“She’s moved on, but obviously she still thinks of you, or she wouldn’t write,” Jasinski observed, bringing Mick’s thoughts back to Kateryna. “You are never tempted to write back?”
“No. Actually, her letters aren’t as hard to read as those from my sister.”
“You really miss her?”
“I do. If this whole botnet thing could just be over…” he began without finishing the thought.
“How did you get into programming?” Mick asked getting ready for an in-flight meal, as he put down his paperback copy of Crime and Punishment.
“Through gaming,” Jasinski replied. “I was a huge gamer as a kid, and I was really good at it. Then some new games came out that let you play against others. But the software sucked—it almost never worked. In trying to get it working, I got to know the developers and started looking over the source code. I found I was good at that, too. Soon I was rewriting it, and found some new ways to get it to work.”
“Wow, they didn’t mind a girl helping out?” he asked.
“Oh, they had no idea I was a girl—none of my gaming friends did. If they found out you were a girl, they would just start acting like complete jerks. Later, when games added voice chat capabilities, I wrote some voice changing software so I could still pass for a guy.”
“Nice!”
“Yeah, it was kind of fun. I used to get in trouble for always being online.”
“Me, too. My parents used to force me to go outside and play, which, looking back was a good thing.”
“Your parents are dead, aren’t they?”
“Yes, they died in a car accident when I was fourteen.”
“That’s tough.”
“That’s life. What about your parents?”
“Oh, they are still alive and kicking, but I haven’t spoken to them in years. I got away as soon as I realized I could support myself programming.”
“So you do software development?”
“As I need to, yes. I use those sites that let you bid for jobs. I choose ones that interest me and don’t conflict with any of my open-source projects—got to be really careful not to let the code get contaminated, or provide any opening for questions about the origin of the code.”
“Yep, can’t be too careful.” Mick stretched his legs. “What would you be doing now if it weren’t for Zed dot Kicker?”
“I don’t know, I was starting to get bored of London. Maybe I would have moved on to Ireland. I hadn’t thought of Australia, but now I’ll definitely think of it.”
“School?”
“Never got on with any of my teachers. Couldn’t be bothered to suck up to get the grades.”
“You know, graduate work is fun, although I agree high school and undergraduate is no fun at all. You could probably test out of most Comp Sci classes—”
“Nah, just not my style, no offense.”
“Sure, I just can’t imagine my life without my time at university. I might even like to teach one day, I don’t know.”
“You would probably be good at that, and you would actually care about your students, which would make for a change.”
“Thanks!”
They both continued reading.
While Jasinski slept, the man sitting next to Mick struck up a conversation with him about mobile phone hardware. The man was slightly balding, English, and had a pile of mobile phones in various pockets. It turned out he was an expert in mobile phone SIM cards, including programming them. Mick had never heard about programmable SIMs, so he listened intently, making a few notes to do some further research. He realized that if he could trust the code, he might be able to keep his privacy without physically switching out SIM cards all the time.
The sun rose; they ate another meal. Shortly before landing, Jasinski filled in the required customs and immigration forms. Mick went to the bathroom with a set of clothes stuffed into his jacket pocket. He changed, put his long black coat back on, and returned to his seat.
When the plane landed at the LAX airport, there were the usual delays. First there were taxiing traffic delays, then the gate wasn’t ready. Then, the disembarking passengers ahead of them took forever to stand up and gather their belongings, despite having over twelve hours to prepare.
Jasinski went on ahead while Mick remained behind, waiting for the stream of passengers to thin out. When it did so, he got up and headed for the exit, making sure there was no one directly behind him. Once on the jet bridge, he dropped his jacket on the floor and made for a door on the side of the jet bridge. A quick swipe and keypad entry and he was through the door and onto the steps down to the tarmac.
Step one, complete.
He quickly dashed down the stairs to ensure he was out of sight from anyone on the jet bridge. He walked quickly towards the rows of baggage vehicles parked underneath the terminal.
He heard voices coming towards him so he ducked and dove into a baggage car, pulling the curtain across behind him. A pair of airline workers approached and talked while standing right in front of him. After a few minutes, Mick didn’t hear any more conversation. He was about to peek outside the curtain when he felt a lurch and the cart started moving!
Damn!
He fought back panic. He rolled over to one side and stole a glance between a gap in the curtain. The baggage trolley was heading away from the terminal. Mick cursed silently. He wasn’t sure that his card and PIN would work at a different terminal. But then the trolley turned again and headed back to the same terminal. A moment later, it came to a halt and he heard the driver walk way. Seeing no one in view when he glanced out, he jumped out and walked purposefully towards the terminal building, towards cover.
This time, he made it all the way to the terminal building without running into anyone. The door had no window, so he had to just blindly open it. If he ran into another employee, he hoped his uniform overalls and airline safety vest would allow him to blend in. There was only one way to find out.
He swiped, keyed, and opened, and was relieved to find an empty corridor. He followed it, went up a set of stairs, past a few desks. He spied what he hoped was the final door and opened it.
A uniformed TSA agent stood on the other side, blocking his view of the passenger terminal. He was almost there!
He held up his badge and looked the agent in the eye, giving off a bored vibe. After a glance at his face and at the badge, which had Mick’s picture on it, the agent nodded and stepped aside.
Made it!
Mick quickly blended in with the crowds of passengers heading for the terminal exit. He glanced at his mobile. Only a few minutes had passed, but it had felt like hours.
On the other side of a glass wall Mick could see passengers arriving on another international flight, heading towards immigration passport control and customs. But he was through.
Back in the U.S. of A. again!
He recalled the last time he left the United States, on board the Gypsy Moth, bound for London.
Once outside security, he spotted Jasinski on the other side of the arrivals hall. She tried to hide it, but he could tell that she was greatly relieved. She held out a bag with another change of clothes.
“Piece of cake!” he said as he grabbed it.
Chapter 8.
From the Privacy and Other Mirages Blog:
I’ve read your posts about browsing cookies and other privacy settings. You’ve hinted that there is a way to browse anonymously. What is it?
Well, anonymous web browsing isn’t something you can do by yourself--you need a network to help you. One example of this is a service called Tor, or The Onion Router.
Here’s how Tor works. You install a piece of open-source software that links your computer to a network of other computers and users who have also installed the software. When you send out a web request, it bounces around the Tor network in a random way before reaching the Tor exit node. When your web browsing request is sent to the web server, the server only gets the IP address of the Tor network exit node. Your ac
tual IP address is hidden. Next time you visit that same site, your request will bounce around the Tor network and out a different exit node. As a result, the server will get a different IP address, so they won’t know it is you again, unless you’ve been sloppy and left cookies behind on your browser.
Try it and you’ll see right away that it works. Some sites will default to the wrong language since they are guessing your country based on the wrong IP. Others will display the wrong targeted ads. It can be fun!
Not everything works through Tor. Some sites that use plugins will fail. But many of these plugins are chock full of nasty privacy invading things that you are better off without anyway--switch to a real site that uses HTML5!
Chapter 9.
Ja2 could #american #cars be any bigger? and the huge #parking spaces they need are larger than some european countries
The drive from LAX airport to Montana passed in a few days. Mick and Jasinski took turns driving the rental car.
They made a few initial stops. First, a short stop at a seedy Korean grocery to purchase new prepaid SIM cards for their mobiles. Then, they stopped to purchase camping gear. Mick explained that they would not have to produce identification at campgrounds, unlike at hotels and motels.
He wondered what kind of reaction the officials at the airport had to the missing passenger.
They rarely talked while they drove, but talked sitting around the campfire each night when they stopped.
“So how did you find the General—and don’t just say re-search,” Mick began one night.
“Well, I read all I could on him, and managed to find a photo. He did a great job of staying out of all the usual databases. By the way, you are also not an easy one to find photos of either. However, I assumed that he would not be able to stay completely out of the news, so I wrote a program that spidered U.S. news photos for a facial match. I had been searching about a month until I found him. He had helped out in a search for a missing girl in a state park. He actually found the girl, and was photographed. From there, a little research turned up his address. Oh, and I spoke to him to confirm it.”
“You spoke to him?”
“Yep, I called him. He was quite polite to me, but wasn’t interested in buying Girl Scout cookies from me.”
“Not a cookie lover, I guess. Can you even do an American accent?” Mick asked.
“Why sure I can, if I try, sweetie,” she replied in a passable accent.
“That reminds me, I need to start working on dropping my Irish accent,” Mick replied.
“Why? It sounds so cute!” she replied. Mick looked hard at her to try to figure out why she was teasing him, but came to no conclusion.
After a few hours of talking into the darkness, they unrolled their packs and crawled into their sleeping bags. Mick turned on the short wave radio he had purchased and they listened to Voice of America in the dark, with the characteristic AM fade-in and fade-out. When a music segment began, he switched to China Radio International and listened to a feature story about canals in Shanghai, which he found interesting.
Mick felt very satisfied with how things were going. Jasinski had proven to be an excellent travel companion, although she did make him feel uncomfortable at times with her borderline flirting behavior.
Two days later, they reached their destination in Montana.
“Finally, time to hack!” Jasinski had announced after they setup their camp a few miles from the isolated ramshackle house where the General now lived.
“Sure, after some surveillance,” Mick replied.
“Hmm. You don’t just mean watching the General for a few minutes before we start hacking, right?” Mick shook his head. “You mean observing him for a day?” Mick tilted his head. “A couple of days?” Mick smiled. “Look, it’s not that I’m not enjoying this camping expedition, but I don’t wait to sit around on my ass for days while you summon your courage—”
“That’s not what we’re doing. We are going to take our time, gather as much info as we can, and plan our attack. Do you really think he is fully retired? Do you think he doesn’t have any security or backup?”
“I guess,” she replied, sighing.
They did spend more than a few days peering through the bushes at the house, watching the movements of the man they hoped would reveal some new information about Zed.Kicker.
After their first surveillance visit to the General’s cabin, Mick realized that to crack the General’s network and servers would not be easy. He would need time and patience. And he needed to do the work from a safe distance from the house. Mick made his plans and started obtaining supplies from local electronics stores. Some, he had to buy at grocery stores.
“I hope you are hungry,” he asked as he pushed a shopping cart full of potato chips, packaged in cylinders. Jasinski scrunched up her nose in disgust.
“That’s a lot of potato chips! We won’t be able to eat all these, you know, or are we planning on camping out until summer?”
“Not for eating,” Mick replied. Once back at their car, he opened a garbage bag. He proceeded to open each can, empty the thinly stacked chips into the bag, then piled the cardboard cylinders in the back seat of the rental car. When he was done, he had ten cardboard and foil cylinders, all stacked next to ten boxes of WiFi hubs, piled near ten motorcycle batteries. Jasinski just shook her head, not even bothering to ask for an explanation.
She seemed further amused when he started assembling the devices: drilling, running wires, opening the WiFi cases, soldering leads, wrapping everything in duct tape, and placing each WiFi router in a water-proof enclosure that bore a striking resemblance to a plastic bucket.
The devices looked even sillier when hung four meters off the ground on trees in the woods. As each one was turned on, Mick, atop a ladder, aimed the cylindrical cardboard WiFi antenna until he picked up a strong signal from another one of his contraptions. Mick then ran a pair of wires down the tree trunk, and mounted a tiny switch that he could reach from the ground. Then, they hiked two kilometers to the next tree and repeated the whole operation.
When they were finished, each contraption was linked to the other via WiFi using WPA2 encryption, providing Mick with broadband connectivity from the General’s cabin to a secondary camp in the woods just off the General’s property. Once the series of webcams and microphones were installed on the General’s property, he activated the network, allowing them to spy, and hack from a safe distance. He had calculated that they would have two to three days of connectivity before the batteries needed recharging.
Mick felt bad about using lead-acid batteries, but he planned to later donate them to a local Boy Scout troop by sharing their location along with a circuit to add a solar charger to them. They should be able to make some other use of the devices, or at least remove and recycle them.
They recorded and viewed the data for the next few days, noting the habits of the General, who came and went periodically. The General’s network was just as tough as he had expected. There was a WiFi network, but it only seemed to have the usual set of Internet-enabled appliances and tablets.
There wasn’t much of interest there, but Mick did manage to tap into an audio stream from the General’s living room. The source was a television set that had its speech control enabled by default. All the top Korean brands had recently rolled out this capability in their televisions. Mick was appalled when he first learned about this feature, and thought it inexcusable for the engineers involved to have such a poor understanding of privacy and security.
Apparently, the General had not read about how this particular model was constantly streaming audio from a built-in microphone to a cloud server where speech recognition was being performed. The audio wasn’t even encrypted, making it trivial once Mick had access to the General’s wireless network, which took him about two minutes.
Mick also managed to connect to the General’s wired Ethernet network. The security camera mounted on the entrance gate was connected to this network via a Cat 5 w
ire in a conduit, which Mick had tapped.
Using this tap he was able to insert some probe packets into the network, which he did very cautiously to avoid detection. The last thing he wanted to do was to alert the General to their presence.
“It’s not going well, is it?” Jasinski asked a day later. They had been working in twelve-hour shifts, in between sleeping, and Mick’s shift was about to end.
“No, it isn’t. I can’t figure out what type of firewall he’s using. He has it locked down really, really well. I’ve tried all the tricks I know, but so far, nothing. What I wouldn’t give for a five minute look-around inside that stupid little cabin.”
“I know, but we can’t risk it. We need to consider just talking to him—telling him what we know, and seeing what he can tell us,” she replied.
“That’s even more risky! We just need to keep hacking. Something will work out.”
Jasinski shook her head and took over Mick’s seat. Mick walked back to the tent to sleep.
The next morning, Mick was settling in for another frustrating six hours of hacking when he decided to take a break and read some mail. Perhaps Kat had written to him again.
Instead, he found this message:
Finbar:
Do you need some help cracking the General’s network? I can help.
Time is short, but meeting would not be a waste of time.
To prove that I’m for real, read the news tomorrow. We are on the same side.
The location and date of a meeting is in the attachment. Meet me there. It will probably be our only opportunity to meet. Prove to me your identity by decrypting the attachment.
Returning to Zero (Mick O'Malley Series Book 2) Page 4