Breaking and Entering

by Jeremy N. Smith

  Ice floes covered the lake like a mosaic. “It’s beautiful,” Alien said, still high from the successful raid. She left the car and clicked away with her camera, capturing the deep blue sky, glassy ice, and snow-flecked trees.

  “Here.” Alien handed Jim the camera. “Will you take my picture, so I can show my friends?”

  Alien ran from the parking lot and hopscotched out onto the ice, slipping and sliding a bit in her boots and black wool pants. In the middle of the lake, she vamped for the camera, smiling, waving, and striking a bodybuilder pose.

  Then she heard the crack.

  Alien scrambled to shore, but just before she got there, the ice gave way. She sank twelve inches until her boots found lake bottom. Alien felt the freezing water around her feet and ankles.

  As she stepped out, Jim pulled her to shore with a strong grip.

  “I guess you can break into anything,” he said.

  The next day, Alien and Jim scoped Castle’s central corporate security offices in Chicago, which filled three lower floors of an unlabeled fifteen-story building at the western edge of the Loop. The only apparent way in was through the revolving front door, behind which was a guard stand with a computer and telephone. Next to the stand was an airtight badge-controlled system like the one in Wilmington.

  Jim drove them into the building’s parking garage, whose entrance was around the corner from the front. Maybe that would offer another way in.

  It didn’t.

  “Let’s try their front door. How about an appointment pretext?” suggested Jim. “Or a vendor delivery?”

  “Hey,” said Alien. “Have you seen Sneakers?”

  The movie Alien was referring to involved characters played by Robert Redford and River Phoenix. They need to break into an office building whose front entrance is protected by a zealous security guard. Alone, it’s unlikely either can accomplish the task. Together, though, with Redford impersonating an impatient office party guest and Phoenix a stressed-out delivery guy, they befuddle the guard with simultaneous demands for help.

  Now Alien would play a variant of the Redford role, she and Jim decided, and he a variant of the Phoenix one.

  They approached the main entrance five seconds apart, Jim in the lead, rolling his black hard-sided suitcase behind him. He walked straight to the guard.

  “I have a delivery to make,” he said. “United Airlines.” He gestured to the suitcase. “One of your guys left this at the airport.” Jim went through the motions of checking the tag.

  “Zack Bennett,” he announced.

  The guard typed the name into his computer system. “I’m sorry, sir, I don’t have him in the computer,” he said.

  “Well, the tag says this is his address,” Jim said. They began to bicker.

  Alien walked by the two of them to the badge-activated barriers. She swiped with another fake badge. Nothing happened.

  “It’s not working,” she called out, shaking the badge in one hand and her laptop bag in the other. She was dressed in her best MBA ensemble: heels, skirt, blouse, and trench coat.

  The flustered guard looked up from trying to find Zack Bennett in his system.

  “Look, I really need to drop this off, and someone has to sign for it,” said Jim, insisting on attention. “I don’t have time to wait around.”

  Alien pouted impatiently. “Excuse me?” she said loudly. “I’m late for a meeting.”

  “Hey—is he in there or not?” Jim demanded of the guard.

  “Hold on!” the guard said. He wavered briefly between the two, and then—just like in the movie—hit a button to let Alien through.

  Alien did a little victory pirouette when she met Jim back at the car.

  “Two stolen computers,” she announced, handing him her laptop case and a bulging black garbage bag. “We just have to take photos of them.”

  “Let’s go.” Jim drove the car back to their hotel and led her up to his room, where they plopped their swag on top of the bed. “Do you want to pose with them for the report?” he asked.

  Alien cuddled up with the silver laptop and black desktop, blowing kisses while her partner clicked.

  By nine the next morning, they were at their last stop. Castle headquarters was a sixty-story steel-and-glass skyscraper two blocks from the corporate security offices, crowned with the red logo.

  Alien tailgated in with little difficulty and rode one of a vast bank of elevators to the second floor. She walked into a finance staffer’s empty, unlocked office and took an armload of important-looking files. Minutes later, she met Jim at a downtown parking lot and put the files in the trunk.

  “Now what?” she asked him. “This is easy pickings. I could go back and hit another office.”

  “Nah,” he said. “Better leave room just in case I nab another shred bin.”

  He left. Alien looked up, taking in the building she’d just looted with a proprietorial air. Below the Castle sign, she noticed, were glinting double-height windows for three floors of top executive office suites.

  Could she get into one of those?

  Alien tailgated again into Castle headquarters. She hovered by the elevators marked 40–60 until she saw a smartly dressed older woman stop and swipe her keycard. Broad in the chest and hips, she wore her hair in graying black bangs unnervingly similar to Alien’s mother’s.

  The woman adjusted her purse while she waited for the elevator to arrive. The door opened, the woman entered, and Alien followed. The woman pressed the button for the fifty-ninth floor, and then, on an adjacent keypad, typed a special four-digit access code she blocked from Alien’s view with her body.

  “Can I help you?” she asked, when Alien didn’t press any buttons herself.

  Alien smiled. “I’m from IT,” she said, drawing her empty laptop case higher, as if it explained everything. “There’s an infected computer on the fifty-ninth floor,” she confided.

  “Oh no,” the woman said.

  “Yeah, it’s attacking other computers,” Alien said. “My boss sent me over to find it. I don’t want to interrupt anybody, though. Do you know whose it might be?”

  The woman looked alarmed. “It could be Mr. Wallace’s,” she said. “There’s nobody else up there right now. I’m his secretary,” she explained.

  “Oh, okay.” Alien nodded sympathetically. Wallace, she knew from remote reconnaissance, was the name of Castle’s chief financial officer.

  “Well, it will only take a moment to diagnose the issue,” said Alien. “I know how important he is and I promise I won’t take up very much of your time. It’s just that this virus on his computer is attacking other computers and it’s interfering with bank operations, so we need to get it taken care of immediately.”

  The elevator whisked them up.

  Alien gaped when they reached the fifty-ninth floor. The area where she’d been earlier had a linoleum floor and fluorescent lighting. Here there was plush emerald-green carpeting beneath a vaulted ceiling and brilliant chandeliers.

  “Knock, knock,” the secretary whispered before an open door in front of them. “Come in,” she told Alien a moment later, leading her into an apartment-sized office whose floor-to-ceiling windows offered a sweeping view of Grant Park and Lake Michigan.

  The CFO, Wallace, was a tall, thin fifty-five-year-old with glasses. He studied something on his computer behind a massive mahogany desk.

  “Sorry to bother you, sir,” said Alien, handing him a fake card. “I’m from IT. Your computer has a virus on it. I know there are top executives here, so we didn’t want to shut off your network connection. But I need to clean it off quickly before it spreads.”

  Wallace frowned. “Again?” he said. “Let me close and back up my files.”

  Alien waited while the copying took place, checking out framed family photos on the desk—a young wife and three children between two and ten years old.

  “Cute kids,” Alien said.

  “Thanks,” Wallace responded.

  “So . . . ,” Alien
asked him. “What’s it like being CFO of a big bank?”

  Wallace looked surprised but answered frankly. “You know, it’s not all it’s cracked up to be,” he said.

  “Really?” Alien stared out the picture windows, watching the people and vehicles pass on the street below like little ants. “You don’t like it?” she said.

  “I’m not really sure,” he ruminated. “It’s nice being up here. But I feel like I don’t have time with my family. That makes it hard to enjoy the view.” At this, he pulled his chair away from the computer. “All yours,” Wallace said.

  “Great,” said Alien, moving forward. While Wallace fidgeted with his tie just a few feet away from her, she knelt to install a keystroke logger on his computer and copy his files to a USB stick.

  Why not go for the grand prize?

  “Hmm,” Alien muttered audibly. “I can’t get the virus off,” she said, turning to Wallace. “I’m going to need to take your computer back to IT.”

  He sighed, but he didn’t protest. “Sue!” he called in the secretary.

  When she arrived, he told her, “IT needs to take my computer. Can I work from yours?”

  “Of course.”

  “What’s your password?” Alien asked him. “Just so I can get everything open again after we shut it down here,” she explained.

  Wallace started to answer: “Jamie one-nine-nine-six—”

  Before he could go further, his secretary interrupted him. Her voice had a new sharpness to it.

  “Where are you taking it?” she asked Alien.

  “Oh,” said Alien. “To corporate security.” She gave the address, to bolster her story.

  “Are you going to carry it out?” the secretary asked.

  “Yeah . . . ,” said Alien. She scratched her neck, blushing. “Or I could call somebody.”

  The secretary studied her. “What’s your name again?” she demanded.

  “Elizabeth Tessman,” answered Alien.

  “Let me look you up in the system,” the secretary said.

  Alien hesitated. Then, perhaps too quickly, she said, “You know, I’m new and may not be in the system yet.”

  At these words, Wallace looked her in the eye. He wasn’t happy.

  “Stay right there,” he said.

  Alien presented Wallace with her “Get Out of Jail Free” letter. His secretary called Castle security. Security called Ted Roberts.

  Back in Jim’s hotel room, Alien told him the whole story. Jim sat on the edge of his bed, facing the desk, where Alien had pulled out a chair. He found it all very amusing, both how far she had gotten and that she had been discovered.

  Alien winced. “I was this close,” she said, pinching her left thumb and index finger together. In her mind’s eye, she returned to what had happened in Wallace’s office after his secretary checked the database of company employees and found that she wasn’t in it.

  “They were so freaked out that I got up there,” said Alien. “Afraid, I mean. Wallace—it was like he thought I might be an axe murderer or something.”

  Jim laughed out loud. “No one cares that you got caught,” he reassured her. “They care that you got in. Remember, Castle forecloses on people’s houses. All they need is some angry guy showing up on the CFO’s doorstep. Now that you got up there, they’re contracting for a thirty-thousand-dollar follow-up engagement just to look at the security of the senior executive floors.”

  “Oh.” Alien stared at her hands. In her single-minded focus on getting in and out with the most valuable materials, she hadn’t considered that Elite was after bigger game.

  Jim stood, grabbed a bottle of Perrier from the minibar, and unwrapped two film-covered plastic cups. He poured them both drinks, and then sat opposite Alien again to deliver hers. In the exchange, his fingertips grazed Alien’s—their first physical contact, not counting when he’d helped her out of the lake two days earlier.

  In three days of working closely together, they had been avoiding any touch, Alien realized. No handshakes, no back pats, nothing. She felt herself flush involuntarily. Why?

  Alien glanced up. Jim was looking into her eyes.

  “You’re good at this,” he said.

  11 / /

  Up in the Air

  The buzz from the Castle assignment lingered even after Alien and Jim filed their report. Having proven herself, Alien expected new assignments right away, and she couldn’t wait. So she was puzzled when the Jedis put her back on writing or reviewing reports for work done by others. It was even more confusing—and disappointing—when they hired two new Agents, both men, to whom they immediately gave technical pentesting jobs of the kind she wanted and knew she could handle: researching new network security holes and trying to break into computer systems to find their vulnerabilities. After all, Alien had impressed Bruce in the first place by demonstrating exactly these skills in his course at SCAN. Her predicament was probably typical of other women in InfoSec, but, given that the work was top secret and she was the only female Agent or Jedi at Elite, there was no one else she could ask. She didn’t know where she stood.

  Alien was further frustrated when the Jedis told her that she was on the team, along with Jim, Jules, and the two new Agents, for a particularly interesting new project. The client was the U.S. Department of Defense, which had hired Elite to study hidden flaws in computer memory that let an interloper see and steal important passwords. The DoD even gave Elite permission, when the project was over, to present its findings at SCAN Capital, the training institute’s largest and most important conference of the year, held every April in Washington, D.C. Alien’s co-workers never shared any specific project details with her, however, let alone asked her to do anything. The one instance in which she was contacted was when one of the new guys saw her name on an email chain and sent her an angry message asking why she was late in processing his time sheets.

  “I’m an Agent—I don’t process time sheets,” Alien wrote back bluntly. “You need to send this inquiry to Melinda,” the Elite office manager.

  Afterward, Alien decided to ask Bruce directly for more assignments that would use the expertise she’d spent the last half decade building at MIT, Los Alamos, and Mayflower Hospital. “I have a degree in computer science and electrical engineering,” Alien reminded him. “I’d like to do technical work.”

  “I hear you. You’re right,” Bruce replied. But he thought that before she took on technical cases, she needed more training. He suggested she take another SCAN class or two. Not as a normal student, though. Alien could be a “facilitator,” with Elite paying five hundred dollars instead of the usual three thousand dollars a class in exchange for her assisting the instructor. Bruce would pull strings to make sure she got the appointment.

  Alien accepted gratefully. The first five days at SCAN Capital she spent as a facilitator in an advanced digital forensics class. Then she rounded out the week with a two-day Web application pentesting crash course.

  The final evening, Elite’s presentation on its DoD project was the headline event.

  Alien slipped late into the packed hotel auditorium and had trouble finding a seat, even way in the back. Jim and Jules, the two project leaders, were already onstage. The session would have been far too technical for almost any other audience, but this group was as eager and ready to take it all in as a bunch of superfans at a rock concert.

  Alien watched from a distant corner. She wanted to be up there with her colleagues. Not for the limelight but for the respect it meant. Give her the opportunity and she knew she too could contribute to cool research. But they had never given her a chance.

  Forty-five minutes passed as Jim walked through examples of their techniques in action.

  “Login! SSH! IM! Email! TrueCrypt! Root!” Jules announced each captured password in turn.

  The crowd roared.

  After the session, SCAN executives joined the Elite team for drinks at a big circular table in the center of the hotel bar. It was the evening scene at SCAN Toron
to all over again, greatly magnified in both size and prestige, as wide-eyed admirers approached, shaking hands with Jim and Jules and asking questions about their project.

  The conference higher-ups traded industry gossip with the Jedis. “Symantec bought @Stake. Who’s buying Elite Defense?” one of the former asked.

  Bruce answered for everyone. “A samurai never sells his sword,” he said.

  When Alien took a seat next to Bruce, she saw someone point at her and whisper to a buddy, “Who is she?”

  Alien’s eyes narrowed. Being the only woman in a boys’ club might have a certain cachet. But it wasn’t clear that she was actually a member.

  Soon after she returned from D.C., Alien finally got onto a technical project. Jason, one of the new Agents, led the effort from his home in Austin. When his report was overdue, Alien was asked to help him. She worked from a bright orange armchair in a crowded Somerville café full of mismatched furniture, a cup of Earl Grey tea at her elbow and her cell phone pressed between her right ear and shoulder.

  The client was a global airline. The assignment was a remote pentest—trying to break into computer systems via the Internet alone.

  “How about I ride shotgun?” Alien suggested to Jason. “I’ll verify and document what you discover.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Jason responded in his Texas drawl.

  “Let’s get you in,” he continued. “SSH as ‘test’ on their reservation system.” SSH stood for Secure Shell. The program used encryption to let you log in and execute commands on a remote machine over an untrusted network. First, however, you needed the name of a valid user account—in this case, Jason’s instructions implied, “test.”

  Alien entered the command in a terminal window on her laptop and took a sip of tea as she waited.