The Back Door Man

by Dave Buschi

  There were other makers of crimeware kits. Fragus. SpyEye. They all served the same purpose. The kits gave instructions for how to customize malicious code. Basically taught beginners, rank amateurs, how they could steal data, confidential information. It lowered the bar. Made anyone an instant player in the cybercrime realm.

  In the last few years the kits had gained in popularity. They were all over the Web. Thanks to them there were now tens of thousands of new malicious code variants out there.

  And James was looking at three of them right now.

  Interesting.

  Maybe the sophistication of this thing wasn’t all that. To cop a phrase from Enrique. Was this your work, Enrique?

  It certainly looked like it.

  Enrique was skilled, but he had a proclivity for plagiarism. Most of his best ideas came from others. James knew how Enrique worked. The kid took shortcuts. Didn’t like to do things the hard way, if there was a faster, more expedient method.

  There was a laziness to that attitude. He used to scold him for it. Because sometimes it meant he got sloppy.

  RAS, eh Brutus. Reticular Activating System.

  James put a lot of weight in RAS. Once his mind was made of aware of something, it was like his mind expanded. Was able to see more of the big picture.

  RAS was a natural phenomenon. Medically it was described as the ability of the mind to have a heightened sense of bodily and behavioral alertness. Everyone had it.

  You buy a car. One that you think is slightly unique, maybe because of its model or color. The second you get on the road, though, you start seeing identical cars to yours everywhere. Seems like everyone owns a champagne-colored Jetta.

  Thing was—they were always there. You just never noticed them. They weren’t on your radar. To you they were invisible. Invisible until you bought one.

  RAS.

  It just took a little prodding. Once you tapped into it. Allowed yourself to stop focusing on the details, it was like seeing with 3-D vision. Seeing what was also there—just invisible because it was flattened temporarily so as to exist in two dimensions. Accordion those dimensions out to three, and suddenly you could see what you were looking for.

  It didn’t take long. There it was. James smiled.

  A tertiary program, layered in the code.

  He knew what the back-door component was doing. Not only that, he had the key. A vulnerability to exploit.

  There was an often-repeated list of cardinal rules in the information security business. Anything can be broken into. Nothing was fully secure. No firewall exists that can’t be breached. No crypto is unbreakable.

  Those same themes held true for worms with back-door components. Creators were always mistaken into thinking they controlled them. Which for the most part they did. Unless someone else took that control from them.

  Flipped the tables.

  You own me.

  Right back at you.

  Control was all in the eye of who did it best.

  James paused.

  The smell of chum in the water had made him get carried away. He’d let time slip. Not good.

  He toggled back to the FLIR.

  Shit.

  His forehead creased. The men weren’t on the floor above him. With a few rapid clicks he brought up other views.

  Shit.

  Where are you guys?

  It took him a moment. Then he found them. Six heat traces combing another floor, moving methodically. There was a seventh heat trace close to where they were. That heat trace wasn’t moving.

  It took him a second to realize why.

  That seventh heat trace was him.

  46

  IT was a ghoulish inventory: duct tape, bleach, cleaning solution, Saran Wrap, plastic sheeting, contractor-strength plastic bags, two hacksaws, some technical gear of unknown purpose, several 10-gig memory sticks, an assortment of weaponry, several clips of ammunition, a knife with Saran Wrap wrapped around its handle, and lastly a folded letter.

  Sue handed it to him. Bob read the first few lines again. It was a journal entry, printed on ordinary copier paper.

  Forgive me Sue for what I am about to do. I know you and the girls will soon be in a better place. This is no place for us…

  The passage, dated yesterday, went on to say that this would be his last entry. There was something printed on the other side. It was a recipe for spicy salmon.

  “There was some paper in the tray.”

  It had been printed on the printer upstairs. James frequently saved paper by printing on the backs.

  Sue told him she’d uncovered the journal entry on the screen, by clicking the computer out of hibernation. She’d tried to scroll back to previous entries, but a password box appeared and had closed down the file. It appeared to be encrypted.

  “James didn’t keep a journal,” Sue said.

  “As far as you know.”

  “I know my husband. They did this. They intended to make this look like James typed it. But this isn’t him.”

  Bob frowned. He glanced out the window and surveyed the yard. His truck was in the driveway. To the left and right were woods. There was a house across the street, and a curving driveway to the left, but otherwise this house was tucked back and out of sight.

  The house, Bob realized, even for being in a neighborhood, was very secluded. The gunshots should have drawn some attention, but no one had come to check on the family. No police or concerned neighbors had rolled up or walked into the yard. A bunker mentality had taken hold of the city, and it seemed to have taken hold of this neighborhood, as well.

  Sue tried calling the police again with no luck. She called the fire department again.

  “It’s still busy.”

  Bob’s eyes strayed to the keys and cell phones he’d taken from the men in the garage. The keys were to a Mercedes, but there was no car anywhere near the house. The men hadn’t had any form of identification on them.

  “We need to go,” Bob said.

  “I know,” Sue said.

  47

  PETER was not happy. He had just seen ten large slip through his fingers.

  “They’ve taken us off?”

  Denis nodded.

  An hour ago they had left the mark’s Jap car. It had been in some sort of wreck and abandoned on the road. From there, the trail seemed to have gone cold.

  Peter looked at his partner. “I don’t like being teased.”

  Denis shrugged. “Five thousand is five thousand.”

  “But it’s not fifteen.”

  “Nope.”

  Peter took a drag on his cigarette and flicked his butt out the window. He didn’t want to let this one go. “That file have his address?”

  Denis grunted an affirmative.

  “Plug it into the GPS.”

  48

  JAMES wasn’t thinking this, but it was there in his head. He’d had discussions with colleagues before. There was a certain body of thought regarding hackers.

  Hackers were notorious for having multi-personalities. They were the ultimate ciphers, nonentities, blank slates. Individually, they belied labels. They were who they wanted to be. Morphing at will.

  As a group, however, they began to coalesce into definable terms. As one voice, they romanticized their profession. They even viewed their profession—if it could be called that—as a legitimate occupation. They saw themselves as having a unique role in the world. As liberators. Freedom makers. Heroes for the masses.

  Hackers were leaders. Multiplied one thousand times one thousand. They were one, and they were a million.

  There was a communistic cant to their credo. Knowledge for them was meant to be shared. Any knowledge that was hidden, kept from the general collective, had to be outed, by any means necessary.

  The light must shine on every dark corner.

  Hackers were paradoxes.

  They lived by their own rules. The irony was that while they broke rules, they believed in the absolute power of rules. Knowing how things work
ed, the rules that governed what made 2 + 2 = 4 or x * y = z enabled them to manipulate the rules as they saw fit.

  Hackers were artists.

  Masters of a timeless art form. An art form that wasn’t new. Its birth actually preceded computers. Not by decades, but by millennia. The romanticists in the hacker realm drew lines to the ancient Greeks. Pythagoras with his Pythagorean Theorem, pulling away the curtain on Euclidean geometry. Showing how it worked. Revealing its secrets.

  Revealing the truth.

  Hackers sought the same truth. As a collective, they lived by a “Hacker Ethic” that touted the appreciation of logic as an art form. Their end game was the free flow of information. Making all information available to the masses. Because with knowledge was gained a better understanding of the world.

  Pythagoras, in his day, sought the same objective.

  Knowledge for one. Knowledge for all.

  Hackers were purists.

  Poetry. Haiku. They felt a familial connection to those arts, however tenuous—rooted in how they saw elegance in code.

  Brevity. Using the minimum number of binary bytes to paint a picture. Just like haiku, or poetry did with words.

  Leaders, paradoxes, artists, purists. Hackers were all of these things.

  James was a hacker.

  He just didn’t know it.

  While his job as an information security engineer was to police and secure, he was a hacker that hadn’t been liberated, yet. One thing, though, his mind had the gift that all hackers had. Because there was one other absolute truth.

  Hackers were hacks. They espoused all sorts of bad analogies.

  The rabbit who thinks he’s a wolf always faces a grim end.

  James was glued to his laptop’s screen, like a moth on a flame, his wings glowing pyrotechnic. He saw the heat trace that was him, which wasn’t moving. That was him.

  A truth.

  There were six other heat traces. All moving. All moving towards him.

  Another truth.

  He snapped out it.

  Stupid.

  James slipped his laptop in the duffel bag. He moved down the aisle, past the switchgear.

  He had eyes but he wasn’t using them.

  Those men had cut him off. He’d seen it on his screen. Computed it instantly. Visualized the chess moves before they happened. There were lifts and stairwells throughout this place, and somehow James was obtuse enough to let them get too close.

  They had him boxed in. They’d cut off his moves. He would never make it to the closest stairwell. He couldn’t head towards the central core, either.

  His options were limited. Head north, stupid, and go to the end. Stop at the Cryogel tanks and wait till they find you. James figured that would be in about five minutes, at best. If he put on his invisible suit and clicked his heels three times.

  Shit.

  He’d gotten sloppy. And he knew better.

  Cardinal rules. Another often-quoted one: always prioritize your threats. Anytime he performed a security analysis on a piece of equipment—such as a new server or router—that was always forefront in his mind. What is the first thing he needed to worry about? Second? Third?

  It was critical to make a list. Make it to ad infinitum, if necessary, but never lose sight of what things mattered most.

  First major threat, second major threat…

  Okay…

  Threat number one: you have Security looking for you. They get you. Game over. You’re done.

  Jail time. Say goodbye to your wife and kids. Spend the rest of your life in an eight by ten cell. Get cozy with Bubba, your three-hundred-pound bunkmate who insists on being on top.

  Got it?

  He was so angry with himself, he wanted to hit himself. Bodily make himself suffer.

  Calm down. This was not productive.

  They didn’t have him, yet. Until they did, he had options. Just figure them out. Option number one: hide. Option number two…

  Think James. He visualized the floor plan in his head. The Cryogel tanks were the best place to go.

  He gripped his duffel bag. He took a left at the end of the aisle. A quick right past some utility cabinets. Twenty feet ahead was open space. A great big cavernous room that housed the tanks.

  No choice. Where he was, was no place to hide. He entered the room.

  The rabbit was coming out of its hole.

  Hello, big bad wolves, come and get me.

  His mind was a gelatinous mold of free-flowing garbage.

  The room was filled with vibrations.

  WMMMMM…

  A reverberating, eternal echo. James seemed to recall that Jerry had said this was the loudest space in the entire Vault. 81 decibels.

  It sounded louder than that. Not that James was an expert. The one bright side: James didn’t need to worry that the tools in his duffel bag would clink and give him away. He could clap his hands and stomp his feet and no one was going to hear him.

  What he wanted to do was scream.

  No time for that, stupid.

  James moved quickly across the open floor. He felt so exposed. Those men had been close. If they reached this room, he was a sitting duck.

  He didn’t want to go out like this. Not when he’d gotten close. He’d just started to see the light.

  The door was cracked. The back door that would reveal the truth. Reveal why he’d been set up.

  The truth.

  Answer what he needed to know.

  49

  THE open space felt interminable. James moved as fast as he could. It was only thirty yards, but it felt like forever he was out in the open.

  Breathing heavily, he made it to the Cryogel tanks and went behind the nearest one. Up close, the tanks were enormous.

  Made of ASME Code steel, they looked like grain silos. Fed by insulated lines, they were the key component of the Cryogel Ice BallTM thermal storage media. The insulated lines led to a field of chillers that were all housed topside. The chillers ran during the night to save on energy costs. Energy was expensive. Running during non-peak hours more than halved the electrical bill for this facility. An electrical bill that was in the tens of millions of dollars per year.

  Electricity didn’t have a shelf life. You either used it, or lost it.

  That’s where the thermal storage kicked in. The solution in the tanks, infused with Cryogel Ice Balls, circulated and stored the energy. Energy, which was released 365/24/7 as air conditioning.

  The tanks had steel ladders on their sides. James gave them one look and felt a wave of nausea come over him. He looked around. There was little cover where he was. Security would spot him the second they walked around the tanks.

  He took a deep breath. You can do this.

  He stepped to one of the ladders and took hold of the lower rung. He started to climb. Above him, the top of the tanks seemed to kiss the steel deck. He climbed with the duffel bag slung over his shoulder.

  He hated heights. It was a fear he’d had ever since he was a kid. As he’d gotten older, it’d just gotten worse. Cleaning the gutters of his own house, perched on his twenty-four-foot ladder, always gave him the cold sweats. And that was only two stories. These tanks were over four stories tall.

  Vertigo was a strange phenomenon. Take a six-inch-wide plank and ask a person to walk across it, and a person could do so easily. Now take that same plank, place it thirty feet in the air and ask that person to walk it again. That was another ballgame altogether.

  James didn’t like heights. Period.

  He flew in airplanes, begrudgingly. He had to shut the port window every time. He hated seeing outside. His hands went clammy during takeoffs and landings. It never failed. He always felt ill hours after a flight. All those gastric juices still churning in his stomach.

  He went up one rung at a time. He didn’t look down. It was painstaking.

  The steel rungs dug into his sweating palms. His ankle was hurting. He kept going. Shutting out everything. No noise. No fear.

 
Just rungs. Concentrate on the rungs.

  He was almost there. Just a few more rungs to go. The duffel bag started to slip. Shit. He gripped with one hand and used his other hand to push the strap back on his shoulder.

  He happened to look down. That wasn’t a good idea. It broke his focus. No longer was he looking at the white enamel paint in front of him. His vanishing point accelerated, stretching like a bungee cord running away from him, making his eyesight undulate.

  It was a long drop. The rungs of the ladder receded smaller and smaller. He felt queasy, dizzy, but that wasn’t the worst of it.

  Down at the bottom he saw something moving.

  Shit.

  It was a man. Security.

  50

  THREE and a half stories in the air, James froze, doing his best imitation of a Cryogel Ice Ball. The man below hadn’t looked up, yet. If he did, James would be spotted instantly.

  James snapped out of it. Move. He took hold of the next rung and stepped up another rung. The noise…

  WMMMMM…

  …cancelled out all other sounds. James continued up. The top was close.

  He looked down. The man was moving to the left and still hadn’t glanced up. James monkeyed up the last two rungs and drew himself up. He reached for the guardrails and stepped onto the top of the tank.

  He was almost close enough to the ceiling that he could touch it. When he’d looked up from the bottom, it had appeared the tanks were flush against the steel deck. Once on top, though, he realized there was actually about eight feet of clearance. If he stood and hopped a few inches he’d be able to touch the ceiling.

  Just that thought made him dizzy again. He crouched down on top of the tank and caught his breath.

  Okay… he needed to look. He edged to the lip and looked down. The man had moved over to the next tank.

  James watched, transfixed.

  Security. Or someone posing as Security. The man stopped. Glanced around. He touched his ear and seemed to be speaking to someone.