‘I’ve got a deadline for a major project fast-approaching. I can’t afford any delays.’
‘I know, sir. I’m aware you’re in charge of customer-side website content for the rebrand, which is why I’ve been instructed to let you know about this immediately, and to ask which servers you’ve been using for the White Frost project.’
‘We’re using Sierra Nine and Sierra Eleven.’
‘I was kind of hoping that wasn’t going to be your answer.’
‘Shit. How long is this going to take?’
‘We’ll be getting them back up one by one, but some are likely to be down for several days.’
‘Several days? That’s just not on. Absolutely not. There has to be a quicker solution.’
‘With respect, sir, it’s not like re-installing Windows. We’re going to have to rebuild entire databases, and the compiling process—’
‘I don’t care about the technicalities. This work is crucial to White Frost, do you understand? For fuck’s sake, there has to be something you can do.’
‘This is not my doing, sir. I appreciate you’re upset, but you’re not the first person I’ve had this conversation with. Everybody wants to be head of the queue to get their work up and running again.’
‘I apologise. I’m shooting the messenger here. But you have to see the situation I’m in. White Frost is supposed to be going live in less than a fortnight, and …’
‘I understand, sir. I suppose there is— No.’
‘What?’
That little note of desperate, eager hope in his voice is music to any hacker’s ears.
‘Well, the only thing I can think to do might get me into a boatload of trouble if it goes south.’
‘I’ll vouch for you. What is it?’
‘It would involve me creating a new partition on the server and copy-pasting your project files to that while everything else gets wiped. Problem is, if it later turns out the malware has infected your stuff, then we’re back to where we started and we’ll have to repeat the whole exercise further down the line. Except, when I say we, I mean whoever is doing my job after I get fired.’
‘I’ll take full responsibility. You can have that in writing if you like.’
‘That won’t be necessary, Mr Rockwood. I’ll take you at your word. What I am going to need from you is a list of the directories where you’re storing the materials you want protected.’
‘Absolutely. Absolutely. I can email that from right here.’
‘I’m also going to need your username and password.’
Rockwood takes a breath, about to answer. Then he stops, and there is a moment’s pause.
‘Wait. Who did you say you were?’
There is no panic. Buzzkill is ready for this. It’s not an exact science. It never goes smooth, exactly the way you planned it. It’s not about whether you get the specific information you were phishing for: it’s about how you can improvise with the information you do get.
The very reason for this call to Rockwood is that Plan A got derailed. It’s okay, though. Without this brief exchange, Buzzkill wouldn’t have scored the additional information regarding which servers Rockwood is keeping the goodies on; and better yet, which specific directories contain the White Frost assets.
Plan A involved Stonefish decoding Rockwood’s password hash and then Buzzkill was simply going to log in and see how far his clearance level took things. Password hashes are long gobbledegook strings of numbers and letters that represent the encrypted versions of login details. It’s so that a computer or website doesn’t store your actual password for some curious and enterprising individual to get hold of. Hashes can be decrypted, though. Guys like Stonefish live for it. It’s like a religious meditation the way he describes it: descending into this trance-like flow state in which hours pass without him noticing. He said one time he actually wet himself a bit because by the time he realised that he needed to pee, it was so urgent that he didn’t make it to the bathroom fast enough.
Stonefish had delivered. That wasn’t the problem.
It may have been an older document. Maybe Rockwood last logged on from that particular machine a while ago and had changed his password since, or perhaps he changed it regularly. Buzzkill really hates people who do that.
But there are ways to use someone’s old password in order to get his new one.
‘Les Dillon,’ Buzzkill tells him. ‘I’m with IT.’
‘Where are you based?’
‘I’m mostly at Radogan House over in Holborn.’
Buzzkill uses the specific name of the premises rather than merely the geographic.
‘Who’s your boss over there?’
It’s a safe bet he knows naff-all about RSGN’s IT personnel, and if Buzzkill made up a name it would call his bluff, but you don’t leave shit like that to chance. Les Dillon is the name of the person who is genuinely on-duty today for the IT department. Buzzkill knows this for a fact, having called first thing and checked.
‘Tallat Kumar. Do you want to talk to him instead? Because if you do, please don’t tell him what I just offered to do for you.’
‘No, it’s okay. But I’m not comfortable giving my login details over the phone. You could be anybody.’
‘I understand. And to be honest I’m not comfortable risking my job over bypassing your files in the server rebuild, so maybe it’s best if we leave it.’
Buzzkill lets Rockwood think about this, reminding him that Les is his only chance of getting a fast result.
‘No, no. What if I came in right now and logged in for you?’
‘I’m on a bit of a clock here. It’s really now or never.’
Limited time offer!
‘I could be there in forty-five minutes.’
‘I really can’t wait that long. Tell you what, though. I can call up your details and read you back the password you used when we first set up your user account.’
‘How do you have access to that?’
‘Through something else that could get me fired. We keep a record of people’s initial password in case they screw up the primary registration. It’s why we recommend regularly changing your password. Please don’t tell anyone I told you about it.’
‘No, I won’t.’
‘Anyway, I’m looking at your file now and it appears your initial password was “jacknicklaus78”. Would that be right?’
‘Yes. Well, I don’t think that was my original password, but I did use it.’
‘It’s what we’ve got on file. Are you happy to give me your new one now?’
‘Sure. It’s “tomwatson77”. Username “jrockwood”.’
‘Got it. Thank you.’
‘And can you guarantee my work will be safe from the server meltdown?’
‘As soon as you tell me the directories you want protected.’
‘You’re a life-saver. I owe you big time.’
‘No, you don’t. Because this didn’t happen, remember?’
‘Understood.’
‘Now, I don’t need to say that when you get into work tomorrow, you should change your password …’
LIFE IN CAPTIVITY
I take off my jacket, my boots, my watch, my bangles and my earrings, placing them in a grey plastic tray which is lifted by a grey-faced woman and shunted on to a grey conveyor belt beneath the most harsh and nasty strip lighting. There is a bloke in front of me, waiting for the nod to go th
rough the metal detector. He smells like he has spent the morning rolling around in a giant ashtray. I hate the smell of cigarettes on clothes worse than I hate the smell of the smoke itself. It smells of mornings after: of not knowing who I am going to find in the house, crashed out on the couch or in my mum’s bed.
I stand there in my socks, waiting my turn, like I’ve done so many times in so many airports. Today, though, I know that once I have passed through security, the only journey waiting for me will be a guilt trip.
Ash-Man shuffles through the arch then I am beckoned forward. I always feel nervous that these things might beep, but vastly more so here. If you forget to remove your phone or whatever at Heathrow, they’re only going to make you go through again. Here, they might think you’re trying to smuggle contraband. I resent the fact that they are looking at me and actually thinking I might be a criminal.
But the worst part is I can’t hold it against them: after all, I am the daughter of one.
I take a seat in the waiting room where they hold you until it’s officially visiting time, and not a fraction of a second before. I am surrounded by people who look hatchet-faced and aggressive, people I am careful not to make eye contact with, but who I feel driven by instinctive caution to scrutinise.
A rational voice tells me these are only visitors, the same as me, but they aren’t the same as me. They all seem tougher than me. They don’t look scared like I feel scared.
They are bristling with attitude, some of them openly and often pointlessly disrespectful towards the staff. It is as though they are laying down boundaries, standing on the same side of the line as their friend or relative who is inside.
I am suddenly self-conscious about being so cooperative and polite, smiling at the staff like some stupid girl. That is me, though: always afraid of getting into trouble. Always trying to please the teacher.
I can hear Keisha and Gabrielle’s voices, mocking how I spoke in class, mocking how I behaved, mocking how I dressed. Considering they were all in the same school uniform, it showed you how little those bitches needed to work with.
‘You fucking fink you’re better’n us, don’t ya?’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘Yes, you fucking do. Just cause you always get your sums right and you talk all proper. It’s paffetic. You fink you’re a fucking genius. You’re fucking nuffing, that’s what you are. Nobody fucking knows you exist except the fucking teachers.’
No, I don’t.
That really told them. Put them in their place good and proper.
I don’t get what’s wrong with how I talk. I moved around a lot growing up, rarely long in one place, so although I understand their slang, I feel self-conscious using it, because it’s not mine. There’s a few Geordie words that feel more natural, but I tend to shy off using them too, because they only remind me of how I don’t belong.
Keisha’s right, though. I am pathetic. Always a target. Always a victim.
It still burns inside when I remember what they did to me in fourth form. They must have got bored of the endless verbal abuse and tripping me up in corridors. Or maybe it finally dawned on them that they were the ones who thought I was better than them, and this light-bulb moment inspired a rare bout of creativity.
They cornered me on the way home one afternoon, lying in ambush behind the high flats: Keisha, Gabrielle, Martine and Paula. I always took the long way home because I knew the others tended to cut through the park. They must have doubled back, or maybe they had bunked off the last class and were on their way to hang around the shops.
‘Martine says you’ve got maffs homework,’ Keisha stated.
Martine was in the top set for maths alongside me, but she never got shit for it because she was one of their mates, and had been for ever. I had only been at the school a year at this point.
‘You’re gonna fail it,’ Gabrielle said.
I thought she was simply trying to goad me, before it hit me that this wasn’t a prediction, but an order.
‘You’re gonna fail it or we’re gonna fuck you up.’
Martine stood there arms folded, giving me evils. She was going to let them know if I complied. Martine was a hanger-on, someone who wouldn’t be pushing anybody around if she wasn’t in with that lot, so she was enjoying wielding some power. I wondered if it had been her idea, a way of scoring points with Keisha and Gabrielle.
In case I thought this might be an empty threat, Keisha punched me in the stomach so hard I thought I was going to be sick. Then they all walked away, but they weren’t laughing like they usually did once they’d had their fun. That was how I knew for sure they were planning to follow up.
I was in hell after that, wrestling with what to do. I wrote out a version of my homework that I had calculated to be a narrow fail: something that would score less than 50 per cent, but where the marks were lost in ways believable enough to the teacher that it wouldn’t be obvious I was taking a dive.
I couldn’t sleep that night, and sometime around two in the morning I ripped up the failed homework and started again. I had tried to convince myself otherwise, but deep down I knew that if I did this for them once, they would repeat the drill. They were doing this because they had run out of ways to hurt me, so I couldn’t give them a new one.
It was my only means of defiance. I couldn’t stand up to them face to face, even one on one, but I could still give them all a big fuck you in the only way possible. I stayed up the rest of the night, taking extra care over the homework, making sure I missed nothing.
I scored 98 per cent, my highest mark ever.
It felt good for about a second, seeing the look on Martine’s face, but as soon as maths was finished, my legs were like jelly and my stomach was imploding. I was useless in my other classes, tired from being up all night and distracted by thoughts of how I might get home.
I stayed in sight of the staffroom window during breaks and even held off having a pee so as to avoid the toilets. My bladder was bursting by the last class, a constant, growing, piercing pain.
In my desperation to get home, I opted to race through the park, running all the way, reckoning they would be waiting for me on my normal route. I was wrong. I ran right into them, and as Keisha fronted up to me, fists balled, I pissed myself in front of everyone. Not only them, but half the school. They all laughed and took photos. It was on Facebook before I got home.
The door to the visit room opens from the inside, preceded by a jangle of keys and a distinctive clunk. It is the constant rhythm of this place, like hi-hat and bass drum.
I am last inside, letting everyone else file through before me, not wanting to get in anyone’s way. I don’t like the feeling of being in a crowd, even the sense of bustle when too many people are trying to get through one doorway.
Same as last time, I look past my mother at first before recognising her. She is in a faded blue prison-badged polo shirt, identical to all the other women, one that looks as though it has been through the machine a couple of thousand times. Before she went inside, I had never seen her in anything so basic and indistinct, and I know that being forced to wear the same thing as anyone else is an insult. For someone who worked as a nurse for years, Mum has always had an aversion to uniforms. The skin on her arms looks ashy. I’ve never seen that on her before. She must have run out of moisturiser.
She isn’t smiling. Instead she has a searching, quizzical look on her face.
‘Where’s Lilly?’
Not ‘How are you?’ or ‘Thanks for coming’.
‘Why didn’t you bring her?’
‘It’s Wednesday. She’s at school.’
Where I should be, I don’t add.
‘Oh, Jesus, like it matters if she misses a morning. Not like she’s studying for her GCSEs.’
‘She doesn’t like it if her routine is disrupted. Neither does the school.’
‘Yeah, but I haven’t seen her in over a week. She gets upset if she doesn’t see me.’
I sit down on a hard plastic ch
air. Mum didn’t stand up, so there weren’t going to be any hugs. If I’d brought Lilly, sure, but I haven’t.
I take a moment, readying myself to say this. I feel exposed. The light in here is too bright, too harsh.
‘Not getting to see you upsets Lilly, but not as much as seeing you in here and then leaving again. She doesn’t understand why you can’t just come home. We’ve been twice and she’s cried for hours after each time.’
‘You think I don’t cry afterwards too?’
Maybe not after this time, I reckon, but I say nothing.
‘You think I like it here?’ Mum demands.
I still stay silent. I’ve made my point.
‘How is Lilly? Is she eating okay? Are you making sure you’re there on time at school, because she gets real scared if she comes out that door and she can’t see someone she knows.’
I feel my hackles rise. I gaze across, meeting my mum’s insistent eyes. The horrible threads and dry skin aside, I think Mum is looking better than she has done in a long time. It must be harder to get drugs in here than the stories make out, though coffee is an exception, I guess, because she looks kind of wired. She is more alert, more awake, and now that she is straightened out, she has to occupy her ever-restless mind with other things, and that means micro-managing my care of Lilly from a distance.
‘Lilly is fine. Me not so much.’
Mum tuts, like this is merely whining she could do without. I press on, though. Talking this stuff out was the reason I made myself come here.
‘I got a letter this morning telling us the housing benefit’s being cut because we now have a spare room.’
Mum’s face is a mixture of outrage and confusion.
‘We don’t have a spare room.’
‘We do now. So we either have to move somewhere smaller or make up the difference, which just got harder because they already said they won’t transfer the Carer’s Allowance to me because I’m not eligible.’
‘Why not?’
The Last Hack Page 4
