Black Hat Blues (14 page)

like a great idea, if only they could figure out how exactly.

Paul had come up with a simple test scam that they’d tried out just

as a way to sort of get all the new guys working well together. They’d

hacked into the payroll records of a number of different businesses in

Miami, based solely on c1sman’s analyses of the targets who had the

most security holes he could find (mostly in the form of unpatched

servers or firewalls). They’d pulled the payroll records, including sala-

ries, benefits, and reimbursed expenses and then e-mailed the data to

everyone working at the companies and everyone on the contact lists

of every e-mail account in the company. Paul had written an accompa-

nying cover letter explaining that they should use the information to

make sure they were being fairly compensated for their labor compared

to their fellow employees. Watching the ensuing e-mails flurry, they’d

been successful in stirring up some serious shitstorms in at least a couple

of the targets, plus encouraging all of them to improve their network

security. But that was small-fry stuff, just a proof of concept for them.

Coming off that, everyone, even c1sman, wanted to do something big-

ger and better.

So she’d pitched Isaiah’s idea to the group. Paul had been miffed at

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being blindsided by the idea and was wary. The others had been fine

with it. Sacco was really excited about it and wanted to know who the

heck this Isaiah person was. Chloe hadn’t been ready to tell him that

much, but his enthusiasm was contagious and soon Paul had bought

into the plan as well. Especially once she told everyone who the target

really was. And now here they were, deep into the actual action after

months and months of planning. Planning that so far was paying off.

The other phone in her pocket buzzed and she pulled it out while put-

ting the cryptophone she’d used with Isaiah away. They had their own

cryptophones for internal communications within the Crew—no sense

letting Isaiah have too much information about their infrastructure.

This one was a smart phone/pda model with a full qwerty keyboard.

She saw a message from Paul asking her to find c1sman and bring him

upstairs. Apparently there was some sort of problem. She was almost

grateful that something was finally going wrong. As she walked back

inside, Sacco fell into step beside her, tossing his half-finished cigarette

into the bushes.

“How’s everything?” he asked.

“Good.”

“I wish I was down there.” His breath smelled like cigarettes as he

leaned in close to speak just above a whisper.

“I thought you wanted to be here.”

“I do want to be here. I wish I could be both places at once. Did he

say how those guys I intro’d him to are working out?”

“He did not.” Sacco had provided Isaiah with some links to labor

organizers in South Florida. Or rather, he provided them to Chloe

who passed them on to Isaiah. “We were just checking in, seeing how

things are going.”

“And things are going good down there?”

She really didn’t want to get into it with Sacco on this subject. While

Isaiah had warned of complications, he apparently felt he had every-

thing well in hand. She didn’t want Sacco obsessing over anything

else besides what she needed him obsessing about here in DC. “He

says he’s got everything under control. As soon as Mr. Data pulls it

together and c1sman makes sure our tracks are covered, we’ll send him

the package.”

“It’s going to be awesome. I wish I could see their faces.”

“It will be awesome, but you hardly ever get to see their faces at the

moment it dawns on them.”

“We should’ve set up a camera,” Sacco said, probably only half

joking.

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“We should still be reading their e-mail and text messages. That’ll

have to do.” She thought she sounded like an indulgent mother, which

was sort of how she felt.

“I can’t wait.”

“There’s much to do between now and then. How’re your pet protest-

ers doing?”

“They’d hate to be called pets,” Sacco said with a frown as they wove

through the lobby, Chloe by instinct steering them clear of any people

who might overhear them.

“That’s why I didn’t say it to them. How’re they doing?”

“They’re good. They’re raising a fucking ruckus, that’s for sure.

Nothing the mainstream media will notice of course, but we’re getting

plenty of video and the website’s up and the press releases are all out to

the blogs. When it hits, the accelerant will be there to light up big.”

Chloe nodded, smiling on the inside. She’d found it best not to

encourage Sacco too openly—it tended to go to his head. Always leave

him wanting just a little more validation. “I need to go round up Bee

and c1sman. Can you head back upstairs and see if Paul and Sandee

need anything?”

They parted ways, Sacco heading for the fire stairs and Chloe heading

for the escalators up to the second floor where Shmoocon was being

held. She stopped herself from adjusting her wig and unbuttoned her

coat to reveal a two year old over sized Shmoocon shirt she’d borrowed

from c1sman that she had on over her sweater. She pulled the badge

from her inside coat pocket and hung it around her neck.

The nice thing about hacker con badges was that they were incredibly

difficult to counterfeit and thus the con organizers never really cared

who was wearing it, as long as they were wearing one. The Crew had

bought three memberships, plus they had the one c1sman got for being

on staff. The badges changed every year, and this time they were hard,

clear tinted plastic rectangles modeled after old computer punch cards,

with holes in them and the Shmoocon name and logo etched into the

surface. Since no one outside the staff knew what they’d look like before

the day of the con, creating one on your own, while not impossible, was

pretty impractical, and Chloe was willing to bet that if someone did

make a solid forgery, the organizers would be impressed enough not to

care. But they’d paid for theirs, and now Chloe was wearing one.

She planned to spend as little time on the con floor as possible, and

she’d dressed down as much as she could. Mousy brown, scraggly wig

with some gray highlights in it and dumpy clothes that hid her fig-

ure and made her look twenty pounds heavier. No makeup at all (she

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cleaned it off after meeting with Danny). She’d thought about taking a

page out of Sandee’s book and cross-dressing, but it was more trouble

than it was worth. As it was she got a few looks, but not many, and she

didn’t think people would remember her passing through.

The volunteer watching the door barely glanced at her badge as she

walked into the Shmoocon area, head down, eyes on a crumpled speak-

ers schedule she’d pulled out. Since it was in the middle of one of the

sessions, there were only a couple dozen people filtering through the

main hallway. To her right were the doors leading into the speaker

rooms, each holding a few hundred people plus a podium, stage, and

screen for the speakers to project their Power Point presentations onto.

To her left were the registration area and the NOC, both of them off

limits to people with her badge. Tables for vendors lined the hall, most

of them hawking security services or recruiting potential employees or

promoting some new software suite. There was one lonely guy with a

shaved head hawking some novels he’d written that she assumed had

something to do with hackers. She ignored them all and followed the

hall to the end and turned right, which took her through a short hall-

way that circumvented the speakers’ rooms and led to the area with

the fun stuff. It was another hall, parallel to the one she’d come in,

with more vendors and doors that led into the speakers areas from the

other side of the rooms. But there were other doors leading into smaller

rooms, including the hacker arcade, the hardware hacking labs, and her

destination: Lockpick Village.

Chloe had taught herself to pick locks from a book when she was in

her early twenties. It had taken a lot of trial and error and practice to

figure out the important little details that the book was leaving out and

to get a feel for it. Now she was pretty good, and could spring handcuffs

or a standard door or padlock in a lot less than a minute. That was

nothing compared to how fast some of the people she’d seen at hacker

cons were. In the hacker scene, lockpicking had become a competitive

sport. She’d once watched one guy pick 12 master locks in under two

minutes. It was an odd little adjunct to hacker culture—nothing to do

with computers really, and nothing very technical about it, but from the

point of view that it had to do with security and was also totally cool,

she understood the appeal.

Lockpick Village was just a meeting room with some tables with a

wide variety of locks on them. There were a number of partial doors

set up on stands on the tables where you could practice picking dead-

bolts and doorknob locks from a variety of manufacturers. There were

also padlocks, combination locks, bicycle locks, and even handcuffs on

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Geek Mafia: Black Hat Blues

display. Behind the tables sat or stood helpful volunteers from TOOOL,

The Open Organization Of Lockpickers, who were showing people the

basics and would be judging a lockpicking contest later in the week-

end. Standing in front of one of the tables were Bee, c1sman, and some

hacker kid she didn’t recognize.

Chloe would have been wary about talking to c1sman in public even

with no one else nearby, but there was no way she was going to even nod

in his direction while this kid was around. Bee had turned and looked

right through her when Chloe entered the room, while the two men by

her side were concentrating on learning how to pick the doorknob locks

mounted in front of them. They both seemed to be struggling, and from

the awkward way they held their picks, Chloe guessed neither guy had

much experience with them. Chloe pretended to idly browse some of

the other displays while watching the body language of the trio, and

soon figured out what was going on. The two boys were doing their best

to impress Bee. The kid was ten years younger and thirty pounds lighter

than c1sman, and pretty clearly a little douche bag. But a cute douche

bag. C1sman on the other hand was looking pretty flustered and the

dew of perspiration had broken out on his forehead.

The douche-bag picked his lock first and made some joke about being

good at putting things in holes that Bee actually laughed at. She was

clearly enjoying the attention, and looked awfully cute with her hair

in pigtails held in place with ethernet cable and a flattering red skirt

and black tights combo that accented and obscured her figure in all the

right ways. It wasn’t subtle, but it didn’t need to be. Bee’s job was to

both watch over c1sman and establish herself under the hacker name

EtherOr as a member of the hacker community. The plan was for her

to be the Crew’s face with the hacker scene, someone who could maybe

arrange one-time contract jobs and generally keep them apprised of new

developments in the community. A cute little Asian chick in this crowd

could open a lot of doors if she applied herself.

Right now though, she was letting c1sman get freaked out by the

competition for her affection, and that was bad, because they needed

him upstairs and concentrating. The fact that for whatever reason he

hadn’t responded to Paul’s text meant he already wasn’t focusing on the

task at hand. Chloe sidled up next to the trio without saying anything

to any of them. She rudely snaked her hand between the douche-bag

and Bee and took a flyer for TOOOL from the table. “Can I take an

extra one of these for my friend Caroline Green back home?” She asked

the man behind the table. He nodded. She hoped c1sman wasn’t show-

ing too much surprise on his face at her sudden appearance.

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73

She turned and left with the papers. The Caroline code was some-

thing Paul had come up with from his youth when he’d had a summer

job at K-Mart. It was a way the store made emergency calls over the

PA system without actually alarming the customers. You always said

something about Caroline, but used a different color for the last name

depending on the message. In this case, Green meant some sort of

important but not emergency level problem. Brown would have meant

a serious problem, and Red would have been an all out emergency. The

reference to home referred to the hotel room they were using as home

base. Chloe knew Bee had gotten the message,

Chloe made an unhurried stroll back through the convention and

towards the exits. She lingered at one of the vendor tables and made sure

that Bee and c1sman were following orders. She saw the whole trio come

around the corner and cursed under her breath, but Bee knew what she