The Last Hack

by Christopher Brookmyre

  Like when I’m breaking into this place and making off with your prototype.

  ‘That’s fair enough. But I’m going to do you a favour. I’m going to give you the scoop making it official.’

  Parlabane’s pulse surges.

  ‘Aldous Syne?’

  ‘Correct. I can confirm on the record that our product in development – still strictly under wraps – is something Aldous Syne has been working on for quite some years, and we are privileged to be the ones bringing it to market.’

  ‘And I can interview him?’

  Cruz pauses, breathes out a regretful sigh.

  ‘That part, no. Aldous has always been a very shy, very reclusive individual. Maybe he’d have been cut a little more slack back in the day if we’d all been familiar with terms such as Asperger’s syndrome and the autistic spectrum. But some of the ridicule he was subjected to, the things that were written … He’s not as thick-skinned as you or me, Jack. It’s no wonder he crawled back inside his shell.’

  Parlabane recalls how Syne’s reputation had so swiftly gone from genius to joke, visionary to one-hit wonder.

  ‘He was extremely reluctant to put himself out there again, even when it came to presenting this new idea to people for development funding. I suppose there’s only so much rejection and humiliation you can take. Consequently this has been very much another garden-shed-inventor type deal, though it’s something considerably more technically sophisticated than the Synapse. We’re talking about the fruits of a lot of labour, and a multi-disciplinary command of electronic engineering. I think people will be forced to admit he is a true genius whose work requires a long gestation period.’

  ‘And are you confident you’ll be present for the birth? Last time we spoke you had concerns about a hostile takeover.’

  Cruz gives an odd little grunt, like someone trying to make light of their frustrations.

  ‘Certainly the upside of your article was that the resultant rise in our share price has warded off that particular predator – for now.’

  ‘You mean Danny Winter?’

  Cruz pauses, tripped by the question.

  ‘That’s confidential. How did you get that name?’

  ‘If you recall, we’ve had a turn at the “naming my source” dance once. The steps are the same.’

  ‘Equally, you’ll understand that I’d be in violation of non-disclosure terms if I were to confirm that.’

  ‘I don’t hear you denying it.’

  ‘What would be the point? I’ve nothing to say on the matter, though.’

  ‘So what was the downside?’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Of my article. You said there was an upside, which implies …

  ‘Oh, yes, sure. Quite simply it’s that bigger predators might start circling, especially now I’ve confirmed about Aldous.’

  ‘So why confirm?’

  ‘You always plan contingencies against what you anticipate going wrong. In this case I didn’t plan for something going unexpectedly well. It alters your perspective. I was terrified of Win— of someone else taking over Synergis because I feared the very intentions people assumed of me: shutting down and asset stripping. But now that danger looks to have passed, the new danger isn’t so scary. To be perfectly honest, if I have to dilute my holding, or someone else buys control of my company from other shareholders around me, I’m not as concerned as I used to be.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘If a bigger player is interested now, it’s because they want what we can build, not what they can get from breaking us up. I feel I owe Aldous something, so if we can make this happen – and, let’s not be coy, if I end up making a profit from it – then it doesn’t matter so much about who is holding the pink slip at the end of the day.’

  HOSTAGE SITUATION

  It isn’t only Synergis’s stock that is on the rise. Parlabane can do little wrong as far as his new employers are concerned. Since landing the gig by bringing them an exclusive interview with a member of Uninvited, he has followed it up with the interview in which Cruz hinted that Aldous Syne is back with a new idea. It is precisely the kind of tech-angled scoops Broadwave’s demographic-obsessed advertising department has been crying out for. Now he is delivering on the initial rumour with a follow-up of firm confirmation, on top of piquing Lee Williams’s considerable intrigue with the suggestion that he is tracking another major development involving his hacker contact.

  ‘I’m really looking forward to bringing Candace up to speed on all this when she flies in again,’ Lee tells him. ‘There’s a big state-of-play meeting scheduled. Attendance mandatory.’

  ‘She’s coming to London?’

  ‘Duh. She’s throwing a huge party to mark the London office of Broadwave being open three years. She’ll be wanting to show you off, so keep your diary clear.’

  Three years. It told him the extent to which his head had been up his arse post-Leveson that his impression was that these arrivistes had only popped up in the last six months. He kept this to himself, naturally.

  In everyone else’s eyes, it seems he is solid gold right now, which is why he has to conceal the truth by acting like he’s content and on top of his game. In reality he is on a runaway train that could explode at any moment, yet the only action open to him is to keep stoking the boiler.

  He has in the past paid the price for breaking one of his profession’s golden rules: don’t make yourself the story. On this occasion that choice has been taken out of his hands. The only question is whether that story will be how he helped Buzzkill hack the Clarion or how he helped her hack Synergis.

  He has seldom felt so lonely. He has nobody he can talk to about this, nobody who can help him. There’s only him and Sam, to whom he harbours constantly alternating feelings of resentment and responsibility, like she’s both his jailer and his ward. This duality is only enhanced by his own duplicity towards her. He has not revealed how much he knows about her, not even her real name.

  She reminds him of someone and it’s driving him crazy that he can’t think who. What makes it harder is that she only reminds him of whoever it is in these tiny glimpses. Most of the time her head is down, withdrawn or intent upon a screen; but every so often – usually when she laughs, when there is a hint of devilment or scheming – that’s when he gets this weird sense of déjà vu. It’s like he’s met her before, which is impossible.

  Every stroke she pulls off is another crime, another fraud, one more line that can’t be uncrossed; yet still she’s keeping this train on the rails. It always goes the same way: she outlines the objective in what sounds like a Mission: Impossible briefing, and then patiently and methodically goes about making it happen. For instance:

  ‘We have two primary targets: Synergis Network Security Director Matthew Coleridge and Synergis Head of Research and Development Jane Dunwoodie. We need their usernames and passwords, and to do this, we’re going to reach deep into our bag of tricks.’

  The first of these, which she calls ‘baiting’, delivers them nothing on their primaries, but it does bear some other fruit.

  She uses her multiplicity of fake social media accounts to subtly infiltrate the online circles of Tricorn House workers, spreading a link to an appeal from the Facebook page of Trish Gomez, a (non-existent) fellow employee who has misplaced a red-coloured flash drive, which she is desperate to recover as it contains scans of childhood Polaroids she recently lost while moving flat. With a few carefully placed social media posts, Sam seeds the rumour that it isn’t childhood snaps Trish is anxious to retrieve, but naked selfies intended for her boyfriend – ironically carried on the flash drive because she was worried about the security of storing them online.

  At various points over the subsequent days, Parlabane and Sam make separate visits to the publicly accessible ground-floor concourse area of Tricorn House, where they plant red flash drives in places they might plausibly have fallen and settled: in toilet cubicles, behind bins, under coffee-shop tables and between cushions on wa
iting-area benches.

  ‘The US government once did an experiment by planting a load of USB sticks in car parks outside their official buildings,’ Sam tells him. ‘Sixty per cent of people who found one plugged it into a workplace machine. Employees tend to be more educated about the danger these days, but that can change if they think they already know whose drive it is and what’s on it. Or what they hope is on it.’

  ‘What’s really on it?’

  ‘A reverse-shell RAT, hidden in the exe, backdoored with a Metasploit-based payload which will evade most AVs in common use.’

  Her words make no sense.

  ‘I did ask,’ Parlabane concedes.

  ‘Basically something that should get us the credentials of anybody curious enough to stick this in their USB slot. What’s also on it is a folder containing a shitload of naked selfies of the same woman whose photo I used for the Trish Gomez profile. I figure they’ll spend a while clicking through them, by which time my remote access Trojan will have had time to copy itself to their machine.’

  They score a 70 per cent pick-up rate, though of those, more than half wait until they get home to check out the goodies. Unfortunately the scattergun method means that Sam has no way of targeting the departments she wants. This means she gets results from all over Tricorn House and beyond, but none of them is in Tricorn Security or Synergis R&D.

  They do score one member of Synergis personnel: an electronics engineer named Oliver Greenberg. Due to the newly implemented two-factor authentication system, Sam can’t log into his account on the Synergis network, but she can get into his personal emails.

  ‘He and his buddies are doing a lot of bitching about Dunwoodie,’ she tells Parlabane. ‘She’s been parachuted in as head of R&D: she came with Cruz as part of the package. People don’t like it when someone is brought in over their head, and it appears you can double up on that when it’s a woman in a techy industry telling guys what to do. They seem particularly tetchy about the implied lack of trust. Seems only the higher-ups know the nature of Project RBA. The rest are being asked to work on individual components but none of them have been told what they’re for.’

  The baiting tactic has come up dry on getting closer to Coleridge and Dunwoodie, but they are working other angles. Parlabane suggests that researching a follow-up story for Broadwave would provide the perfect cover to quiz the targets and glean some valuable personal details.

  Sam looks at him with pitying disdain.

  ‘No benefit in making yourself memorable to the targets. Imagine the inquiry after they’re hacked. Who did you speak to, out of the ordinary? Oh, there was that journalist who was asking all kinds of questions I thought were kinda tangential at the time …’

  ‘So how do you suggest we play it?’

  ‘In this day and age, you don’t need to go in person to ask things when people are telling the world freely if you know where to look.’

  Within a matter of hours Parlabane knows more about the everyday lives of Jane Dunwoodie and Matthew Coleridge than he knows about most of his friends: marital status, number of kids, the names of their kids, what those kids look like, places of education, favourite pubs and restaurants, football affiliations, favourite music, TV shows, movies, video games, political and charity activism, who their friends are, what their friends look like, where they grew up, where they’ve been on holiday, what cars they drive.

  ‘Have you used this on me?’ he asks.

  She doesn’t answer.

  ‘So what do we do with all this?’

  ‘We go spear phishing.’

  Spear phishing, she explains, is what you call it when you’re aiming at a specific target, as opposed to spamming out emails and hoping some idiot bites. It is a matter of creating a bespoke trap, carefully tailored to the individual using the information you have gleaned.

  They know Matthew Coleridge has an eleven-year-old daughter who is heavily into karate, and he spends many a Saturday driving her to competitions at various sports centres around south London and Kent. They have dates and locations for several of these, photos from the meets, lists of organisers, competitors, sponsors. They know he lives in Bromley, they know the name of the restaurants where he likes to go out for family meals and they know that he sometimes takes his wife and kids bowling beforehand. They know plenty more besides, but this was as much as they would need for now.

  Using Coleridge’s direct line – found by Sam on a group email in Oliver Greenberg’s account – Parlabane calls the security chief mid-morning, when he’ll have had time to deal with the most pressing matters in his in-tray and most likely be open to a moment’s distraction. This gets Parlabane his first foot in the door.

  ‘Is that Matthew?’ he asks, putting on a generic English accent.

  ‘Yes. Who is this?’

  ‘My name is John White. I’m with the Sevenoaks Karate Association.’

  ‘How did you get this number?’

  He sounds irritated rather than accusatory, not welcoming an interruption this morning, but Parlabane can use that too.

  ‘Oh, am I ringing you at work? I’m terribly sorry, it’s just this is the number on the contact form I’ve got here from Bromley Junior Dragon Dojo.’

  ‘No, it’s no problem. Must have put down my work number on the form by mistake. Your voice sounds familiar, actually. Have we met?’

  ‘Well, you may remember coming to a competition recently at the leisure centre here: your daughter Penny came first in the under-twelves open Kata.’

  ‘How could I forget,’ he all but purrs.

  They chose the Sevenoaks Karate Association for this reason: people are always happy to reconnect with the scene of a triumph; parents doubly so. In about ten seconds Coleridge has gone from mild impatience to oozing goodwill.

  ‘The thing is, we’re having a silent auction to help raise funds. I’m not on here asking for money, at least not today. Just want to know whether you’d be interested in taking a look at the auction website, and if there’s anything you’d like to bid on, you can take it from there. All the businesses in the area have been very generous. We’ve got a pampering session at a local spa, a bowling session at Strike Lanes followed by dinner next door at Pollo, a corporate package at Selhurst Park, really a ton of great prizes to bid on.’

  ‘No, that sounds great. I’d be delighted to take a look.’

  ‘Thanks, that’s brilliant. I didn’t want to send out a mass email because everyone gets a million of them, don’t they? And if you’re fund-raising, it helps to be a bit more personal. Not to mention the danger of it ending up in the spam folder.’

  ‘Well, I can assure you that won’t happen with this if you want to email me the link now.’

  ‘Sure. Well, actually I can’t do it right this second. The Wi-Fi here has started playing up. Can I dictate you the URL?’

  ‘Sure. I’m opening up a new tab now.’

  Parlabane tells Coleridge the address.

  ‘And can you make sure I spelled that right?’ he asks. ‘Is it loading okay?’

  ‘It’s taking a while, actually. Oh, no, here it comes.’

  ‘Great. As I said, I’m not asking for credit card details. If there’s anything you want to bid on, email the address at the bottom. Anyway, if you’ll forgive me, I have to make about another twenty of these calls this morning, so …’

  ‘No, no, not at all, and best of luck.’

  The website does list the items for a fund-raising silent auction, all knocked up by Sam the night before with careful attention to detail. What it also contains is the reason the site appeared to be ‘taking a while’. The first thing it did was deliver its payload of malware to Coleridge’s computer: a remote access Trojan that connects back to Sam’s laptop from inside the Tricorn House firewall.

  They pull a similar trick with BMW driver and Arsenal fan Jane Dunwoodie: in her case the hook is an invite to a VIP champagne opening event at a new dealership close to her home in Finchley, featuring a prize draw offering,
among other enticements, a corporate hospitality package at the Emirates.

  The runaway train stays on the rails, always accelerating. Parlabane thinks of all the cat-burgling break-ins he carried out, the simple deceptions that bagged him exclusives but ultimately earned him the opprobrium of the Leveson Inquiry. These were mere smash-and-grab jobs, opportunistic exploitation of unwariness and complacency. They were the work of an amateur.

  Sam operates on a different plane: working multiple angles simultaneously, planning several moves ahead, improvising instantly when that next foothold shows her an unexpected rockface. At any given stage she is pursuing a variety of attack vectors.

  It’s only on the part left to him that they are making bugger-all progress.

  KEYBOARD PLAYER

  Even the most ingeniously devised and perfectly executed strategy can yield nothing if your luck is out, especially when you’re firing blind.

  Sam bought what she needed from a place off Tottenham Court Road, then Parlabane shipped the components north to his friend Spammy, along with Sam’s specifications. He got the finished product back three days later, which constituted a lightning turnaround for the big man. Spammy had done a grand job of the electronic engineering, then it was down to Sam to handle the social engineering.

  She called Winter’s investment firm, where she spoke to his PA, the man himself apparently unavailable. This was preferable, because Parlabane had been warned that he was suspicious of favours. Flattering him via a subordinate was therefore ideal.

  Her voice was bubbly and enthusiastic, like she was calling her best friend.

  ‘My name is Tess Jones, from Vizion Peripherals. That’s Vizion with a zed. The reason I’m calling is we’re launching our new top-of-the-range keyboard, the Vizion Maven, and as a marketing initiative, we’re offering a limited number free to people who are considered electronics industry visionaries: mavens. Obviously what we’re hoping is that they’ll talk and tweet about the brand, but there’s absolutely no obligation. We consider Mr Winter someone who has shown vision in his choice of investments, so I was wondering if he would be happy to try our new Vizion Maven?’