Black Hat Blues (9 page)

bothering to look over his shoulder at whatever bullshit image fawks

was projecting onto the screen behind him, Sacco wrenched the mic

from its stand and climbed up on top of the table. People cheered. His

comrades on stage had nervous grins on their faces. They had to suspect

he was up to something.

He looked to his left and saw a heavyset young man holding a card-

board box full of CDs. He looked right and saw another, even more

heavyset kid with another box. They both nodded to him, reaching

into their boxes.

Rick Dakan

41

“Listen!” Sacco shouted into the mic. “Listen! Listen in on what I’ve

got to say. I want you listenin’ to the words comin’ out of my mouth!

I wand you to listen in on the secrets I’m about to spill.” He lowered

his voice to a whisper, amplified with a hiss through the audio system.

“Lissssssten. Do you hear that? Do you hear what the douche bag with

the Star Trek lookin’ earpiece is hearing? Can you listen in on what

the boss man is whispering about over his latte? Shhhh. Listen. What’s

that? Can’t quite hear it?” Someone behind him, down on the stage,

was tugging on his pants leg. Probably Dex. “Be real quiet now. Listen

real hard. Can you hear him now?”

The room was quiet, and Sacco had no trouble hearing the angry

whispers coming from his former friends. The next time Dex tugged at

his cuff, he kicked back and then jumped down in front of the speaker’s

table, shouting, “LET ME HELP YOU HEAR!”

His two paid accomplices, New York college kids who’d worshiped

Hacks of Rebellion since they were fifteen-year-old script kiddies, started

tossing handfuls of CDs into the audience. Sacco had snatched the

burned copies of Listnin from Dex’s car and replaced them with blank

CD’s he’d bought up from every drug store within twenty blocks. He’d

written labels on the top dozen or so in each box, just in case someone

checked. If his co-conspirators online were holding up their end too,

there were a dozen different torrents being seeded with the software

right now. He pulled out some disks of his own from inside his jacket

and spun them out in long, floating arcs towards the middle of the audi-

ence. Hackers ducked, jumped, and snatched for the silver disks. Some

rose up and mobbed his paid helpers, but instead of stopping them they

were reaching into the boxes and tossing out even more CDs. Fawks cut

his mic, and the jerks on the stage behind him were screaming bloody

murder. Sacco laughed and laughed and laughed, hopping down from

the stage as he tossed the dead mic over his shoulder.

He made his way through the crowd towards the exit. He wasn’t

going to answer any questions or make any more speeches. The software

would speak for itself (and listen too). Dex came running up behind

him by the time he reached the bank of elevators. He started yelling

all the things Sacco expected him to. They had a deal. There’d been a

vote. He was a fucking asshole. They were kicking him out. How dare

he break into Dex’s car. Sacco stood there and took it for a while, just

letting Dex vent and rage. He figured it would do the guy some good

to get it all out, and there wasn’t a thing he could say that would affect

Sacco in the least. He missed the first elevator to come, but decided

to get on the next one. Quite a crowd was lurking about them now,

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Geek Mafia: Black Hat Blues

listening in, and Sacco wanted to get outside. He jumped on the already

packed elevator at the last moment, leaving no time or room for Dex

to join him. He thanked the others inside for their kind words and

encouragement on the way down. Stepping into the hotel lobby, he

took a moment to decide which way to exit, looking left, in the general

direction of a bar he liked, and then right, towards the front entrance

and… and the girl with the pink hair.

She was holding a CD, spinning it around on her raised middle finger

and smiling at him. He walked over to her.

“Nice speech,” she said.

“You liked it?”

“Just the end part. Most of the stuff before it was pretty lame.”

He nodded to the spinning disk on her finger. “And you got one of

my CDs.”

“I got two of them,” she said, winking. Oh that wink. “Now, are

you going to buy me a beer and explain to me how this Listnin thing

of yours works?”

“Absofuckinglutely.”

She laughed with such genuine delight at that, that she almost seemed

like a different person for a split second. “Well come on then, cowboy,

let’s go.”

He followed her out the front door, thinking that this HOPE hadn’t

turned out so disastrous after all.

Paul still wasn’t used to this part. It thrilled him. He looked up and

down the list of e-mails—two and a half years worth of e-mails—

and clicked randomly on one of them. It was something about a piece of

Florida State House legislation having to do with land use regulations,

but as dull as it was, it still sent micro-currents of excitement coursing

down the back of his neck. He was not supposed to be reading this, and

yet he totally was. Next to him on the couch Chloe was going through

another massive download. At the table Sacco and Sandee were going

through others. Their Data Guy on the outside had it all too, and was

running his password crackers and his analysis software on all of it.

C1sman’s painstaking hack had worked—they’d owned the target’s

network and, best of all, no one seemed to have noticed.

There was nothing in any of his former lives that compared to these

thrills, this level of excitement. An aspiring and then mildly successful

comic book artist for the first decade of adulthood, his life had been ink

stained and scrabbling for attention at comic book conventions. Then he

though he’d hit the big time when his childhood friend turned dot com

millionaire agreed to finance his brilliant idea for a video game. The

game had turned out pretty good, but Paul had turned out to be a pretty

crappy video game designer, mostly in the area of working with others

in his own company. They’d fired him and in a moment of despair and

desperation he’d met this crazy-hot woman named Chloe who offered

him a chance to get his revenge. If he was willing to break some walls.

Considering the much nastier and less practical revenge plots that’d

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Geek Mafia: Black Hat Blues

been romping through his mind, Chloe’s plan had seemed practically

reasonable. They ended up walking out of the meeting where he was

supposed to get his ass handed to him with a check for $800,000. Of

course then things got complicated.

In the end he lost the money, lost his friends, and was wanted by law

enforcement for questioning on suspicion of fraud and kidnapping.

But he’d gotten the girl, and that was worth something. That was, in

fact, pretty much worth everything. Chloe’d sacrificed her friends to

stay with him—everyone but Bee—and they’d set up a new life in Key

West. They still stole from people, but Paul needed some good reason,

some moral excuse that allowed him to sleep at night. He knew that,

at least some of the time, he was just lying to himself. But he’d gotten

really good at lying, even to himself. Still, when this opportunity to

strike out against a genuine bad guy in the world had come along, Paul

had been excited. As high as the tension was, as dangerous as things

had gotten, he was sleeping better now than he had in years. Well,

metaphorically sleeping. In reality there wasn’t time to sleep much at

all, but he felt good about that too.

Paul opened another random e-mail. Again it was inscrutable to

him, full of legal jargon and inside politics talk. There was no way

he was going to be able to parse anything useful out of this stuff, but

he didn’t expect to. This was pure voyeurism until the analyses came

in from outside and they’d found the specific files and e-mails they

needed. After he’d escalated privileges all the way and completed the

data dump, c1sman had collapsed back onto the couch in an exhausted

heap of frayed nerves. Paul had sent him downstairs to Shmoocon

with Bee to have some fun and mingle with the nice law-abiding

hackers and security professionals. He wanted c1sman’s mind focused

on the familiar, or better yet, distracted by the “secret” crush that

everyone but Bee knew he had on Bee. Let them play and keep tabs

on the network down there—as part of the NOC team, c1sman had

full access—as long as no one noticed that they’d piggybacked in on

the con’s bandwidth and experimental TOR server set up, they were

golden.

“Well, it’s started, finally,” Chloe said. She had a third laptop, a little

ultra-portable, propped up on the armrest. It had a copy of Outlook on

it that would mirror every action on the target’s system. Yet another,

identical ulta-portable next to that had a similar setup monitoring

e-mails from the Congressman and his staffer. Between the Blackberry

hack (which got them into the staff’s Exchange server), and c1sman’s

network hack on the target’s office, there wasn’t any e-mail between

Rick Dakan

45

the two of them that they weren’t going to see. There had been a few

moments setting it all up where Paul had held his breath in nervousness

as they’d inserted the rest of their malicious code and hacks into the

target computers. The malware on the Congressional aide’s Blackberry

had given them access to all his e-mail, but they wanted to do more

than just monitor his messages—they needed to be able to write

their own. But at the same time they needed to make sure he didn’t

notice that someone else was sending mail from his account, with the

added complication that everything he sent was cc’d to both his lap-

top and his phone. Sacco’s first move after owning the Blackberry was

to upload more malware onto the phone to make sure Danny didn’t

notice the changes. Then they’d sent a false message from Danny to

the Congressman that included the same piece of malware they’d used

to infect the first phone. There’d been a lot of concern at this point,

especially about whatever added security the US House of Reps IT

department might have installed, but as far as they could tell it all went

as planned. They then installed the same back doors and stealth mea-

sures on the Congressman’s machines. Now it was time to start press-

ing their advantage and use their newly stolen Congressional influence

to maximum effect.

While they waited for their outside analysis to dig up the dirt, they

had other work to do. Chloe moved one of the ultra-portables over so

Paul could read it. They’d built in a minute-long delay into both e-mail

accounts so they’d have a chance to read the messages before they went

out and either delete or change them as needed. Paul scanned an e-mail

from Danny to the target and keyed F10, the hotkey they’d set up to

intercept outgoing mail.

The original read:

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Subject: Referral

Hey Ken,

Wondering if you had some spare time for a referral. TC is

working on some legislation to help entertainment indus-

try protect their IP from a new piracy threat and has some

ideas about inserting procurements to fund new enforce-

ment efforts. Ent. Ind. will need support from multiple

C’s for this I’m sure, since they’re fearing a big hit to their

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Geek Mafia: Black Hat Blues

bottom lines. Hoping you could do some coordinating for

us on this.

Thanks,

D

Paul wasn’t sure what TC meant at first, but it clearly referred to

Congressman Wolverton. The e-mail showed that Danny and the tar-

get were well acquainted with one another and that the staffer wasn’t

shy about asking for favors. Paul assumed that the line about support

from multiple C’s (congressmen?) and the mention of the entertainment

industry’s bottom line was Danny’s way of saying there was plenty of

money to go around. That was good. It confirmed their supposition

that the target was in it for the money first and foremost, and as long

as Paul kept the promise of a profit in his forged e-mails, he would be

speaking the right language. He was a little worried that Danny and

the target were so familiar with each other though—that meant he had

to be extra careful with the forgeries to not write anything the target

might find out of character. He dumped the e-mail into a folder on his

desktop and prevented it from being passed on to Clover. If everything

went as planned, Clover would never even know that the Congressman’s

aide had been sending him any e-mails at all.

Paul sat back and waited what seemed like a reasonable amount of time

before readying his “reply” from Clover. Danny was e-mailing a lot, and

Paul was keeping up with it as best he could. The target was e-mailing

too, although not as much. Everything else seemed pretty business as