was doing and said something to the douche-bag that made him stop
tagging along and left him with a disappointed look on his face. Chloe
suppressed a smile as she watched him curse to himself behind Bee and
c1sman’s backs as they walked away from him. She let them pass her,
listened for a couple more minutes to the woman behind the table’s sales
pitch for security software, and then followed them out. They took the
elevators, she took the stairs, and they met back up at the room to find
out what the trouble was.
If he hadn’t met that writer Alan Denkins, the con would’ve been
a complete disaster. Back home in Athens, Georgia, he was going
through his usual post-convention decompression, which meant down-
loading torrents of all the new TV he’d missed over the weekend and
eating a cake. But this time he felt different. This time he didn’t have
a job to go to on Monday morning and didn’t have much in the way
of pleasant memories to rehash in his mind as he drifted off to sleep.
This time he was mourning the death of SecZone. Things had gone
from bad to worse, as the hallway confrontations got more heated and
both convention’s networks got taken down. It never came to blows
of course, but it was embarrassing and awkward and mortifying and
a bunch of other words he couldn’t summon up at the moment. It had
just sucked. He’d wanted to walk away and probably would have except
half the gear in the network room belonged to him and he wasn’t going
to be a jerk about it. So he’d waited and even hid in his room for a
while until Sunday morning came and he could start pulling his stuff
and going home.
Alan had been the one good thing. He was cool, and nice, and really
interested in hacking. Not interested in hacker politics or rivalries or
bullshit. He wanted to learn about hacking for the book he was writ-
ing, and Chris had been happy to tell him all about it. And he wasn’t
just listening to be polite. He was actually listening and asking ques-
tions and seemed to be absorbing what was being said. And he asked
good questions too. Stuff that made you think. They’d stayed up late
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75
that night and Alan asked him all kinds of questions about how you’d
actually hack into a company’s network and why you’d do it and what
you could do once you got in. Chris had even told him some stuff—
all off the record of course—about some of his own exploits when he
was younger. And later he might have mentioned something about
some of his more recent exploits too, although he’d attributed those
achievements to “friends” and “this guy” he knew. But there was a
wink and a nod and he was pretty sure Alan knew what was what and
who was who.
So when that first e-mail arrived from Alan on Monday morning,
Chris was happy to see it. The writer had said he might have some
more questions, and Chris was looking forward to the distraction of
answering them, but when he opened the e-mail he was surprised to
see just one line: “I’m in Athens. Can I stop by?” That was a surprise.
It was maybe even kind of weird. He was a little wary in his response,
but the two chatted briefly on IRC and Alan explained he was inter-
viewing someone at University of Georgia anyway and wondered if he
could come by in the evening and ask some follow-up questions. Chris
agreed, and then spent the rest of the afternoon making his apartment
something approaching presentable to the outside world.
Three big trash bags full of cans and frozen dinner trays later, he was
still wishing he’d actually been able to fix his vacuum cleaner when he’d
taken it apart six months ago. Ah well. If Alan had survived a hacker
convention, he could probably stand a hacker’s apartment for a few
hours. He showed up promptly at 7 PM, as promised, and nothing in
his demeanor showed any signs of recoiling at Chris’s stained carpet or
undecorated walls. He was much more interested in seeing the home
network and office he had set up. Chris ran an open wireless hotspot
as a favor to his neighbors, but that was entirely walled off from every-
thing he did online. He’d never taken advantage of his ownership of the
hotspot to snoop or sniff his neighbor’s internet habits, but it was nice
to know he could if he needed to for some reason. Owning all of their
machines would be trivial. His main set up took up all of the second
bedroom, with three computers on folding tables and a hardware store’s
worth of spare parts, tools, and electronic detritus covering all the free
space. He had to pull in one of the seldom-used kitchen table chairs so
Alan would have someplace to sit.
“So how’re you feeling post con?” Alan asked as he sat, sipping on a
Coke Chris had given him.
“Pretty crappy to tell you the truth. It wasn’t good. My last one.”
“Your last hacker con period?”
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Geek Mafia: Black Hat Blues
“No, just SecZone. I think I’m done with that. I’ll still go to others,
but I’m tired of working on staff. It just takes too much out of me. I’m
gonna stick with being just an attendee. Or maybe a speaker sometime.”
He’d never given a talk at a con and generally the thought of being up
behind the podium filled his stomach with angry squirrels, but it would
be a way to stay involved and not be just another attendee.
“You’re a good teacher,” Alan said, seeming to mean it. “I think you
could probably give some killer talks.”
“We’ll see if I come up with anything worth talking about. I have
some free time, so I’m sure I’ll come up with some sort of interesting
exploit or vulnerability that’d make for a good talk.”
“Working on anything now?”
“Not really, but like I said, I’ve got some time. I’ll play around a
little.” Chris stopped himself from diverging off-track into musings
about some of the potential avenues he might explore and focused on
Alan. “But you drove all this way and you’ve got questions. What can
I do for you?”
“Well, I don’t have any specific questions right now. What I had
in mind was some sort of demonstration. I was wondering if I could
watch over your shoulder while you did some hacking. I’ve heard your
explanations and I think I understand the basic theory and practice of
it all, but I’m still fuzzy on the details of what it really looks like. I was
hoping that maybe you could give me a live demo and really help me
understand.”
“Sure, I could do that I think.” Chris said, although he was unsure if
he really could. It seemed like it would be really boring for Alan. Plus
there was another question. “But what would I hack into?”
“Whatever you want I suppose, although I don’t want you to get in
any trouble.”
“Anything you do with a computer these days that’s worth doing
will get you into trouble with somebody. But there’s trouble and then
there’s real trouble.”
“We don’t want any real trouble.”
“Definitely not. But I’m not sure what I can show you without risking
real trouble. I mean, there’s some honey pot sites I know about we could
mess around with. Some hacker sites that invite attacks to test security
protocols, but that’s not really what you’re looking for.”
Alan sat and thought for a minute. “What about the paper I do some
freelancing for? If we had their permission.”
“Sure, that would be fine. If we had their permission everything
would be cool.”
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77
“Let me make a couple calls.”
Alan stepped outside to make the calls. Chris watched him through a
slit in the blinds as he paced around the parking lot, talking on his cell
phone. Ten minutes later he had his permission and they were setting
up in his office and snooping around the website for the South Florida-
based
Weekly Voice
.
They started really digging in around 9 PM. Because he was explain-
ing everything to Alan, it was much, much slower than Chris was used
to, but also a hell of a lot more fun. Alan asked just the right number of
questions, and never the same thing twice, so it was fun teaching and
explaining. The newspaper’s network was all standard, off the shelf stuff,
set up competently enough but with nothing beyond his abilities to over-
come. Some deep Google searching turned up a useful question tagged
with the paper’s sys admin’s e-mail address on a help forum that let Chris
know enough details about their firewall setup that he could start prob-
ing the network in the right ways. He took things slow and careful and so
it took until just after one in the morning before they were in the paper’s
network and had escalated their privileges all the way to admin level.
“So we could do whatever we wanted on their network now?” Alan
asked.
“Sure. Read and send e-mails, read and copy and change files. Let’s
see… looks like this is the layout for next week’s paper. We could
change a headline if we wanted.”
“Let’s not do that. I have permission to poke around, not to mess
around,” Alan said. He didn’t seem tired at all. He was just utterly fas-
cinated by the whole process. “If you want, I can e-mail the sys admin
about the security holes we found so he can plug them.”
“Why don’t you just send that to me and then I can go over them
with him in person. I think I want to give him a chance to cover his ass
a little before I tell my editors how easy this was.”
“OK, but don’t let them be too hard on him. He’s doing an OK job,
just not nearly good enough to stop someone like me. But the truth is,
if he was good enough to stop someone like me, I hate to say it, but he
wouldn’t be running IT for a weekly newspaper.”
Alan laughed. “You’re probably right.” He stretched, and yawned.
“Well, thanks c1sman. This has been awesome of you. I really appreciate
it, especially staying up so late and all.”
“Oh, I’d have been up late and in front of these screens whether you
were here or not, so it’s no big deal. I had fun showing off.”
“You should be proud of those skills, man. It’s scary stuff. This is all
off the record of course, as I told you.”
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Geek Mafia: Black Hat Blues
Chris had actually forgotten about that. He’d sort of assumed since
they had permission, he and his exploits would be in the article or book
that Alan was writing. Oh well, secrecy was probably better in this case
anyway. No need to attract unwanted attention. He thanked Alan again
for being such a nice guy at the con and said they should stay in touch
and that he should feel free to contact him anytime he had any hacker
questions. Alan promised he’d do just that, and then disappeared into
the night.
He got some e-mails from Alan over the next few weeks, usually simple
but very specific questions about some aspect of hacking or about what
they’d done that night. Before he answered any of them he had Alan set
up a PGP encrypted e-mail account so they could converse in privacy,
and he was pleased that the writer seemed to have no problems doing
that on his own. The e-mails became bright points in otherwise dull
days as he looked for some sort of work that he might find interest-
ing. He had plenty to keep him busy, but it was all boring and none
of it paid very well and he needed money. His ex-wife was being sort
of cool about the whole child support thing and not filing any formal
complaints yet, but because of that he found it kind of hard to press her
when she did things like switch the week that Shawn was supposed to
come visit him from Arizona and then cancel the trip entirely because
apparently his son would rather go on a trip with his new friends to than
come hang out in his dad’s dingy little apartment. He couldn’t really
blame him, and started looking into flights out to Arizona and places
to stay when he got there. His ex’s folks had never much cared for him,
so there was no way he was staying there.
Then, three and a half weeks after he’d been in Athens, Alan pinged
him on IRC and they started a private, encrypted chat. He wanted to
know if Chris was free to fly down to Florida for a weekend and do some
contract work. Some hacking. All expenses paid. Chris wasn’t even sure
what to think of the request at first, and asked what kind of work it
was. Alan was vague, saying it was similar to what he’d done with the
newspaper thing and that he could make $5000 for the weekend’s work,
but he had to do it on site. He couldn’t think of any reasons that made
sense to say no, and the thought of that money outweighed his natural
laziness and hatred of flying. He said yes.
Three days later he was stepping off the plane in Miami and an hour
later he and Alan were ensconced in an almost empty one bedroom
apartment in Miami Beach. It had a bare mattress with fresh sheets
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79
and two pillows in the bedroom and a desk and two chairs in the living
room that held a cable modem and some ethernet cable and not much
else. Alan, who’d picked him up from the airport and kept a tour-guide