Hacked

by Ray Daniel

  “Nasty enough to turn it into a zombie.”

  “Zombie?” asked Bobby.

  “Yes,” said Mel.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Somebody else was controlling Peter’s computer,” I said.

  “When he hacked your niece’s Facebook account?” asked Bobby.

  “Cousin,” I said. “And no, he did that on his own.”

  “Then when?”

  Mel got up and walked to the whiteboard. Drew a passable desktop computer, then a lightning bolt to another computer. Then she drew an angry-faced stick figure sitting at the other computer. “Somebody could have used Peter’s computer to hack the senator.”

  “Could have used?” asked Bobby.

  “There’s no way to tell,” I said. “It would look exactly as if Peter were typing.”

  “Wouldn’t Peter have seen that happening?”

  “Not necessarily. He could have been sleeping, or their system might have created another KVM set and used that.”

  “Exactly,” said Mel.

  “KVM?” asked Bobby.

  “Keyboard, video, mouse,” I answered.

  “You couldn’t just say that?”

  “Who’s got the time?”

  Bobby walked to the whiteboard, drew a remarkable likeness of Peter between the senator and Xiong.

  “Wow, you can draw,” I said. “Who knew?”

  “I dabbled in cartooning.”

  “Look at you with the layers,” I said. “You’re like a huge onion.”

  “I think Peter may be the real link between Xiong and the senator.” He drew a dotted line from me to Peter. “You just stuck your nose in here and got entangled.”

  “I stuck my nose in because Peter hacked my cousin.”

  “Yeah, well, whatever reason you had, you became part of Xiong’s problem.”

  “What problem?”

  Jael said, “He needs to protect the video to keep the pressure on the senator.”

  “There you go,” said Bobby. “Jael understands it.”

  Not a surprise. Jael’s previous job was with Mossad.

  I said to Jael, “That makes no sense.”

  “Why?”

  “There was no way for Xiong to know I was after Peter.”

  “Unless somebody told him,” said Jael.

  Silence settled across the conference room as each of us wrestled with the implications.

  Mel stood, walked over to Bobby’s drawing of Peter, added a squiggly line at the neck in red marker, and a single drop of blood.

  “Eww,” I said.

  “None of this explains Peter’s murder. If Xiong wanted to keep Peter quiet, he’d just shoot him. Why cut off his head, and why put it on 4chan?”

  I sat back and looked at the whiteboard. I imagined sliding around the boxes, the lines, and the remarkably accurate drawing of Peter, mentally reconnecting them, grouping them, ungrouping them. There was still something missing. I stood and added something to the board: @PwnSec

  “I had forgotten about them,” said Mel.

  “They’re the loose end,” I said.

  “How do you mean?”

  “Peter’s dead. Xiong’s not talking. The senator doesn’t know anything. All we’ve got is that PwnSec is clearly upset at me about Peter. Peter was one of theirs. They give us a place to start.”

  “Some more doxing?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’ve got a plan. Got to do a little coding.”

  “Can I help?” said Mel.

  “You mean like team coding?”

  “Yeah, I can help catch your typos.”

  Did I want a pretty woman watch me do what I did best? It turned out that yes, yes, I did want a pretty woman to watch me do what I did best. Also, I remembered one of Jael’s rules.

  “Isn’t this Shabbat?” I asked her.

  “Yes. It started a half an hour ago.”

  “Shabbat?” asked Mel.

  “Jael doesn’t work Saturdays.”

  Mel’s eyes widened. “Oh … ”

  “So it’s just you and me.”

  Bobby said, “You two need to get a room.”

  I said, “And a computer. And maybe even some pizza.”

  Thirty-Seven

  The Uber driver dropped Mel and me off at the head of Follen Street. It turned out that my wish for pizza had been answered by the pizza gods. A pizza truck sat in front of my condo, the driver standing on my front steps staring up at the building.

  I called out, “Can I help you?”

  “I’m looking for this guy named Aloysius Tucker.”

  “What for?”

  “He ordered pizza.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “So you are him. Help me with these.”

  The pizza guy waddled around to the back of his SUV, raised the lift gate, and looked up at me. “C’mon, they’re getting cold.”

  “What’s getting cold?” I asked.

  “Your pizzas.”

  I peered into the SUV. Pizza boxes filled every available spot. The pizza guy said, “There you go, twenty-five, assorted.”

  “Twenty-five pizzas?”

  “Yeah. Just like you ordered.”

  “I didn’t order twenty-five pizzas. I wasn’t even home.”

  The pizza guy cocked an eyebrow. “Don’t even.”

  “What do you mean, ‘Don’t even’? I didn’t order these.”

  “You know I could have you arrested.”

  “For what?”

  “Wire crime.”

  “Wire fraud,” said Mel.

  “Yeah, that one.”

  “I didn’t order these pizzas,” I said.

  “We got your name. We got your phone number.”

  “So does everybody. I’m in the book. Do you have a credit card number?”

  “No. You’re supposed to pay now.”

  “I’m sorry, dude, you’ve been punked.”

  “What?” said the pizza guy.

  “It was a joke,” I said.

  “I’m not laughing.”

  “Neither am I, but I guarantee the guy who ordered the pizza is. He’s having a good time telling his buddies about how he found a pizza place that would take an order for twenty-five pizzas without even asking for a credit card. They must have looked for days.”

  The pizza guy slammed his hand on the side of the SUV.

  “So what? I’m out the fucking money?” Then to Mel. “Can he do that?”

  “Technically—” said Mel.

  I said. “I didn’t order the pizzas. Why would I order twenty-five pizzas? They don’t even fit in my condo.”

  The pizza guy said, “Goddamn it! Goddamn it! Goddamn it!”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “That’s twenty-five bucks down the fucking drain!”

  “What twenty-five bucks?”

  “Ingredients.”

  “You only put a buck’s worth of ingredients in a whole pizza?”

  The pizzameister crossed his arms. “We buy in volume.”

  “What do you buy in volume? How much volume can that be?”

  “Plenty of volume.”

  “Oh my God. How much was this order?”

  The guy consulted a long slip of paper. “It’s $317.25.”

  “Hell of a profit.”

  “There’s overhead.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  The pizza guy flipped me off, lowered the SUV gate, waddled back to the driver’s side, and hoisted himself in. “Where’s the police when you need them?” he said to Mel.

  Mel said, “Right here. I could arrest him if you want, but it won’t get you paid.”

  Pizza guy started his engine. “Motherfucker, shit,” he said, and sta
rted to roll the SUV down the street.

  I ran after the van. “Hey, wait!”

  He stopped, glared at me. “Yeah?”

  “You know the homeless shelter on Columbia Ave?”

  “Yeah?”

  I pulled out my credit card. “I’ll buy them. You deliver them there.”

  “You got it!”

  I opened the SUV back, grabbed a pizza, and let the SUV head off.

  Mel said, “That was really nice.”

  “Seemed a shame to waste twenty-five dollars’ worth of ingredients.”

  As Mel and I climbed the steps to my condo, I did a mental sweep of my housekeeping. Dishes in the sink? No. I cleaned those. Underwear on the floor? Maybe. Keep her out of the bedroom. General clutter and the like? No. I don’t allow general clutter and the like.

  I opened the door to my apartment and glanced around. All was as I had hoped, ready for company. I tossed the pizza on the kitchen nook counter, grabbed out a couple of plates, and placed 12 cents of ingredients on each plate. Needed something to wash it down.

  “Coffee, tea, wine, whiskey, beer?” I asked.

  “Do you have water?”

  “Water?”

  “You know, to drink.”

  “Blech … I guess.”

  I ran the tap, let it get cold, filled a glass for Mel and one for myself.

  “You don’t have to drink water,” said Mel.

  “Better than letting you drink alone,” I said. “Plus, I can also have a beer. Either way, we have some coding to do.”

  I sat next to Mel, opened the laptop, and opened Twitter.

  I searched Twitter for #TuckerGate, and scrolled through the results. Each insult felt like a little punch in the gut.

  … murder …

  … rapist …

  … mastermind …

  … criminal …

  … mafia kingpin …

  The last one made me laugh.

  “What?” asked Mel.

  “Kingpin? Who even says that anymore?”

  I did a search for pizza and found this:

  @PwnSec: Pizza Party at @TuckerInBoston’s house.

  Then my address.

  “You should tell them what you did with the pizza,” said Mel.

  “Can’t.”

  “Can’t?”

  “I promised my lawyer I wouldn’t tweet. Besides, it would only encourage them.”

  The doorbell rang. I went to the intercom and pressed the button.

  “Pizza! Pizza!” someone yelled into it, then snickered.

  I ran to the front window, saw two figures bolting down the street.

  Idiots.

  “Pizza, pizza, my ass,” I said. “Let’s dox these bastards.”

  Thirty-Eight

  The Great Hall of Geek Fantasies has many rooms. There is the “I am Actually a Wizard” Pavilion, the “I Wrote a Million-Dollar App” Gallery, and the “I Won the Video-Game Tournament” Alcove. But place of pride, largely because it is the only one that could really happen, goes to the “I’m Eating Pizza and Coding While a Sexy Person Watches” Rotunda.

  Sitting in my kitchen with an open laptop, a box of pizza, and Mel by my side should have been a high point in my life. The incarnation of my fondest fantasies.

  It wasn’t working out that way.

  “You misspelled tweet,” said Mel.

  “Thanks.” I fixed it and tried to remember what I was doing.

  Mel and I had scoured Twitter and had seen that PwnSec tweeted a lot. The tweets all had a similar ring to them, telling me that they were being written by one person. While many people liked the tweets, there was definitely a recurring set of names who almost always had something to say about them. This gave me a plan.

  Most people are under the impression that Twitter, Facebook, and other social-media companies consider users to be their customers, and that these companies provide wonderful means of sharing pictures of one’s lunch in order to better the world, or at least in order to better the lives of their users.

  I imagine that pigs on a farm see it the same way. They lounge about all day, comparing the quality of today’s slop to yesterday’s slop, complaining that the barn was pretty drafty last night, and generally acting as if they are the farmer’s customers. But of course, they are not. They are the product. And so are we.

  Social media allows those with the right tools access to information that could only be guessed at by the Mad Men of the 1960s. Whereas those guys were forced to hold focus groups, send out surveys, and rely upon the genius of guys like Don Draper to suss out the great trends in the market, today’s Mad Men can go to Facebook or Twitter and extract a detailed and extensive web of information about who influences whom, who talks together, and how they feel.

  Doing all this requires that programmers be able to access the data on a social-media site, and it was that data that I was going to access tonight. My plan was simple. Gather up the @PwnSec announcements, see who liked them the most, and work from there.

  But Mel was getting in the way.

  The first problem was not her fault. It was mine. I was unaccustomed to having a pretty woman in my condominium, and I’d never had one there who could understand the code I was writing. The caveman part of my brain grunted in approval.

  Tucker write program. Tucker get woman.

  The problem with the lower part of your brain is that even though you know it’s an idiot, you can’t keep it from coloring the way you see the world. In my case, an insistent hum of sexual distraction caused the typos that Mel caught.

  The second problem was, perhaps, Mel’s fault. She had an uncanny ability to ask me a question just as I was getting a clear picture of what I needed to do next in my program. I’d get the picture, then Mel would ask “What if we did it this way?” and then my plan would be gone.

  “You know,” I said. “I’m not making much progress. I’m pretty beat. It’s bedtime.”

  “I knew this would happen,” said Mel. “I just knew it.”

  “Just knew what?”

  “This always happens. Typical guy.”

  “Don’t flatter yourself. I wasn’t inviting you to bed with me.”

  “Inviting me to bed? I didn’t think you were inviting me to bed. Eww.”

  “Eww? What were you talking about, then?”

  Mel pointed at the two empty beer bottles. “You’re too drunk to code.”

  “That’s what always happens?”

  Mel stood, grabbing her jacket. “That’s what always happens when guys drink and code. They get sleepy, then sloppy, then they poop out.”

  She headed for the front door and turned. “Give me a call tomorrow after you’ve gotten some sleep.” The door clicked shut behind her.

  The caveman in my brain was not pleased, not one little bit.

  Write code! Show her!

  And so I did. Unencumbered by “teamwork,” I was able to crank out a program that catalogued all the PwnSec tweets, the tweets of those who liked those tweets, and the network of followers that surrounded the whole thing. It became clear that there were four people who really cared about PwnSec: @Runway aka Peter aka the headless hacker, @Eliza, @Tron, and @NotAGirl.

  All four aliases followed @PwnSec and followed each other. They liked or commented on almost every PwnSec thread, except for

  @Eliza, whose own tweets read remarkably like PwnSec tweets, making it pretty clear that @Eliza was the author.

  Now to do some doxing.

  Having a nickname on the Internet forces one to choose between fame and privacy. If you want identity, then the best thing to do is to use the same nickname on Twitter, Facebook, and the Internet Relay Chat. That way, people who meet you in one place can find you in other places. If you want privacy, however, you use different nicknames in differe
nt places, and never engage in cross-channel communication.

  The PwnSec nicknames broke all these rules. These kids were definitely in it for the fame. Some Googling showed their names all over the place, and as Peter had learned, it’s almost impossible to have that much cross-communication without having someone make a mistake. I doxed them all. They all lived in and around Boston.

  Tomorrow, they’d be getting a visit.

  Thirty-Nine

  In the 1880s Henry Whitney, owner of all the land along Beacon Street, had a dream: a dream of a day when trollies would carry commuters to his land and jack up his property values.

  He also owned a trolley company.

  The West End Railway ran tracks and horse-drawn trolleys out to Cleveland Circle, making Beacon Street one of the nineteenth century’s hottest properties.

  Today, Henry Whitney’s goldmine is named the C branch of the Green Line. I sat in an electric trolley, watching workers put up barricades in preparation for the Boston Marathon. For the most part, the Marathon runs down Commonwealth Ave, but at Cleveland Circle it shifts to Beacon Street, bisecting the city into those who are on this side of the Marathon and those who are on that side of the Marathon. Bostonians choose their side carefully, because they’re stuck there for several hours.

  The trolley stopped, let some people on, started again. I thought back to last night when I had completely doxed PwnSec through a combination of Twitter programming, Googling, and a little social engineering (trickery) on the IRC.

  There had been four people in PwnSec: Peter Olinsky (Runway), Russell Nguyen (Eliza), Earl Clary (Tron), and Dorothy Flores (NotAGirl). So NotAGirl was, in fact, a girl, a counterexample to the Internet adage “There are no girls on the Internet.” And I was on my way to visit her.

  The trolley rattled its way to the end of the line, Cleveland Circle. I hopped off the train and looked around for Dorothy’s house. There is, in fact, no circle at Cleveland Circle. There are ball fields, a trolley depot, a CVS, and a strip mall consisting of a series of single-story restaurants, hair salons, banks, and hardware stores, but no circle.

  The single-story nature of the strip mall ended at the corner where somebody had built a convenience store in front of a three-story brownstone. The now-entombed brownstone loomed over the convenience store’s shoulder like an older brother ready to take on a bully. My doxing efforts told me that Dorothy “NotAGirl” Flores lived in the looming brownstone.