by Bella Mackie
Guess what Janine had done with her penthouse in Monaco? That’s what I mean about chance. I read that piece with a slight hangover and only a vague interest one morning, and three weeks later, Janine was featured in the magazine Lifestyle!, a monthly glossy which mainly featured interviews with very rich women photographed on plump sofas and let them talk about whatever they wanted. Normally that was a charity lunch or a renovation project which involved a lot of glass and marble and an overuse of the word ‘authentic’. I think the only people that actually bought this magazine were other rich women who wanted to hate-read pieces about their society rivals, but they ran a lot of adverts for exclusive interior design companies and craftsmen and so the serpent ate the tail and the magazine stayed in business.
Janine’s feature focused on her new terrace, something she’d added on a whim when she realised that she wanted somewhere to do yoga in the morning sun. The roof garden was at a slightly tilted angle, she explained, and was much better suited to the evening light. I wondered how the interviewer reacted to this, presumably with genuine sympathy for such a terrible burden. But she didn’t stop at the terrace, which seemed to have been modelled on some kind of Grecian vision, with large terracotta pots and an honest-to-God white marble fountain twice the size of anything else in the space. There was a tour of the rest of the penthouse, which spanned three floors and housed nine bedrooms, six bathrooms, and a, wait for it, ‘serenity room’ which seemed serene only in that it didn’t contain any furniture apart from one cream sofa and a floor-to-ceiling mirror. Janine explained that she retreated to it when ‘life gets overwhelming and I need to recentre’, which didn’t explain the mirror but perhaps sometimes it’s better not to ask. The reason she moved to Monaco, she explained, was for her health. A heart scare made her ‘reassess how she lived’. There must be an awful lot of health benefits in the principality. The tax loopholes? Not mentioned.
As the interview spread out over 5,000 words, the interviewer clearly got slightly desperate for something new and original and prompted Janine to talk about her clever wardrobe. ‘Tell us about your dream closet, it’s got some special features I can imagine every woman reading this will be dying to hear about.’ Accompanied by a photo of an enormous walk-in wardrobe, Janine explained that every item in her cupboards was itemised, photographed from every angle, and stored in a database which she could access from an iPad. It made dressing in the mornings a dream, she told the magazine, because the system could tell her which item to match with what. ‘It reminds me of clothes I’d forgotten about. Just last week I bought a beautiful Chanel bouclé jacket in royal blue, only to find, when I added it to the database, that I had two exactly the same!’ Those jackets retail for £5,000. How we all laughed. The technology didn’t stop with the wardrobes though. That was just the start. Everything in the home had been connected to the internet, Janine explained. The lights were no longer turned on with switches, the oven did not have buttons (‘Not that I’ve cooked in a while,’ she trilled) and even her morning sauna was temperature-controlled by the smart hub. Every room was able to be locked remotely, in case of a security breach, and it gave her so much comfort to know that, she confided, ‘I don’t completely understand how it all works really, but our wonderful housekeeper has really mastered it and I barely have to do a thing.’ That was the motto of Janine’s life really.
It was her mention of the sauna which really piqued my interest. It seemed like the set-up in a crime novel and I had visions of infiltrating her house, perhaps as a maid, before shutting her in the sauna and watching her beg for mercy. Perhaps this wasn’t exactly feasible. But the remote element appealed, and it felt like a house connected to the internet would be worth at least a little research. Could you use this technology to nefarious ends? Was it completely secure or could it be hacked with little effort?
The web was full of stories about smart devices breaking down, malfunctioning and messing up. Couples who’d split up when their AI gadgets accidentally mentioned the name of a mistress, children exposed to swear words, kettles boiling for hours on end and heating systems which were impossible to work. But the really interesting flaws in this kind of intelligent design were in the security element. There was a spate of scare stories online about people breaking into baby monitor streams and parents hearing strangers talking to their children at night through the devices. There were reports of burglar alarms being easily hacked into and silenced well before intruders even entered the house. Frazzled families claimed that their smart devices had been taken over by criminals who demanded ransoms to stop tampering with the temperature and playing music at all times of the day and night. In most cases, this was because the system which these devices ran on was not encrypted nor updated. Sure, some of these companies took it a little more seriously, but most businesses just sold you the kit and told you to make sure you had a good password.
I had to find out whether it would be possible to hack into the system Janine had, but where to start? I couldn’t just type ‘how to find a hacker’ into Google and take my chances (I actually did do this initially, and felt incredibly foolish for days afterwards). Moving on, I searched for academics who were doing research on smart devices, and found a woman who’d written a paper on the future implications for home security in the era of smart houses. She worked at UCL and, God bless our higher education system, her email address was right below her name on the website for anyone to find. I emailed Kiran Singh from the mailbox of [email protected] and asked her if she’d have some time for an interview. I told her I was hoping to place a piece with the Evening Standard on the dangers of inviting this kind of technology into our homes.
Everyone always wants their name in print. Even though print is dying on its arse, people still get excited to see themselves mentioned. Online, you disappear within minutes mostly. But your gran can tear out the page of a newspaper and show her mates. Perhaps frame your achievement in the downstairs loo, where you’ll see the paper yellowing and curling every time you go in there to pee. Academics are no different. Kiran emailed me back within an hour to say that she’d be happy to speak to me and was the coming Friday any good?
We met at the café in the British Museum. Her idea, and a nice change from the normal banality of grabbing lunch from one of eight million Pret A Mangers in this city. I went armed with a notebook and a tape recorder, bought that morning from a tech shop on Tottenham Court Road, in the hopes that it made me look somewhat like a journalist. The recorder was guaranteed to be simple to use, I was told by the slightly desperate man selling it to me from his empty shop, nestled between two furniture megastores displaying identikit pale pink velvet sofas in the window displays. I switched it on and hoped for the best.
Kiran was a nice woman, if a little earnest, sitting at a table sipping green tea when I got there, but easily identifiable as an academic. Normal people don’t wear cords. They think about it, perhaps even try some on in the near permanent half-price sale at Gap. But ultimately they realise that they cling to you, collect fluff like no other fabric on earth and worse still, they make you look like an academic. After some small talk, she was happy to get down to the topic in hand, and gave me a ton of helpful information on whether it was possible to use this technology to hurt someone. Kiran thought there was one obvious way she could see a hacker using these smart home devices maliciously. If you could obtain access to the owner’s hub, then all bets were off.
The hub, she patiently told me once I’d asked her to go back and explain it again, was the brain box running all the gadgets in a smart home. It sends out commands and they obey. The hub can instruct the thermostat to increase the temperature in a home, or tell the TV to update the channels. Once a device is marked as ‘trusted’ by the hub, it’s in the network and can converse with all the other gadgets.
Some of these smart devices run on end to end encryption. ‘Amazon is generally pretty good with cloud security, but I wouldn’t touch Ergos devices with a bargepole,’ she said, sl
iding a finger across her neck. A lot of them didn’t though, given that the companies are smaller and the resources limited. There were easy ways to get access to the hub, Kiran told me – if you can obtain the serial number from the owner, then it’s a piece of cake.
‘I see people post it online all the time,’ she said, rolling her eyes. ‘Even if it’s not handed to you on a plate, there are ways of getting it by force if you’ve got basic hacking skills.’
Once a hacker gains control of the smart hub and the devices connected to it, the smart home can become a weapon for the person in charge.
‘You could use the homeowner’s cameras to spy on them,’ she said, ‘or gaslight someone by turning on music at certain times of day, opening doors, closing blinds.’ I suppressed a smile, she wasn’t to know how wonderful her hypothesis was. ‘But mostly, we’re not at that stage yet. Most people buy an Alexa or a Google device and use it to order milk. Sure, those devices are hackable, but the real danger is when everything in your house is connected, and we’re not there yet. That technology is still in its infancy, the preserve of the very rich.’
I asked her who was doing this kind of hacking and she looked around the café quickly, as though we might be surrounded by people eager to know where to start. In actual fact, we were sitting between an elderly woman in a floral coat eating blueberry cake on one side, a Japanese couple who were busy taking selfies on the other, and a young guy with dark hair and a well-cut coat engrossed in a book sitting three tables in front of us.
‘The big stuff is done by nation states – China, Russia, the US – though they deny it. Second-tier hacking tends to be groups focused on extortion – using webcams to blackmail LGBT people in the Middle East, for example. Then you’ve got isolated teens in their bedrooms who are totally self-taught and do it for laughs, because they’re bored, who knows? They have time to mess with someone’s head by interfering with their doorbell or turning off their heating, and then boast about it on Reddit or 4Chan or Babel …’
After a few more questions and a promise to get in touch when the article was done, I made my exit, careful to avoid the couple still determined to get that perfect selfie, and headed back to work. I walked briskly through the back streets behind Oxford Street, mulling over whether I could risk recruiting an accomplice to help me hack Janine’s house or not. I’d been loath to outsource any part of my plan from the outset, unwilling to add any obvious tripwires when there would be so many already. But I was sure that I couldn’t do it alone – my understanding of technology began and ended when I had to update my phone software – and I was already completely enamoured with the idea of Janine’s own home turning on her. Could I find someone I trusted enough to help me do it?
* * *
That weekend, I spent twenty-eight hours online, rubbing at my eyes every five minutes and alternating between coffee and wine depending on my energy levels. I looked at the sites Kiran had mentioned, reading thousands of posts by amateur hackers who boasted of their successes, crowing about infiltrating clouds, hubs, phones, and cameras in language that was almost completely alien to me. Was it lazy to imagine they were all scrawny 16-year-olds who’d not seen daylight for weeks? Perhaps, but I have no doubt it was accurate nonetheless. There were many posts from people asking hackers to help them, mainly to spy on partners suspected of cheating. ‘Girl (22) needs help to prove BF (28) is carrying on with co-worker. Help!’ was typical of such a plea. Normally the replies offered to take the conversation private, so I didn’t get to see what the result was, and whether a helpful hacker stepped up to the job.
But I was exhausted and tanked up on caffeine, so I posted a message. It didn’t matter if it failed to attract anyone, but it was worth a shot. It was vague and short, explaining that I was female (16, I figured that might appeal to some white-knight nerd), and wanted help to mess with my horrible stepmother. I won’t go into the details of some of the messages I received in the days that followed. Suffice to say, my plea was like honey to a bee. If the honey was a young vulnerable girl and the bee was a fucking swarm of old gross blokes. I replied to the least disgusting messages and blocked everyone else. I spent the next week drip-feeding further details to three users, seeing how they’d react, what they knew about hacking and what they’d want in return. The one I held out least hope for was ColdStoner17, who seemed not to be able to use proper words and replied at the most random times of day, often with gifs which I didn’t understand. I was about to cut him loose when he messaged me at 7 a.m. one day as I was getting ready for work.
Yo, he typed, when we freaking out the old lady then? I fucking hate my stepmom too. This can be like the therapy my dad won’t pay for. The language was basic but the full sentences were a start. I discovered that he was 17 (hence the username), lived in Iowa with his dad and the aforementioned evil stepmother, and spent a lot of time messing around on the internet when he should be doing his school work. I told him bluntly that it seemed unlikely he’d be a superstar hacker, but apparently I didn’t understand 17-year-olds very well at all. He spent the entire morning bombarding me with all the ways he could infiltrate laptop cameras, mess with baby monitors, and turn off people’s heating. It was mild stuff, but it still sounded more impressive than anything I could attempt, and so instead of binning him off, I engaged with him.
We talked a lot into the night on an encrypted instant messenger, as he told me how lonely he was and I told him fabricated stories about how much I hated my parents. The more we spoke, the more he relaxed and used proper spelling. He told me how much he loved reading, and we bonded over a love of Jack Kerouac (I have never read any Kerouac but Google kept me just about up to speed). I deliberately held off on any proper details about my plan, happy to form a relationship with him first, albeit one based on lies and sexist fairy-tale stepmother tropes.
This went on for a few weeks, as I attempted to act like the fictitious 16-year-old he thought I was, while also giving him a confidence boost that I reckoned would help him feel indebted to me. He confided in me about being bullied when he was younger because his parents had got a divorce (I guess Iowa wasn’t the most progressive of places) and he told me about his fears that he’d never get a girlfriend. Despite my attempts to keep it entirely chaste, sometimes I’d wake up to voice notes where he’d sing me little songs about how much I cheered him up, and I’d bat them away with smiley emojis. He was becoming infatuated. I’d forgotten how easy it was to manipulate teenage boys, but it came back to me pretty fast. I felt like I was on the right track with Pete (he told me his real name on day four, I told him that my name was Eve) and decided to press ahead and tell him a little bit more about what I wanted to do to Janine, my terrible stepmother.
I explained that she lived in Monaco (kind of like France, yes) and that she’d turned my dad against me over the years so that we were almost entirely estranged (not a complete lie). I wanted to freak her out and teach her a lesson. Did he know anything about smart houses? He knew a little, he said, but came back to me a day later fully clued up on the different methods used by companies who offered smart technology. The kid must have been up all night reading about all the ways you could infiltrate a home like Janine’s, and he was confident that we could get into her hub. The best way would be if we could get a new device into the house – if you can add another item to the system, we can take control of the whole thing. Are you planning a visit any time soon? This threw me. I had hoped that we’d be able to access the home hub without ever having to set foot inside the property and I had no clue as to how I might be able to get into Janine’s apartment without risking everything. I wasn’t a cat burglar and I had no illusions about how well secured it would be. But then, I’d never actually been to Monaco to see how Janine lived for myself. I had some holiday to take, there was no harm in seeing the lie of the land, even if it meant knowing for sure that there was no way to carry out this particular plan.
I told Pete that I was going to be out there in a couple of weeks but
wasn’t sure if I’d actually be invited in. She hates me lol, I wrote, and I usually stay with my mum at a hotel and see my dad when she’s not around. It was weak, but if Pete thought this was a weird familial set-up, he didn’t say. Despite nearly being an adult, his family made him go to church twice a week and every day during the holidays, so I guess he didn’t have a great yardstick for what was healthy.
I booked a week off work and sorted out a hotel in Monaco, which hit my finances hard. This entire project had drained a large amount of the savings I’d diligently gathered, and it pained me to see my hard-earned funds being depleted like this. I’d been putting a little bit aside every month since I started getting an allowance from Sophie and John (they obviously felt as though they had to treat me like one of their own in this respect. I felt uncomfortable about it, but I still took the money) and it gave me a sense of security that I didn’t get from anything else. Every time I checked my savings account I felt a fresh sense of fury at the imbalance between the Artemis financial landscape and my own. I accept that this is ridiculous, given that I was spending my money in order to kill them, but not every emotion is rational.