Out of the Dark by David Weber Page A

“man-in-the-middle” attack.
    Ground Base Commander Shairez’s carefully built remote was deposited on the roof of a coffeehouse in downtown Tehran. Despite the Iranian régime’s paranoia and perpetual state of heightened military alert, slipping the remote through its airspace defenses was child’s play for the Shongairi. Concealing it once it was down wasn’t a lot more difficult, either, since it was little larger than a baseball. The heavily stealthed, unmanned platform which deposited it found a convenient location, hidden in the shadow of an air-conditioning compressor, then departed through the moonless night air as swiftly and unobtrusively as it had arrived.
    The location had been selected in advance after a previous platform’s incursion had “driven around” at high altitude listening for a suitable portal through which to enter the local WiFi system. The 802.11 standard wireless connection of the coffeeshop which had been chosen offered broad frequency wireless connections to interact with potential victims. Even better, it was completely unprotected, without even the standard WAP’s 64-hexadecimal key. It wouldn’t have mattered very much if it had been protected—despite the remote’s small size, its processing power would have sufficed to break even a substantially more challenging key with a brute-force approach—but it was convenient.
    Now the remote inserted itself into the coffeeshop’s network and attempted to access the router. In this case, it was a common retail Linksys SOHO, and the coffeeshop’s owner had never bothered to replace the default password. The remote got in easily and looked around, checking carefully for intrusion detection systems. There was no sign of one, and it quickly established access and began modifying settings.
    The first thing it did was to change the password and wipe out any logs which might have been recorded on the router. Then it modified the gateway—making the router send the traffic of any coffeeshop users throughitself. Once it was able to view all the unencrypted traffic of all users of the coffeeshop’s connections, it began monitoring and recording. For two days, that was all it did—listen, record, and compress, then retransmit daily dumps of all communications in and out of the coffeeshop to the stealthed Shongair ship which had deployed it.
    •  •  •  •  •

    His name was Rasul Teymourtash, and he was a taxi driver. In a nation where political activism had become a dangerous, high-stakes game, Rasul was about as apolitical as a man could get. He went to mosque on Friday, accepted the five principles of the
Usl al-Dn,
performed the ten duties of the
Fural-Dn,
and concentrated on keeping himself and his family fed. One of his brothers had been arrested, savagely beaten, and sentenced to fifteen years in prison last year for alleged activity in the outlawed Green Movement. Another had simply disappeared some months before that, which might have been one of the reasons for Rasul’s tendency to emulate an ostrich where politics were concerned.
    He was also, however, a patron of the coffeehouse Shairez had chosen as her entry point into the Internet. On this particular day, Rasul dropped by the coffeehouse and connected his laptop to its router . . . by way of the Shongair remote. He browsed, he checked his e-mail, and then he decided to download an MP3 music file.
    The authorities would not have approved of his choice of music, since Lady Gaga was not high on the list of acceptable musicians. She was, admittedly, rather longer in the tooth than once she had been, and she’d undoubtedly mellowed somewhat over the years, but no one could have mellowed enough—not from
her
original starting point!—to satisfy Iran’s leaders. Rasul was well aware of that, of course, yet he also knew he was scarcely alone in pushing that particular set of limits.
    What he was unaware of, however, was that the Shongair cyber techs aboard