Thirteen: Chat Mode
While ignorance and stupidity may debar a person from solving a problem, it is no handicap at all when it comes to screwing up someone else’s solution.
The Consultants’ Handbook
Wiz was bored, restless and, most of all, homesick for Moira and the Wizard’s Keep. E-mail was wonderful but it was no substitute for being there. It wasn’t even a substitute for talking on the phone.
He toyed with the idea of trying to set up a telephone call to the
Wizard’s Keep, but hooking into the other world’s phone system was really
Danny’s area of expertise. Wiz wasn’t sure he could establish a voice
connection and still keep his location hidden
On the other hand, he thought, I can do something almost as good.
Computer chatting would give a much more immediate connection and he knew a way to make that secure. What’s more, he knew where he could find what he needed to do it.
He spun back to his workstation and started connecting to the Internet.
Danny was bored. As often happened when he got bored he was surfing the Internet, hanging out on his favorite talk channel. As usual it was barely controlled chaos, with perhaps a half dozen conversations going on at once, like a printout of a cocktail party.
FREEKER: Anyone got any good codez?
DRAINO: So he says ‘first assume a spherical chicken’
PILGRIM: The P-153 is a piece of shit. Use a canopener.
RINGO: Does anyone have the DTMF codes to do that?
DEATHMASTER: Hahaha
A.NONY.MOUS: Look in the last issue of 26OO.
WIZ: Hey Danny how are things at the Keep?
The message scrolled by so quickly he almost missed it. Then he called up the buffer, read it again and goggled.
“DRAINO: Wiz,” Danny typed, “is that you? Where are you? Are you all right?”
“Fine,” the answer traced out on Danny’s screen. “Maybe we’d better go to a private channel.”
“Jerry, Moira come here!” Danny yelled over his shoulder. “It’s Wiz.”
“Well, they’ve had a problem all right,” Special Agent Marty Conklin told the FBI director. In the corner Conklin’s boss nodded approvingly. “They’ve got their butts in a sling so they want us to pull a rabbit out of the hat to save their bacon.”
The director winced at the mixed metaphors. She wasn’t sure she approved of Conklin either. He was obviously pushing the Bureau’s weight restrictions hard and the director had a strong suspicion he couldn’t pass the annual physical training test either.
But in Conklin’s case the title “special agent” was especially appropriate. He was the FBI’s brightest, if arguably weirdest, specialist on computer and telecommunications crime. His boss had managed to make him look halfway presentable in a rumpled gray suit, but he had still come along just in case his prize charge got too far out of hand.
The director lit another cigarette and blew smoke out her nose. I’ve got to quit these-as soon as this business is settled, she thought. “What exactly happened?”
“They left a back door ajar at a black site and now they’ve got newts in the firewall.”
“Can you put that in English?”
Conklin paused to do a mental translation. “Okay, they have a site that’s physically highly secure. Everything’s guarded and under lock and key. For some reason they need Internet access from the site, but obviously they don’t want the next net newt who comes along to take the system home with him.”
“Don’t want a what?”
“A net newt-slimy little uglies that you find under rocks.”
The director nodded. “Oh, you mean hackers.”
“No, I mean system breakers, computer criminals.” Conklin was about to launch into his canned lecture on how most hackers are not criminals, but his boss cleared his throat meaningfully.
“Well, anyway, what you do in a case like that is set up a firewall. That’s a computer that connects to the net on one side and to your secure system on the other. All it does is pass messages back and forth. It acts as a barrier to keep out the net . . . uh, the bad guys.
“Now normally a firewall doesn’t have any user accounts on it. It is strictly there as a gateway to the main system. But in this case someone did something real dumb.”
Conklin smiled broadly at having caught the nation’s top communications security agency in an error. “When a computer comes from the factory there’s a standard password installed, something like ‘password’ or ‘administrator,’ something the field engineers can use to set the system up. Anyone using that password has superuser privileges on the system-they can do anything, because you need that kind of access to get the system up and running. Of course, since the password is the same on all machines of that kind it’s a major security hole and you’re supposed to erase it as soon as the system’s set up.”
Now the director was smiling too. “And they didn’t?”
“No ma’am they did not. So some slimy little newt comes along, uses the password to set up his own accounts and starts helping himself to all the free computer time he can carry. Now they’ve found it, they’re embarrassed and they’re scared it’s a major security breach so they want us to nail the little sucker.”
The director was still smiling. Bureaucratically this was better and better. Not only did No Such Agency need a favor-it didn’t have law enforcement powers and couldn’t arrest the system breaker even if it could find him-but the problem was the result of a bone-headed blunder by their people. When the FBI cleaned up this mess No Such Agency would owe them big time.
“In fairness to them,” Conklin’s boss broke in, “it was an easy thing to overlook. The system has only been operational a few weeks and since the firewall doesn’t have any users there was no reason to check the password file.”
The director shook her head. She wasn’t interested in being fair to No Such Agency, she was interested in milking this for all it was worth. Unless . . .
“Is this really a national security problem? I mean is there a possibility the main system was penetrated by an outside agency?”
Conklin shook his head. “That’s what No Such Agency is afraid of, but that’s a bunch of professional paranoids playing Cover Your Ass. Fundamentally this was a dumb stunt, the sort of thing a fourteen-year-old kid would do from his Macintosh. There’s no sign of any other tampering with the system or of any attempt to get from the firewall back to the main system. I’m ninety-nine percent sure it’s a run-of-the-mill newt.”
“But not one hundred percent sure? Then of course we need to pursue it.” And put those arrogant SOBs even further in our debt, she thought. “What are the chances we can catch this, uh, ‘newt’?”
“If he keeps using those accounts, about a hundred percent. That’s why No Such Agency hasn’t canceled them. We’re watching, waiting and tracing him back.”
* * *