by Duncan James
***
Robin was amazed how things had changed for the better so quickly. Suddenly, he was enjoying life again at Oxford. His course was going well, and he had always enjoyed that, but now he was settling to a far happier home life again.
Since she was sharing a flat with fellow students, and he wasn't, they had decided that Marian would move into Robin's flat. It was also in a quieter part of Oxford, away from where most students lived. Not many had digs south of Folly Bridge, on the Abingdon Road, and yet it was still not a difficult bike ride for either of them to get to their respective colleges. Thanks to Marian, Robin's flat had already been given a good going over, so not a lot needed to be done to make it habitable for the pair of them. Marian had insisted, though, that all his computer stuff was moved off the kitchen table and into the spare bedroom, which they had converted into a sort of office.
It did not take them long to settle to their new life together, although at first they found it more difficult to concentrate on their studies, as they each had so much to learn about the other.
Marian, Robin discovered, was an orphan. Both her parents had been killed in a car crash when she was very young, and she had no memory of either of them, and knew nothing about their background. Richard FitzWalter, now Sir Richard, and his wife, who lived in a rather grand house in Nottingham, had adopted her, and she had always regarded them as her parents, since she knew no others
Robin and his new love had driven up there one weekend, in Robin's rather battered Mini, and he had immediately been made hugely welcome. The large house was in the country on the edge of what was left of the old forest, and Robin had thoroughly enjoyed being shown some of Marian's favourite walks through the countryside, accompanied by her rather frisky black Labrador. It was a wonderfully trained dog, which could be walked without a lead, and which had immediately befriended Robin. So had her parents, who were jolly people and so easy to get on with that Robin felt he had known them for ages. Lady FitzWalter was a wonderful cook - he could see where Marian got it from - and they sat until quite late after dinner on Saturday chatting animatedly over a malt whisky in their comfy lounge, with timbered ceiling and inglenook fireplace. Robin felt totally at home.
It had been such a happy and relaxing weekend, that they both found it difficult to get back into the swing of their studies on return to Oxford. But it was a welcome discovery that they both had such a love of the countryside.
It was much the same story when, a few weeks later, they drove down to Surrey. Marian was immediately at home in the Hood's old farmhouse, where Robin's parents went out of their way to make her welcome.
"We've heard so much about you," said Robin's mother, Gill Hood. "And you are exactly as Robin has described you!"
"It's very nice of you to have me down for the weekend," she replied, "especially as it's a long weekend. It doesn't often happen that we can both arrange a free Monday at the same time."
"Sadly for me, I shall have to go to the office on Monday," said Dennis Hood, "but you're more than welcome to stay as long as you like. I suggest we drive out for a pub lunch tomorrow, to show you a bit of leafy Surrey, since you haven't been here before."
"That would be lovely," Marian replied. "But from what I've seen of it so far, it's not all that different from the countryside around where I come from."
"Except that we have the best chalk streams in the country near here," said Robin. "On Monday, I'll show you one of my favourites, where I used to fish."
"If you want to cast a line for a while, I'm sure I could fix it for you," said his father, "even though you no longer have a rod on any of the beats there."
"That would be a great treat, if you don't mind," he said, turning to Marian.
"Of course not," she replied. "It would be fun."
"I'll ring Frank Tucker straight away," said Dennis. "I know he still has a beat down there somewhere, so he may be able to fix it."
"I do hope he can. Padre Tucker taught me to fish," said Robin to Marian. "He's a great character, and you must meet him some time."
The meeting took place sooner than they had thought. Frank Tucker was to be fishing the River Anton himself on Monday, on beat four, where he promised Robin that he could share his rod for as long as he liked, while he got to know Marian.
They both agreed, on their return to Oxford, that it had been the perfect end to a perfect weekend.?
5. THE TWO-CARD TRICK?
Robin had always been suspicious of the 'hole-in-the-wall'. He had never regarded it as anything but a very insecure way for banks to go about their business. It was, after all, exactly what people called it - a hole in the bank's wall. It was a hole in their first line of defence. Not only that, but immediately behind that hole there were stacked several thousands of pounds, frequently in used notes. And all you needed to get access to all that cash was a piece of plastic.
Certainly, it was a rather special piece of plastic, with its embedded microchip and magnetic strip on the back. And certainly, too, the introduction of the chip and PIN had made the cash machines less easy to defraud. But they were not perfect by any means, and the criminal fraternity had been quick to develop new ways of getting at the cash behind the ATMs. The more Robin thought about it, the more he came to believe that the hole in the wall could easily be opened, perhaps even without a four figure PIN number.
It was while he was at Oxford that Robin began to study the system seriously. The theory behind the system was that every bank credit and debit card would have the owner's secret PIN number encoded into both the microchip and the magnetic strip. Only if the number tapped into the cash machine was the same as that on the card, would the machine be activated and authorised to carry out the transaction demanded by the owner. The problem was, as Robin saw it, that a criminal only needed to know someone's PIN number to be able to produce a duplicate card. The fraudster didn't even need to copy the chip, as many ATM machines, especially abroad, only read the magnetic strip. And although the PIN number is often encrypted, it's the easiest thing in the world to record a four digit number on to a magnetic strip, and even easier to watch someone tap in their code on a chip and PIN machine, whether in a store or at the bank.
The felon did not even need to know the name of the PIN number's owner, as this was not recorded on the magnetic strip, but Robin had a theory that even the PIN number might not be necessary. What the card actually did, he reasoned, was access the bank's huge computer system, and Robin knew that computers, even small personal ones, have memories. The last thing in that memory was going to be the personal details of the last user of any particular cash machine, and those details would remain there until the machine was used again. In other words, the last user's account effectively remained open until the machine was used again and a new set of information was entered into it. Until that time, the hole in the wall remained open for anyone clever enough to simply reach in and help himself to someone else's money.
Robin resolved to find out if his theory was accurate, and then to devise a means of overcoming this weakness in the banking security system before criminal gangs devised a way of making these phantom withdrawals on a large scale. Not just criminal gangs either. Bank staff who understood how the system worked could make a fortune.
It was during their final year at Oxford that he had explained all this to Marian, who was both puzzled and worried by his theory.
"The first thing I want to do is to show that it is possible to take cash from other people's accounts, simply by using their PIN number and nothing else," he explained. "And I believe that it should be possible to use the computer's own memory to put the PIN number of the last user on to a blank card. Rather in the way that DVD discs can be re-written."
"If you're right," she had said, "then certainly the banks will need to be able to develop some sort of countermeasure to keep the system secure, but how will you be able to do that for them, when you don't have direct access to their system?"
"I shall simply have to de
vise a way of getting into the system - that's got to be my first step. Unless I know the system's weaknesses, I can't develop anything that will make the system stronger and more robust," Robin explained.
He thought for a moment.
"What I really need," he said, "is an unlimited supply of blank credit and debit cards that I can experiment with."
"But you'll never get those," she protested.
"No, but I know how to get a couple, at least," he replied. "I shall 'lose' mine, and apply for a replacement. That will give me one I can play with, having deleted all the relevant information, and if I could persuade you to 'lose' yours as well, that's two!"
"I'm not sure this is right, or even legal," replied a perplexed Marian. "But if that's what you need, then I'll do it for you."
"Good girl - thank you," said Robin, giving her a hug. "We shall be given different card numbers from those we 'lose', but the ATM machines don't read any of the information on the front, so that won't matter. The bank sort code will be on the magnetic strip, so that should copy across as well."
He paused.
"What I shall have to do is to somehow programme my cards, so that they fool the ATM into believing that it is the same card that has just been used. In other words, that the first transaction has not yet been completed."
"What I don't understand," said Marian, one day, "is how you will know you have been successful. Just supposing you do manage to use your card to get money out of a machine immediately after someone else has used it - how will you know the cash has been taken from that person's account? You can't very well ask, can you? And what will you do with the cash - keeping it would be stealing?"
"If my theory is correct, then there really is nowhere else the money could come from," he replied. "But how about if I follow you? You would be able to tell if the money had come from your account, and I'd give it back to you."
"That's good," she said. "Something else I can do to help. You could even follow yourself, so to speak, and put your re-programmed card in after you had used your proper one."
"I had thought of that," replied Robin. "The problem with us testing this using old cards of our own that we have 'lost', is that I must be absolutely sure that none of the original information remains on either the chip or the magnetic strip. One day, I shall simply have to conduct experiments using complete strangers', and that will be difficult for all the reasons you can imagine."
"Will you be working with Jim Farlow on this project?" asked Marian.
"Probably not," replied Robin. "We'll keep this little exercise to ourselves I think.?? But I'll certainly need his help for the next step, if this succeeds."
"And what's that, may I ask? Developing a programme that prevents this type of fraud, I suppose."
"That obviously is the next step," replied Robin. "But there are also two other possible frauds I want to explore later, and I will need Jim's help with that work."
"Your devious mind!" laughed Marian. "What other ways of cheating the banks have you devised?"
"Well, in two ways, possibly," he replied. "First of all, if I can programme a card that will allow me to take money from the last user of a cash machine, surely it should be possible just to take money from the machine itself without using other people's details. I would need to be able to devise a system that triggered the cash dispenser while bypassing the PIN number and so on of the last user. If I can do that in some way, then I could just about unload a machine of all its cash. The hole in the wall would become a real hole in the bank's security system."
"Ingenious, and obviously if you can do it, then so could a criminal. So yet another counter-measure will be needed," said Marian.
"Exactly," said Robin with a grin, "and one which the banking industry should be prepared to pay handsomely for."
"What other way did you have in mind, then?" asked his partner. "You said had thought of two other possible ways to defraud the banks."
"Simply this," replied Robin. "If it should prove possible to gain access to a bank's computer system using a piece of plastic at a hole in the wall machine, then it should also be possible to do it remotely - by computer, from home."
"Wow!" exclaimed Marian. "That really would be serious for the banks."
"And it's going to be a great deal more difficult, as well," said Robin.
He walked to the phone, and pulled out his wallet.
"First things first," he said. "I shall phone the bank and tell them I've lost my debit card."
No sooner had he done that, than the phone rang. It was Rupert.
"Were you on the phone, or on the Internet?" he asked.
"On the phone, as a matter of fact," replied Robin. "I was just getting the bank to send me a replacement debit card."
"Lost it, then have you?" asked Rupert. "Now that's a real blow," he went on, without waiting for an answer.
"Why, or need I ask!" queried Robin.
"Well, since you ask," replied Rupert, "Freddie and I were just saying that we both have the mother and father of all thirsts, but that we are both skint, so can't do much about it. And now this."
"Hard luck, isn't it?" responded Robin, winking at Marian.
"I suppose the lovely Marian still has hers, doesn't she, or is our luck really out? Don't tell me she's lost hers as well."
"Not yet," replied Robin, without thinking.
"Ah, good," said Rupert. "Could you possibly have a word in her shell-like ear, and tell her that Freddie and I are on our way round, suffering from dehydration. I'm sure she would not want to turn away two dear old friends in such dire distress."
"You really are a couple of bums, do you know that? But come, anyway," replied Robin. "I could murder a pint myself."
"Wonderful!?? What good sorts you are, both of you. Bear in mind that we are simply impoverished students, not inventing things all the time and earning a fortune. If it were me, as Freddie once said, I'd jack it in and get on with life. If you can earn good money without a degree, why bother with it. Oh, and by the way," added Rupert, "we thought we'd bring Valya with us - just as a bit of female company for Marian, you understand. She'll have Vodka, of course."
With that, he put the phone down.
"What was all that about?" asked Marian.
"Freddie and Rupert are on their way with a thirst and no money," he replied. "They're bringing Valya with them as company for you."
"Like hell they are!" said Marian. "They're bringing Valya with them because they both fancy her, that's why."
"As a matter of interest, since she's at your College and you see her quite a bit, have you heard how's she getting on? She seems to me to be quite a mathematical genius, and understands computers as well. It might be useful adding her to my little enterprise at some stage."
"She's doing all right, I think," replied Marian. "Seems to work very hard, although we don't go to the same lectures, of course. But we get on very well, and often meet over a coffee or something. I gather her father is coming over from Russia for a visit soon, to see her. Apparently, he's one of Russia's top computer programmers - or so she says."
"No wonder she's so good herself - it obviously runs in the family. I must try to meet him when he's over here."
"I'm sure Valya will be only too pleased to fix it - you can talk about it this evening. Now I must go and do my face before they all arrive."
With that, the doorbell rang.
Marian swore quietly.
"I shall only be a tick," she said, "let them in, and keep them talking."
"They'll wait, don't worry," replied Robin. "Take as long as you like - you're the one with the credit card, remember?"