network spider. He had heard of them, had even got a copy of one and taken it apart to see how it worked, but he had never encountered one in the wild before.
He shuddered as the digital legs of the dark creature probed his code, sifting through it, analyzing it.
Then it was gone. Fooled by the electronic ghillie suit.
“What?” Fargas asked.
“Security spider. Just went right over the top of Ghillie.”
“Pick you up?”
“Cruised straight past.”
Sam traced the shape of the spider and fed it into his early warning system. The next time the spider, or one of its kind, came crawling in his direction, he would have fair warning.
Cracking the network controller was going to be tricky. He briefly considered an ARP poisoning attack against one of the network switches, turning it into a hub and making it accessible to anyone. But that would leave evidence of the hack, which would defeat the whole purpose.
He decided on a MAC spoofing attack.
Every machine on a network has a Media Access Control address, a unique ID number programmed into the network card. Sam’s next trick was to find a suitable machine and “borrow” its MAC address, fooling the network controller into accepting him as an authorized part of the network.
It didn’t take long. A few minutes of watching and waiting and a new computer came online. A laptop, almost certainly, attaching itself to one of the many wireless access points on the network.
Sam smiled as the laptop revealed its MAC address in the probe request and was confirmed a nanosecond later by the probe response from the network controller. Before it even had time to authenticate the request, Sam was in, jamming the network card of the laptop for a moment while he reprogrammed his own MAC address, “spoofing” that of the genuine machine.
The network controller looked him up and down, decided that he was the new laptop, and happily authenticated him.
He was in.
Someone would be calling tech support about now, Sam thought, complaining about a laptop that was not connecting to the network. But if the help desk here was like most, it would take twenty minutes to answer, and then the first suggestion would be to reset the laptop.
Plenty of time.
• • •
Ethan Rix put on his telephone headset and answered the call with a click of his mouse.
Business was light this time of the morning, and this was his first call since coming on shift.
Most of the problems were simple technical questions that he could clear up quickly, the same problems over and over, in fact. Some people seemed to have the same problem each week and never learned from the week before what the solution was.
The voice on the other end of the phone was complaining about a laptop that wouldn’t connect to the network. As usual, he advised resetting the machine.
“First pinhead of the morning?”
He looked up. Erica Fogarty, one of the on-duty system administrators, was hovering over his desk.
“John Holden from fourth. Can’t connect. System says he’s already on. Couldn’t be a MAC spoof?”
“Inside the firewall? Not possible.” Erica shook her head.
“I’ll run a check of current log-ins, just to be sure,” Ethan said.
The spider came back as Sam was delicately probing the hard drives of the network controller. He paused and the spider passed by, although he couldn’t shake off that disquieting feeling.… Was it the spider? Or was there something else? That burning Eye of Sauron.
There were trip wires on the network controller. Sections of the hard disk that, if accessed, would immediately sound the alarm. He maneuvered cautiously around them and probed deeper into the bowels of the big server.
The SAM database is the record of all the usernames and passwords on the network, all encrypted into secure hashes with over eighty billion possible combinations.
Supposedly unbreakable security.
In fact, it took 7.7 seconds, using a rainbow crack to retrieve the first password, and within five minutes, he had the one he wanted. The SysAdmin password: the system administrator. The key to every door in the network.
Suddenly, the entire network lay open before him. Barefaced, unprotected, vulnerable.
No time, though, to stop and congratulate himself. He was already moving, racing through the wide-open corridors of the network.
Next stop, the primary transaction database. Millions,
“I’m in,” he said.
“You serious?” Fargas asked.
“I am God, and Harold be my name,” Sam replied.
“Harold?”
“Let’s go shopping. What’ll you have?” Sam asked.
“One strawberry, two cinnamon twists, and a chocolate iced.”
“Let’s start with a couple of the latest, paper-thin Toshiba notebooks.” Sam scanned the database as he spoke, writing and executing SQL statements, looking up product codes and making matching entries in a sales order table.
“One of those new neuro-headsets,” Fargas contributed.
“Two headsets coming right up. Can I upsize you to a supercombo?”
Job done. Time to leave.
He closed the SQL manager and waited—just for a few minutes to make sure that his covert operation had not attracted anyone’s attention.
If Telecomerica suspected the break-in, they would run checks on the data, and that would reveal the change he had made. Which would lead them straight to him.
But so far, so good.
“Excuse me, Erica,” Ethan called across the room.
“Yeah?”
“You using SysAdmin?”
“Nobody uses SysAdmin. It’s just a backup in case of password corruption.”
“Someone is.”
She came and stood over his shoulder again. “What are they accessing?”
Reflected in his screen, Ethan saw a horrified expression fall over Erica’s face. “The central database server,” he said.
Sam was just completing the cleanup, erasing every trace of his presence, when all hell broke loose.
The network lit up like a fireworks display as intrusion alarms went off on all the main servers simultaneously. Powerful anti-intrusion code checkers roared through the network pipes, searching, scanning for anything out of the ordinary. Spiders, not one but a hundred of them, appeared on his radar, crawling everywhere. There were thundering crashes all around him as electronic doors slammed shut.
“Crap!”
“What is it?” Fargas asked.
“They’re on to me. It’s like the Fourth of July in here.”
