Saturday 4 February 2012

To make up for the wait...

Here is another piece. Please post your comments. I'd really appreciate it.

Shinar

I was browsing through the news services to keep up with current affairs. There had been another breakout from a prison back on earth. This was the third in only one week. Apparently a group of ten people from a terrorist organisation called The New World Order had broken into the high security prison in Red Lake, Ontario, killed three guards, severely injured another six and freed one prisoner called Cornelius Kerethites. Kerethites was imprisoned for computer espionage. He had hacked into government computer systems six years ago and had been caught, charged and found guilty the following year. He had already served five years of his seven-year sentence and now spent the remainder as an OPS, after prison psychologists had assessed him as a low risk to society.
The truth probably was that he had used confidential information that showed the government in a bad light to blackmail them into giving him a light sentence. Hacking into computer systems was classed as a major criminal offence and breaking into government information stores ranked as highly as murder. That he got away with seven years was certainly suspicious. Whatever the truth really was, it just showed once more how powerful information had become these days and how dangerous it could become in the wrong hands.
This made me wonder. If I was to disclose SESCC's security holes to the world, as I had originally intended, somebody could use the information to their advantage by breaking into SESCC and wreaking havoc. I had to be really careful what I did with my discovery. My intention was to give society a thorough shake and show them how much information on unsuspecting individuals was held by governments and what they were doing with it. I had no intention to put society into any danger.
I decided that it would be better to prove my point by breaking into SESCC myself and disclosing a small part of the information I would gain access to, rather than by documenting the security holes of the system itself. I would still be able to show society that everyone's life was recorded and everybody constantly left an electronic trail, and I would make it impossible for criminals to use what I had discovered to their advantage.

There was more on the news services, but it was only the usual reports on the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Near East Alliance1, a little information on the ongoing workers' unions' strikes in the USA and stories about the uprising in the slums of Brazil, which was now being silenced by extreme military force. There were also some boring articles about the latest scientific discoveries and inventions, closely followed by highly twisted stories on radical animal activist groups destroying laboratories and attacking the homes of scientists as well as the scientists themselves. It was the usual blood and gore reporting that attracted the general public's attention and sold well.
These days it was page views that counted. They had become the equivalent of the print run from the times when newspapers were still being printed on paper. One copy sold in the old days now equalled a dozen or so page views. A story only had to be displayed on-screen to be counted as a page view. Every click was recorded and analysed, whether the story was actually read or not.
Systems had become quite sophisticated and they adapted to your preferences. The more news you read the better the news service accommodated to your reading habits, thus increasing the chances of you returning and reading even more news. This was practically impossible in the old days when everybody was presented with the same set of news as everybody else. Customised, up-to-date and fast moving news was the key to success, incredible financial wealth and, in effect, immense power.

I closed my news browser and returned to the problem of analysing the information I had gathered about SESCC, or Sesk as I started to call it, in order to break into the system and steal large chunks of information. I flicked through the heaps and heaps of printout I had produced over the last few nights. There were hundreds upon hundreds of pages of information printed on stacks of paper. The paperless office certainly hadn't arrived in my home yet.
I started up my highly optimised search engine software to scour the Gigabytes of data for a few keywords. My first attempt was to find some sort of back door2 into Sesk that would allow me to access the main system as well as every subsystem directly using only one username and password. The search for "back-door" returned hundreds of results, and I printed out the references so that I could look through the paper copies later.
My next attempt was to focus on finding an administrator password or some sort of default password that Sesk would be set up with as standard when first installed. A search for "password" returned another set of several hundred references. My printer kept on churning out pages of search results.
Finally I tried to find references to potential erroneous system overflows which might open the possibility of inserting my own code into Sesk and gain access that way. The search engine returned even more results for "overflow". My printer was going to be busy for a little while longer.

I decided that this would be enough for one night. It was already half past eleven and Jenny had been in bed since about ten o'clock, after she had watched her favourite talk show "O'Sullivan", or "Sully" as she usually called it, on Channel 321.
I went into the kitchen to get something to drink. I opened the fridge and took out a can of grapefruit crush. I walked over to the window and looked outside. It was rather silent. A police patrol was quietly passing by, making sure that the local community could safely sleep in their beds – or as in my case, could safely hack into a top secret government computer system and commit a major breach of law and order.
I opened the can of grapefruit crush and took a sip. Then I walked back to my room. When I turned round the corner and walked through the door I saw Jenny sitting on my chair in front of the computer looking at the screen. She seemed to be reading, her finger slowly tracing the words on the screen, pronouncing each word in a whisper.
"Hello, little lady, what are you doing there?" I said.
She turned around quickly, looking at me with large, worried eyes. "I can't sleep."
"Oh, Jenny, are you all right? You haven't slept very well for the past few nights. You are not coming down with something, are you?" I asked her.
"I don't know. I'm hot and my room is hot and the duvet is hot and everything is too warm. I just can't sleep. I'm probably just coming on," she replied rather annoyed.
"Well, it is quite warm today. Do you want a cold drink?"
"Yes, please. Can I have some cold water, please?"
"Of course you can, darling. You go back to bed and I get you a glass of fresh, cold water, all right?"
"Yes, please. Thank you," she said, got up and walked out of the room towards her bedroom.
"I'll be with you in just a minute, sweetie," I called after her. Then I went over to the computer to find out what she had been reading. The last set of search results was still on the screen. A long list of file names and short excerpts from the documents themselves. I was satisfied that if Jenny was to repeat anything she had read to anyone, it wouldn't be a problem since it wouldn't make much sense just on its own. It was another lucky escape.

I walked back into the kitchen to get a glass of water and took it to her room. The door to her room was closed, so I knocked at the door, waited a moment and then entered. Jenny was lying on her bed, the duvet only covering her feet. The room was fairly warm. I gave her the glass of water.
"Thank you," she said and started drinking eagerly.
I walked back to the door and turned the air-conditioning up a little. I could feel the cool draft from the vents increasing slightly.
"Right, darling, it will be cooler in here soon, so please try to go back to sleep. All right?"
"Yes, I will. I'm very tired. Sully said that sleep is important so that your brain can learn things," Jenny told me.
"That's right. Your brain needs some rest to sort out what you learned during the day and file everything away properly. Sleep well, poppet, and sweet dreams," I said.
"Night, night," she replied, closed her eyes and turned onto her side.
I turned around and went back to my room.

The printer was still busy printing out the long list of search results. I picked up the first heap of paper and started looking through the references. Then I looked up the corresponding articles in the stack of documents I had printed out the previous nights. It seemed a rather daunting task to find clues to breaking into Sesk in the huge stack of paper. It seemed even more daunting than finding the proverbial needle in the haystack. I had done this sort of thing before though and knew that it took only a couple of clues to find even more clues and eventually, usable results.
However, Sesk was unlike any other system I had hacked into in the past. This was the jackpot as Laura had called it. After breaking into Sesk, everything else was going to look like a walk in the park on a sunny day with a cool ice cream. I knew it was going to be tough to break into Sesk, but knowing that it was the ultimate hack meant it was a big incentive.
I decided I was too tired to approach this task tonight and expect to find any clues or leads, so I switched off the computer screen and left the printer and computer to produce hardcopies of the search space I was going to roam tomorrow night. Then I switched off the light, left the room, closed the door behind me and locked it. I didn't want Jenny to read anything else and repeat it in front of a teacher or another pupil. I didn't want her to know anything about it.
1The Near East Alliance was formed on 15 May 2023 between Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt to unite the countries' military and political forces against Israel. The countries were soon forced to abandon their diplomatic relations with the USA and the EU who strongly opposed this new alliance.
2 A back door is a way of getting into a protected system. It is usually installed by the original programmer or programming team and remains active after the completion of development. A back door even remains available if alterations to the protection of the system are applied at a later date.

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