The Last Hack
Page 3
Critics called it ‘Broadfunnel’, because it was one of the first places would-be reporters and ordinary punters sent their blogs, vlogs and phone-cam footage in the hope of a payment or simply a credit. Candace called this ‘crowdsourcing the news’, and hired a new breed of editors whose job was about filtering and compiling content from the deluge of material that came to them over the wires. It wasn’t a scattershot strategy: this new breed needed strong news sense, and worked closely with a staff of experienced reporters who helped shape the coverage across multiple media. The results weren’t merely garnering page hits: Broadwave’s features were regularly being picked up by newspapers, and its logo was becoming a familiar sight in the corner of video footage shown on network news.
He hadn’t sent them a CV and no vacancy had been advertised. They called him, and he was on a flight the next morning. He met them at their London offices, in a basement off Kingsland Road.
In his excited haste Parlabane had scribbled down the words ‘perseverance works’ next to the postcode dictated by the intern he spoke to. As he walked from Old Street Tube station, he couldn’t remember whether this had been a warning that the place was difficult to find or a sentiment to himself regarding his own tenacity. It turned out to be the name of the building.
He was met in the reception area by a heavily tattooed young woman sporting close-cropped, pink-dyed hair and a pair of pink eighteen-hole Doc Marten boots. She had an iPhone in her left hand and was clutching a copy of Diva in her right. She looked twenty-five at most and Parlabane assumed she must be the intern he had spoken to until she greeted him by name in a strong southern Welsh accent. That was what turned enough cogs in his head for him to be able to respond by saying: ‘You must be Lee.’
He didn’t know if he got points for that, but she did seem genuinely pleased to see him.
He only got a brief look at the place through the reception windows before Lee ushered him back out again, saying they would be meeting Candace around the corner for brunch.
Hence his current location in this po-mo greasy spoon, where Parlabane is coming to suspect that his glimpse through the windows is as close to Broadwave as he’s going to get.
‘I’m not gonna ask you to blow smoke. That doesn’t tell me nothing I don’t know. What I really want to ask is what you think is wrong with Broadwave.’
It is Candace who speaks. Parlabane wonders whether his insight is genuinely being sought or whether this is some kind of truth-to-power test. Candace Montracon is a tall and striking black Hispanic transsexual whose path to a nine-figure net worth before the age of thirty was not greased by favour, privilege or Ivy League connections. There was no ‘small loan of a million dollars’. Hers is an intimidating power to speak truth to, but Parlabane also reckons her bullshit detection and tolerance levels are calibrated so that truth is the only path. He is also working on the premise that Candace didn’t get where she is without a fine appreciation for hustle.
This is his chance to pitch.
‘That’s not a question you would be asking if you didn’t already know the answer. Broadwave’s Achilles heel right now is that in news terms, while you’ve got great reach and fast reflexes, you’re reactive rather than dynamic. Something happens and you’re all over it, big with the analysis and the follow-up. Not so much with the scoops. You’re great at covering stories, but you aren’t breaking them.’
Candace shows barely any response, but Parlabane is looking carefully enough to detect just the slightest affirmation. It’s barely a nod, the merest movement of her head, but it’s enough to say: Tell me more.
‘You guys thought the whole “democratisation of information” thing combined with your crowdsourcing model would mean the stories would come to you. You’d be the ideal safe haven for whistleblowers, for leaks and confidential sources: people who wouldn’t go to the mainstream media because they didn’t trust them for whatever reason. It didn’t happen though, because it doesn’t work like that.
‘New media, old media, certain principles endure, and one of them is that it’s all about contacts. If you’ve got a nervous source wanting to reach out, they’re going to reach out to someone they know, or at least someone they feel they can quantify. People trust individuals, not brands; no matter how hot and sexy that brand is. And that goes tenfold in the political sphere.’
Candace fixes him with a penetrating stare.
‘And I gather the political sphere is one in which you are well-travelled.’
Lee wades in before Parlabane can answer, speaking with what he is surprised to discern as alacrity.
‘He broke some seriously major stories.’
Lee turns to look at him, eyes wide. She is actually fangirling.
‘I mean, Jesus, the Midlothian NHS Trust scandal, the murder of Roland Voss, a massive blackmail conspiracy at the Scottish Parliament. That was swashbuckling shit. You were a lightning rod back then.’
As they departed the Broadwave offices, Lee had informed him that the premises had once housed a typesetting business, asking if he remembered what it was like to use paste-up boards and bromides. He replied in the affirmative, which seemed to delight Lee but made Parlabane feel like a relic.
It is proving something of a leitmotif as the interview progresses.
‘And how’s your contact book looking these days?’ Candace asks.
It is what in Glasgow they call a double dunt. She is not only pointing out the stark absence of such lightning-rod political scoops in Parlabane’s more recent career, but deftly introducing the sensitive subject of the reason why.
Parlabane finishes chewing a small mouthful of his roll and sausage; probably about a quid’s worth.
‘I guess you’re asking whether I’m as good as my greatest triumphs or as bad as my worst mistakes.’
‘It would be fair if the answer was “somewhere in between”, but we both know it ain’t about fair. Especially now. It’s all about the brand. Hitler Diaries: that was embarrassing because it told everyone the news company wanted it to be true more than they worried about it being right. When you’re the goddamn Sunday Times, you can recover from that. We don’t got the institutional cachet of having a century or two of operational history behind us. In the new media, you’re only credible while you’re cool and you’re only cool while you’re credible. What I’m asking is if you can still get people to pick up the phone.’
Parlabane feels punctured, skewered with pinpoint accuracy through his own Achilles heel. The Leveson Inquiry had laid bare his more morally questionable (and at times downright illegal) methodology, and in his desperation to restore his reputation he had taken the bait in a honey trap set by the intelligence services. What he thought was a major scoop about military collusion in overseas false flag operations turned out to be a deliberate hoax planted to flush out a leak. He had wanted it to be true more than he had worried about it being right.
‘I can still find a story where nobody knew there was one,’ he replies. ‘My Black Widow exclusive proves that much.’
He winces inside. He’s actually bringing up the Black Widow story himself now. Not waving but drowning.
Candace looks impassive, though Parlabane is grateful her look is not one of pity.
‘It was a big story, a great scoop,’ she concedes. ‘But not so much about your contact book as about being in the right place at the right time.’
Parlabane takes a sip of tea. He’s sure this last was supposed to rile him, maybe to see how he reacted or maybe evidence that Candace has seen enough and wants to wrap this up.
He figures he’s got one last opening here, and then it’s over.
‘You ever watch football, Candace?’
‘Do you mean soccer? Sometimes.’
‘I took her to West Ham against Swansea,’ Lee says, her grin and her accent suggesting the points went west.
‘I once heard an interview with a striker who had scored the only goal of the game, a tap-in from six yards,’ Parlabane says. ‘Some
one had come up to him afterwards and said: “You got your money easy today.” He laughed because the guy had no idea what it took to be in the right place at the right time for that six-yard tap-in. It’s the most valuable skill in the game, and a striker who’s got that is worth a fortune.’
‘That’s true,’ Lee agrees, but then she wrinkles her nose. That’s when he knows for sure that he’s lost it.
‘It wasn’t really a Broadwave kind of story, though,’ Lee goes on. ‘I mean, it was a great scoop, obviously, but affairs, cheating, marriage breakdown: it’s a bit tabloidy. Not quite our speed.’
She’s still smiling, but he can see the regret in it. He has disappointed her. She wanted him to prove he was still relevant, that he was still the guy she had read about. Essentially she wanted the reporter he was when he was her age.
Parlabane picks up the remains of his roll, an overpriced breakfast looking like the only thing he’s going to get out of this interview.
He looks across at the women on the other side of the table and thinks about some of the editors and colleagues he used to work with. So many men he used to work with. He can imagine the way they would respond to the idea of Lee as their news editor.
I don’t care what job title she’s been given, I’m not listening to some little girl. What can she tell me about this game when she’s only twenty-five?
Parlabane’s response would be to listen to her very carefully, because she’s got that job title and she’s only twenty-five.
He used to think he wanted the media to be the way it once was, but these were the comfort fantasies of an ageing man. Instead he can glimpse what the industry might become were it run by young tyros such as Candace and Lee, rather than by old filth like Kelvin MacKenzie and Paul Dacre.
Candace signals for the bill with the slightest glance to the waitress. It is subtle and minute yet effective, unequivocal, and in that tiny gesture Parlabane can see the future leaving without him.
THE USUAL REASONS
*Buzzkill changes language mode to Internet Relay Chat.
*Buzzkill lights candle.
*Buzzkill mourns the budgie.
K-zag joined channel #Uninvited_specops
The usual reasons. Buzzkill smiles typing that.
Once you’re in the guts of it, it’s hard to remember what first sparked the motivation for a hack. In this case it was a TV news report about the Royal Scottish Great Northern Bank doling out super-fat bonuses to its top dogs, like these skrubs needed a hot meal. This was coming on the heels of the revelations that the RSGN had been illegally rigging the Libor rates as well as helping its richest clients dodge what meagre taxes were still due after they had parked the rest of their money in Panama or the Virgin islands.
Stonefish was on the wind-up, using SJW. It stands for social justice warrior, which admittedly Buzzkill can be, sometimes. Nothing is sacred with the Uninvited crowd, and it is unwise to let them know what you really care about. Nothing is to be taken seriously, and anything you say can and will be used against you. That said, you don’t have to be selling the Socialist Worker outside Euston to think these RSGN chancers are taking the piss.
The TV reporter laid it all out, what they’d been up to, then their shameless spokeswombat spewed out quotes giving it the L’Oréal defence: Because we’re worth it. Buzzkill’s response was: Fuck these ass-clowns.
But Buzzkill has thought ‘fuck these ass-clowns’ about plenty of people before, and not decided to deploy any hack-fu against them. Seeing the report merely prompted the response: ‘Hmmm. I wonder I wonder I wonder.’
So truth is it’s not about social justice, any more than the rest of the Uninvited crew – regardless what they might claim – will be doing it for the lulz. They do it for the usual reasons: because they can; or simply to find out if they can.
A bank would ordinarily be a non-starter (come on, it’s a bank), but at the tail-end of that news story, the reporter mentioned that the RSGN was in the middle of a rebranding exercise. It was the usual suit-think: they were trying to clean up their image by redesigning their logo and launching a new slogan. It was hardly going to make everybody forget that they were doling out seven-figure bonuses to their execs while everybody else was still paying for their ten-figure bail-out, but it did present a skilled hacker with a possibility.
A trip down Canary Wharf was called for, to that glass-and-chrome supervillain HQ from where you see the TV guys reporting every time the RSGN gets caught on the fiddle. Buzzkill had a wander around, scoped the place, took some notes: such as the fact that it had this gigantic digital thermometer hanging in the middle of the vestibule, permanently showing the wrong temperature. It was about forty feet up and obviously a bitch of a thing to get to, so apparently it had been like that a while, as it hadn’t been twenty-eight outside for months.
Around midday, an upmarket deli joint full of suits having lunch seemed an inviting destination. Buzzkill sat there a long time, sipping from a bottle of water and being comfortably ignored, blending into the background. To a shower of corporate zones the hacker was practically invisible.
Buzzkill huddled there tapping at a laptop which had a modified webcam attached to the side by a clip. It was designed to look like it was pointing at the user, but all the time the tiny high-definition camera was focused on the screen of whichever device happened to be open on an adjacent table. That way the resourceful hacker-about-town was able to see the address of the site they were logging into in order to keep working for the Man during their lunch hours: committed, professional, dedicated.
Slaves. Drones. Losers.
After that, of course, a username and password would be required.
Sonya’s login proved sufficient to facilitate a thorough poke around, allowing the download of a ton of emails and a fact-finding tour of the Customer Communications department’s local network. Sonya’s lowly credentials weren’t going to provide access to anything truly tasty, but it was a foot in the door: enough to get names, job titles, contact details, and from that to develop a picture of the department’s structure, the terminology they used and crucially the codename they had given the rebranding project: White Frost.
Hacking works by increments: once you’re inside, even at the ground floor, you can usually score something that will help you access the next level; and sometimes you really luck out. In this case it was the discovery that Customer Communications had a policy of hot-desking, so staff were logging in from dif
ferent computers. This meant that each machine stored a list of passwords for all of the user accounts that had logged into it. They were encrypted, but still, it represented an express elevator to the penthouse. Buzzkill only needed the right executive credentials to make it move.
That’s what the internet relay chatroom request for hashes was all about, and why the guys were joyfully giving out grief about it. It takes a varied pool of talents to make something like this happen, and though everybody loves to showcase their skillz, they also love the power it gives them when they can dangle their refusal over a friend in need.
You don’t only have to ask politely, you have to ask canny. Don’t sound like you want it too much. Don’t sound like you’re on a crusade.
That’s why Stonefish said NYPA. Not Your Personal Army. He was joking, though. He knew Buzzkill wasn’t on a crusade, same as they both knew nobody was going to miss out on being part of this big a win. This would see Uninvited getting headlines right around the globe. Jesus, even LulzSec and Anonymous never hit a bank.
A GOOD WALK SPOILED
‘Hello, can I speak to Jonathan Rockwood please?’
‘Who is this?’
‘My name is Les Dillon. I’m from—’
‘Les, it’s not a good time to talk. I’m on the golf course, so …’
‘I appreciate that, and I’m very sorry to interrupt your game on a Sunday morning, sir, but I’m with IT and I need to inform you of some server outages in case they affect you.’
‘Wait, server outages?’
‘Yes, sir. There’s been a suspected breach and we’ve been investigating a possible malware intrusion. The damage looks limited at this stage but the worry is that we don’t know how far it might have spread.’
‘What are you telling me?’
‘Well, ordinarily we wouldn’t be going so belt and braces, but because of White Frost we’ve been ordered to take everything up a notch, security-wise. We’re having to wipe the potentially affected servers and restore from back-up.’