CHAPTER 4

Even with the advanced firewalls, the system had just about been the easiest governmental system he’d ever had to defeat. It hadn’t even had any real security to speak of. That is, it had enough to keep out the basest neophyte or the common script kiddie, but not enough to keep anyone serious out. In a way, it disgusted Lionel to see people who thought so little about the private information of citizens that they were supposed to be protecting—but then again, it made him just as disgusted by the people who trusted their governments and their communal systems to keep this running competently, so to hell with them all.

Lionel Curran and the rest of his online pals were currently playing an MMORPG, scouring a dungeon in Uthuwai while simultaneously hacking into the mainframes of various credit reference agencies. The job wasn’t even difficult enough to draw him entirely away from the looting of treasure chests—he was close to reaching Level 71 in his Sorcerer class, and he had stayed up two nights in a row to achieve this.

As for the hacking job, it seemed to be going okay. Lionel had to laugh at a few obvious honeypots he encountered along the way. Honeypots were traps set by computer security officials to ensnare any hackers who came into the system without authorization—they were lures such as data, vulnerable computers, or networks that appeared to be ripe for the plucking, but were actually kept monitored. Honeypots kept information that was dressed up to look important, and only script kiddies or total noobs fell for them.

That wasn’t going to happen today.

The mystery client had contacted him on Forumz, a website dedicated to giving registered members their own pages, blog spots, and regular rotation into the “recommended” section of the site. There, Lionel and a number of other Parasytes posted their thoughts on modern hacktivism, what it was, where it was going, and the overall hypocrisy of all these hacktivists, since the terms “hacker” and “activism” have such broad moral interpretations. Lionel had dabbled in hacktivism years ago, joining that strange community of people fighting for something—whether it was groups fighting for greater openness between their governments and their people by hacking into government databases to steal files and spread them across WikiLeaks, or just a bunch of angry hippy “peacemongers” who wanted to screw with Lockheed’s website for a weekend, Lionel Curran was no longer interested.

The world was going to hell and nobody cared, least of all him. Of course, people claimed to care. Everybody claimed to care. But Lionel was of the firm belief that if as many who claimed to care actually cared, then there would be no more war or strife or poverty or whatever the hell. You can’t have that many people care and nothing get done, he figured.

So he leveled on a couple of newer MMORPGs that he was beta testing this month, and all the while he did what he did best. He wrote scripts, sold them to the script kiddies who preferred the pre-packaged automated tools instead of actually learning how to hack for themselves; and they were willing to pay. He sometimes helped the white-hat hackers break into certain systems to test their security, and all the while he wrote malicious code and dumped them throughout the systems of various banks and corporate databases like the cuckoo’s egg, waiting to hatch at the right moment.

Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.

They also gathered classified information and moved it through countries with special cyber protection laws, such as Sweden and Belgium, in order to enact these protective laws and maintain their anonymity. Such classified information, if shopped around adequately, could find a willing buyer.

Lionel and his fellow Parasytes also turned a profit stealing people’s identities and then turning them over in great lump packages to the highest bidders. Lionel, along with many other hackers of his caliber, had developed a program for figuring out social security numbers long ago. It actually wasn’t all that hard. The necessary information for doing it was mostly available on social networking sites and in public domain areas, such as the social security death master file database. Using all of that information, the right computer could guess about 8.5% of the social security numbers of people born after 1989.

All of this could be a lot of trouble, but their employer this time paid well, and had paid up on all three jobs he had hired their community for in the past. He appeared to be a gifted hacker himself, having written some of the scripts for them, and had merely handed them off so that Lionel and his people could finish the job.

Lionel was just about to reach Level 71 when a chime went off at the third computer monitor on his right. He reached for the mouse, and clicked the OK button. And just like that, their secret client’s corrupted files were uploaded.

There were worms now moving through the systems of at least one branch of a credit bureau more than 2,000 miles away. A few of them would appear as e-mails to a number of staffers at the credit bureau, and there they would wait for a few days, slowly chewing away at files, spreading their corruption and corroding the integrity of the system.

Another worm was well on its way to getting into the power grid of Gotham City, trick it for a minute so that it interrupted the three-phase powering system just long enough to disrupt the power for one city block. The worm would disrupt the command to send power as it left the generator and entered the transmission substation at the power plant. It would confuse the system so that it didn’t adequately step down the transmission voltages to distribution-level voltages, which prevented the power from being split in different directions. The circuit breakers wouldn’t let that level of power go through. So, in short, everything was about to go black near 78th Street.

But there was another code that Loinel’s mystery employer had wanted embedded, one that didn’t immediately make sense to him, but he only did what he got paid to do. The message itself had looked, well, stupid. Incredibly juvenile. On a whim, Lionel went back and looked at it again. He pulled it up onto his screen:

OLOOLOOLOOLOOOOOOLLOOOOLOLLOLLOLLOLOOLOOOOOOLLOLLLOOLLOOLOLOLLLOLLOOLLOOLOLOLLLOOLOOOLOOOOOOLLOLLLOOLLOOLOLOLLOOLLLOLLOOOOLOLLLOLOOOOOOLLOLOOLOLLLOLLOOLLOOLOLOOLOLLOOOOLOOOOOOLLOOOLOOLLLOLOLOLLLOLOOOOLOOOOOOLOOLOOLOOLOOOOOOLLO

On and on it went like that. It seemed idiotic to try and pull off something as big as this job was and then leaving behind a big “LOL” message.

Lionel thought about the blackout that was about to go down at 78th Street. When that happened, the Third Bank of Gotham would have its security systems down. And not just the physical alarms inside the bank itself, but also the backup generators. All the computers inside the bank would go offline until the power could boot back up, and when they did they’d be racing to catch up, and the other worms, which Curran had ready to go, would find it much, much easier to slip inside during this rebooting process.

Lionel didn’t really know the real intent of his client. He only knew that once he had sent over confirmation to the mystery person, he could look at his account in Zurich on the fifth computer monitor behind him, and could see that it took on an extra two zeroes.

“Good enough for me,” Lionel said. He reached over and picked up his Sweet’n’Tasty milkshake, gulped the last of it down, and flung it in the overflowing waste bin beside him. “All right, ogre,” he sighed, looking back at the screen in front of him. “Let’s do this.”