with me?” Fred’s voice came across, cold as ice.
Up to now, I was scrolling through the logs for the website and trying to ignore the noise of the voices. Fred’s tone made my ears perk up.
“Yes, that is what I am saying.”
“Is that really wise? You are forgetting just what I can influence.”
Right then, there was a splash of noise in the main gallery space, the front door seemed to open and a couple of new voices carried.
“Sounds like they are here.” I heard a door open nearby – I assumed it was the inventory room door – and the sound of steps going down the hall, into the main gallery space.
“We’ll talk about this later.” I heard Fred say.
I quickly got up from behind the desk, walked to the office door and closed it quietly. If Fred were to remember my presence in his office, he might suspect that I heard the conversation with Alex – and something told me that it was not a conversation he would have liked others to overhear.
Curious: not only was someone interested in destroying Fred Nordqvist's business, but one of his employees had just announced he was quitting, and not on the most amiable terms. It seemed he might have more than one pressing problem. Maybe this assignment would be interesting after all.
2
Through the closed door, I faintly heard a burst of conversation and activity in the main room. I could distinguish a woman's voice exclaiming something and laughing. The noise of voices didn’t sound antagonistic, and my attention went back to the web server logs and HTTP signatures.
What I was dealing with at the gallery was a plain Denial of Service (DoS) attack. The idea behind such attacks is to overload the server with malicious requests, so that it is unable to process any legitimate traffic. I ran the command “whois” on the IP the traffic was coming from, and it came back with: “Ravenswood Art Gallery”. Linda Raven was registered as the owner, with a phone number noted and an address that looked to be a couple of blocks away, on one of the streets leading to the Kirkland waterfront.
OK, it looked like a local competitor, who decided to try a little cyber-attack to interfere with Nordqvist Fine Art. I brought up the Ravenswood gallery’s web page, using an anonymizer software just in case, so that whoever ran that site wouldn’t be able to tell where I was browsing from, and found myself looking at a photo of a smiling woman in her early fifties, in the upper left of its website. She had with jet-black hair (maybe to go with the “raven” name) and blue eyes, surrounded by a soft glow achieved by a filter. She was wearing red lipstick, and in her ears were earrings with matching long red inlays (maybe corals or semi-precious stones?). As for the art, her site said that they sold European 19th and 20th century painting, sculpture and photography. So, a direct competitor, going after the same market as Nordqvist Fine Art, it looked like.
About a minute later, as I was perusing the Ravenswood Art Gallery’s site, I heard steps going back towards the inventory room, then sounds of drawers opened and things moved across the floor. The voices next door resumed, less distinct than before. My un-intentional eavesdropping continued.
“As I said
already, I thought about this. I have to be realistic.”
“Hold on, aren’t you being a little drastic?”
“No. I’m telling you, I’m done after this one.”
“Oh are you?” Fred’s voice was quiet and deliberate, so that I had trouble making out his words. “You know, I can obliterate your reputation with just a couple of words to the right people.”
“If you do that, it would destroy you and your business, too!”
“Oh, I’d say that I didn’t know any better. And that I came clean the moment I suspected anything! These paintings are just a part of my gallery’s business – a lucrative part, for sure, but there is so much more that I can sell. Jewelry, photographs, sculpture. I’ll take a temporary hit and move on. Your name will be ruined, make no mistake! And you’ll be lucky if your life isn’t ruined. And that woman won’t be pleased with the turn of events either.”
There was a long pause. Alex was probably thinking of his options. I got the impression that Alex decided to end a work arrangement he had with Fred. But Fred was not on board with that – and it sounded to me like he was in a very good position to make the other man’s life very difficult.
Finally, Alex appeared to arrive at the same conclusion. I heard his voice, sounding as if coming through clenched teeth, with definite malice in it:
“OK, you win. Looks like I can’t get out of this as long as you are around. Damn you!”
I heard a door open again, and the footsteps stomp down the hall and into the main gallery space.
Art and Arsenic (Veronica Margreve Mysteries Book 2) Page 1