is?"
Marcus grunted, bored. "How about some music?" he asked. He had an old-fashioned single-purpose music player mounted in the dash, text display only.
"Please" said Cass.
Marcus spun through a long list of artists, his huge fingers moving deftly until he settled on something called Astrid Gilberto. The faint strains of cocktail lounge settled through the car, a woman's soft voice da-da-dading along with it. Marcus hummed quietly along, turning down streets at random.
"You find the music device?" asked Cessus.
"Yeah" said Fed. "But why?"
"Sync it" said Cessus. "And run the visualization option."
Fede did as he was told. All music devices came with little apps to make random shape and color shows, but Fede wasn't sure Marcus's would provide anything useful.
Instead the nine columns he had seen on Cessus's screen appeared in rippling rainbow colors, rendered in swirling hypnogogic pixels. Fede snorted. "Clever" he said.
"Thank you, kind sir" said Cessus. "Marcus's stereo is disconnected from the networks for security reasons, but anybody watching could only reasonably expect that his car would have one and that it would be broadcasting. I've only synced the text patterns - the colors are modulating as expected. The difference between what you're seeing and what anyone else would see is attributable to lag on your comp's end and the packet loss inherent in syncing on such a weak connection over any further distance. So. I think you can watch those packets for any sign of trouble, if you please."
"Excellent" said Fed. "What now?"
"Now we find out what to listen to" said Cessus. "They're in a little house in the middle of nowhere. We have an address and GPS coordinates. Nothing else. How do we figure out their comms?"
"Uh, can we trace the address to an owner, figure out the data line that way?"
"Good thinking, but I would expect the owner's name is faked, or at least nonassociated. But that far out there I'll bet they're running wires only. Probably copper, probably owned by an ex-Baby Bell. All those wirelines are leased, and the Bells had them divided and subgrouped geographically."
"So we just need to find… " Fed's voice faded as Cessus began tabbing through maps, geometric shapes etched on them in brilliant red. "Where did you get those?" he asked.
"Bells were busted long time ago. Tracing their maps against ISPs and traffic owners is a good basic practice for seeing the patterns. Got to understand the beast's bones before you eat the meat. Now, here. There's only this one main trunk near their location. It's leased out to Gaterville Countryside ISP, LLC. Let's see what their security looks like, shall we?"
Fede watched as Cessus dissected the ISP's firewall, set agents to gather traffic in and out of their open ports, diagnosed their operating system, detection countermeasures, their security's weaknesses and flaws. Cessus eventually found a mail session started through an unencrypted link to a public server from an account at the ISP and sucked out the password and login. Then he set up some filters to watch for the same login being used elsewhere. Sure enough, not ten minutes later the login was used with any encrypted handshake to run a shell to the same server the mail session had connected to. Thirty seconds and Cessus had logged in and discovered root access.
"Okay" said Cessus. "Now that we've got full admin privileges over here, how to we get back to the ISP?"
"Log files" said Fed. Check for when this guy went the other direction and connect in some believable way."
"Good idea. How about we assure that we can get back here again some other time, first?"
Cessus installed three separate root kits, backdoors hidden in four different places in case any one of them was found and deactivated. Then he scanned the log files for a secure shell connection to the ISP's primary servers, found one and discovered it provided a root connection straight to the ISP.
He logged out and erased the connection from
Marcus grunted, bored. "How about some music?" he asked. He had an old-fashioned single-purpose music player mounted in the dash, text display only.
"Please" said Cass.
Marcus spun through a long list of artists, his huge fingers moving deftly until he settled on something called Astrid Gilberto. The faint strains of cocktail lounge settled through the car, a woman's soft voice da-da-dading along with it. Marcus hummed quietly along, turning down streets at random.
"You find the music device?" asked Cessus.
"Yeah" said Fed. "But why?"
"Sync it" said Cessus. "And run the visualization option."
Fede did as he was told. All music devices came with little apps to make random shape and color shows, but Fede wasn't sure Marcus's would provide anything useful.
Instead the nine columns he had seen on Cessus's screen appeared in rippling rainbow colors, rendered in swirling hypnogogic pixels. Fede snorted. "Clever" he said.
"Thank you, kind sir" said Cessus. "Marcus's stereo is disconnected from the networks for security reasons, but anybody watching could only reasonably expect that his car would have one and that it would be broadcasting. I've only synced the text patterns - the colors are modulating as expected. The difference between what you're seeing and what anyone else would see is attributable to lag on your comp's end and the packet loss inherent in syncing on such a weak connection over any further distance. So. I think you can watch those packets for any sign of trouble, if you please."
"Excellent" said Fed. "What now?"
"Now we find out what to listen to" said Cessus. "They're in a little house in the middle of nowhere. We have an address and GPS coordinates. Nothing else. How do we figure out their comms?"
"Uh, can we trace the address to an owner, figure out the data line that way?"
"Good thinking, but I would expect the owner's name is faked, or at least nonassociated. But that far out there I'll bet they're running wires only. Probably copper, probably owned by an ex-Baby Bell. All those wirelines are leased, and the Bells had them divided and subgrouped geographically."
"So we just need to find… " Fed's voice faded as Cessus began tabbing through maps, geometric shapes etched on them in brilliant red. "Where did you get those?" he asked.
"Bells were busted long time ago. Tracing their maps against ISPs and traffic owners is a good basic practice for seeing the patterns. Got to understand the beast's bones before you eat the meat. Now, here. There's only this one main trunk near their location. It's leased out to Gaterville Countryside ISP, LLC. Let's see what their security looks like, shall we?"
Fede watched as Cessus dissected the ISP's firewall, set agents to gather traffic in and out of their open ports, diagnosed their operating system, detection countermeasures, their security's weaknesses and flaws. Cessus eventually found a mail session started through an unencrypted link to a public server from an account at the ISP and sucked out the password and login. Then he set up some filters to watch for the same login being used elsewhere. Sure enough, not ten minutes later the login was used with any encrypted handshake to run a shell to the same server the mail session had connected to. Thirty seconds and Cessus had logged in and discovered root access.
"Okay" said Cessus. "Now that we've got full admin privileges over here, how to we get back to the ISP?"
"Log files" said Fed. Check for when this guy went the other direction and connect in some believable way."
"Good idea. How about we assure that we can get back here again some other time, first?"
Cessus installed three separate root kits, backdoors hidden in four different places in case any one of them was found and deactivated. Then he scanned the log files for a secure shell connection to the ISP's primary servers, found one and discovered it provided a root connection straight to the ISP.
He logged out and erased the connection from
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