The Black Book Page 3

  In three minutes, I had learned more about the international shell game than I could have gotten in three jail terms. Who says this isn't a great country?

  Meyer appeared at my shoulder, he was white as a ghost, and shaking badly. "Thinking of making a run for Aruba with Travis' booty?" He asked.

  "No Meyer, I wasn't. Tell you what Mr. Economist, tomorrow morning you come sit with me for an hour or two at the computer. I'll give you a lesson about money."

  “I’m sure it will be fascinating, but at the moment, we have bigger problems.”

  “Like what?”

  “My houseboat exploded half an hour ago. They’ve taken my home and all my possessions. They tried to kill me.”

  “Shit. It looks like we may need to move up the schedule a bit.”

  Chapter 5

  Hacking into the website of the Aryan Nations didn't pose much of a problem. They were running Windows NT, with IIS as a web server. They hadn't even applied the free security patches available from Microsoft.

  "Ok, Meyer, the first order of business is to install a back door. That way, if we have to come back to the site, we won't have to go through this rigmarole again. Executing a simple Active Server Page Script will get us that far." Two minutes later, we were in.

  "Next, we want to steal their address book, and poke around on the hard disk. We can FTP anything we find back here onto our hard disk."

  "But, won't they notice us on their system?" Meyer looked worried.

  "I doubt it. Most servers run unattended. Even the ones that have a human around aren't likely to be manned at this hour. Six A.M. here is four in the morning there. Bingo! Look here! We have their whole membership database! This is going to be fun!"

  "But M. What if they notice?"

  "Well, for on thing, we are on an anonymous IP address. It changes every time we connect. But, just so you'll feel better, imagine for a minute that there was someone watching their machine at four in the morning. There isn't anything on their screen to see. Even if there were, what would they do? About the only thing they can do is turn the damn thing off. They don't know who we are, or where we are."

  After I downloaded their files, I uploaded a few of my own. These were scheduled to run over the next two weeks.

  "We're going to leave them an Easter egg, something to ruin their day, and generally keep them busy. Next, we take on the Federal Reserve, and then the world."

  "So much for you making me feel better."

  "Don't worry Meyer. I could do this in my sleep."

  The banks in use by the Aryan Nation and the Federal Reserve were just a shade more difficult than cracking a website, but, I didn't tell Meyer that. The Fed has the same problem as Government sites everywhere. They might be a bit more security conscious, because they deal in money. On the other hand, they hire data processing people for as little as they can pay them, and get exactly what they pay for. It took half an hour to hack into the bank without leaving a trail. The money transfers went faster than that. Ten minutes after I pressed the last key, the Aryan Nations were short one hundred and thirteen million dollars. I thought for a minute that Meyer was going to have a seizure. "Don't worry." I told him. "The money will be out of those accounts within twenty minutes. By tonight it will be five accounts away, there won't be a trace."

  "M. Do you realize what you are doing? You can't subvert funds from the banking system like this! It's criminal."

  "What do you mean can't? I just did. As for the moral issue, I’ve given it a lot of thought. I’ve spent my whole life being honest. I’ve never stolen a dime. That would be a crime. Civil disobedience is when you understand something to be illegal and you do it anyway. It’s when the outcome means more to you than the punishment. If what we are doing right now gets me ten to twenty years in a federal hotel, I’ll accept that, if it gets McGee home safely. Hell, once McGee is home I might just turn myself in. I could sort of use a vacation."

  "But, we'll be caught. Don't you understand? They'll trace where the money went."

  "Let's see. One hundred and thirteen million dollars times fifteen percent in fees. That gives us sixteen million nine hundred fifty thousand reasons they won't be able to trace the money. Besides, those boys are going to be a mite busy with the entertainment I've arranged for them."

  "My god. What else have you done?"

  "Well, let me set this thing on autopilot for a minute, and we'll talk about it. I just need to get it started cracking the other sites."

  "I probably don't want to know about them do I?"

  "You might, you might not. It turns out that there are just over eight hundred sites I've found with Internet searches that have Aryan or Neo-Nazi home pages. Add to that the two thousand or so web addresses we found in their address book and that gives us about three thousand addresses to play with. Our machine is hooking into them now, and uploading a few programs I wrote on the way down here."

  "What do the programs do?"

  "You might say we are starting a war here Meyer. At midnight, Zulu, six P.M. tonight our time, all of these machines are going to start working for us, which is to say against them. I planned a simple three-phase campaign. First, all of their machines will begin sending threatening email to federal, state, and local politicians and law enforcement agencies. It would have looked contrived if they all sent identical messages to each recipient, so I put together a random insult program, with a psychological word-weighting algorithm based on the recipient's last name. It is important to call Eugene McCarthy a Mick, instead of a Dego. It does everything from making threats on the president's life, to calling the local black FBI agents "Mud Babies," and demanding the immediate release of Betty Crocker. It includes as many racial slurs and epithets as I could come up with. All of the members in the database will get an email from the Aryan Brotherhood demanding that they send the title to their cars, along with ten thousand dollars to Jerry Fallwell. I am adding their telephone numbers to every telemarketing list I could find, from replacement auto glass to timeshare condominiums. And any credit cards found in their names at Discover, Visa, Master Card, and American Express will be reported stolen."

  "M. Do you have any idea how many years in jail this might earn us?"

  "Not to worry, Meyer. Besides, that is just Phase-One. Phase-Two starts at 0900, Zulu, when all of the machines begin a denial of service attack on each other. They spend all of their cycles either pinging each other, or trying to keep up answering the pings they receive. It is sort of like an autoimmune system disorder for computers. Aryan against Aryan, mano a mano, modem vs. modem."

  "But, they'll just restart their systems."

  "Nope. First off, we are hooked into their boot records. Restarting their computers will just start the process over again. On top of that, we'll be running as NT service applications or invisible 9X applications. They won't be able to see us, or get rid of us without wiping their hard disks clean. I think it will be a major improvement to the world of computing when they do."

  "I'm afraid to ask what phase-three entails."

  "Oh. I took the liberty of placing several classified ads. The next issue of most underground newspapers will be advertising a gay pride festival next week outside Hayden Lake, Idaho, at their stronghold. Mainline newspapers will be carrying an AP article that describes a new U.S. land grab policy in the area. Forty acres free to anyone who sets up a tent, and can protect it. There are also rumors starting to circulate about a new gold find in the area, and the fact that the Grateful Dead are giving a free concert in their pasture. That was about all I could get done last night."

  "What happened to the simple life?"

  "Well, you know what they say, Meyer. Anyone can make a mistake. But, to really foul things up requires a computer. Just think, I could have been having fun like this for the past thirty years, and never did."

  We celebrated over lunch, with good California Chablis and a seafood salad as the machine hummed away. Any of the accounts not
logged on would get an email with an attachment to catch their machines up to date. The emails were mostly from Publisher's Clearinghouse saying "This time you really won!" Tomorrow, I needed to get on the road. It was time to put together a team.

  Sue came in then with a catbird look on her pretty face. “If you’re going to leave me here, then we need to spend some more time talking about what and who you are going to be up against.”

  With Meyer tucked safely in for the night, she tried to educate me. The process took hours, and a great deal of effort. Once again, I found I was only human. When she was done, I felt knowledgeable about every square inch of what I was up against. Now I just needed to learn more about the opposition, and come up with a plan. But, that would have to wait until morning.

  Chapter 6

  Internet warning system attacked

  CERT Coordination Center site inaccessible

  By Robert Lemos

  ZDNET

  May 23 — Unknown attackers inundated the Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Center with data Wednesday, cutting off the public’s access to the organization largely responsible for warning others on the Internet about computer-security threats.

  THE ATTACK BEGAN around 9 a.m. PDT Tuesday and continued to stall traffic to the organization’s Web site Wednesday.

  “Our connection to the Internet has been largely saturated by this activity,” Ian Finlay, an Internet security analyst for the CERT Coordination Center, said in a recorded statement.

  “The www.cert.org Web site may be unavailable until the attack begins to

  subside.”

  Although the attack has prevented anyone from accessing the

  security advisories on CERT’s Web site, the Center said it will still be able to get the word out on critical alerts.

  “We have alternate means to issue advisories as it becomes necessary,” Finlay said in the statement.

  © ZD Inc. All Rights Reserved. ZDNet and ZDNet logo are

  registered trademarks of ZD Inc. © Ziff Davis Media.

  All Rights Reserved.

  The Delta 757 swept down over the snow-covered peaks of the Wasatch mountain range that borders the Salt Lake Valley on the east. Like all modern airlines, they had knuckled under to the feminist movement in the mid-seventies, and fired any stewardess that was even remotely attractive. First class was no exception; the stewardesses with longevity always bid for those positions. The uninspiring result was that as we approached our touchdown, the announcement was strikingly similar to a lecture my mother had once given me.

  I was in Salt Lake because Doc was here. At the age of six, Doc had started taking television sets apart. He never actually put one back together and made it work until he was eight. At the age of twelve, he heard that surgeons in Vietnam were experimenting with electric shock to anesthetize wounded soldiers. He promptly built himself a machine, and had half of the children in the neighborhood sleeping peacefully before they apprehended him. At twenty-two he was working in Silicon Valley for the defense industry. Never one to be bothered by petty office politics, he had authored a memo describing how stupid the company's system was, pointing out several design flaws, and giving ideas for improvement. Instead of passing it through channels, he dropped it off at the president's office. When the company did not act, he dropped a copy off at the competition's office. His memo was last seen at the Paris Air Show, being used by a French General to browbeat several company executives.

  Lately, Doc had been keeping out of the public's view, and out of harms way. In fact, to talk to him at all, I had to rent a helicopter. I found him alone, but not lonely, atop the Oquirrh Mountains west of Salt Lake City, on Nelson Peak. Rush week was coming up, and he had taken an engineering position, keeping the local television transmitters purring. As we came in for a landing, he was just zipping up, having relieved himself in the direction of the station management in the valley below.

  When the rotor wash was manageable, I crouched down and made a dash across the hillside. "I thought you might want a pizza." I said, holding aloft a deep-dish thick crust Domino's Supreme.

  "You were always kind of thoughtful." He said. His blond hair was whipping in the wind, but he didn’t seem to notice it.

  "Hang tight, and I'll get the pilot and the beer. I wasn't sure I'd find you."

  "I'm not headed anywhere." He said accepting the pizza, and sniffing at the box.

  My pilot shut down, but declined the offer of pizza and beer. He said he would rather just polish his bird, and look around. So, six-pack in hand, I made my way back across the hillside.

  Inside the sheet metal building that contained the transmitters, Doc cleared off a portion of his workbench to make room for the pizza and beer. The whole place hummed with electricity. The smell of ozone was strong inside the building. I expected to get shocked any second. Doc did not seem to mind. He’s just over six foot one with small love handles, glasses held together with duct tape, and an other-worldliness that says everything is all right with his world.

  "Bit far from home aren't you?"

  "Yup. Need some help." I said, biting into a slice.

  "Afraid I'm broke." Doc said morosely.

  "Not any more you aren't. Besides, that isn't the kind of help I need."

  "I'm not broke?" He said with a surprised expression.

  "Nope. I just deposited one hundred thousand dollars into your account." I told him.

  "Who we killing?"

  "That’s not the kind of help I need either."

  "Oh."

  "I just need you to throw together a couple of party favors for me. Nothing too fancy and I foot the bill for materials. It doesn't come out of your account. I recently came into a good deal of money."

  It took about three beers to explain the circumstances to Doc. I left it up to him to fill in the particulars. When I got back into the chopper, I had his agreement to get off of the mountain as soon as the station could get someone up there to replace him. Pressing as my schedule might be, he would not simply walk off the job. He would meet me the next week in Idaho. I tried to give him fifteen thousand for parts and materials, but he would only take eight. When I asked him about this, he just said "Smith & Edwards." The pilot told me later that it was the name of the largest army surplus store in the western states. If you needed it, they had it. Finding it was something else again.

  My next flight was on Northwest. They had an early morning flight I could catch that connected with a puddle jumper to the Brainerd Lakes area. With that in mind, I checked in to one of the airport hotels, and made my reservations. Getting a good night's sleep in Salt Lake was not a problem. The town is effectively dry. The local liquor laws must have been passed in the early eighteen hundreds. Each watering hole is effectively a state-run liquor store. The bar sells you setups for the price of a normal drink. You then have to walk over to the liquor outlet to buy mini-bottles for the price of a Chrysler Le Baron to complete the drink. To avoid this hassle, the locals join private "Locker" clubs. After paying his dues, the member places a bottle in his private locker for the bartender's use. Of course, no one ever brings a bottle, and the bottle that they didn’t bring never runs dry. Yet, somehow with all this hypocrisy, they managed to attract the winter Olympics. Wonders never cease.

  Chapter 7

  Money Reported Missing

  Bank Officers Questioned

  By: Jake Weston

  Northern Idaho Sentinel

  May 24 - Tempers flared yesterday as local bank officers answered questions regarding missing funds. John Bellingham, president of Idaho Federal Thrift Bank maintains that account holders moved millions of dollars from a local account last week by wire transfer.

  The account holder was not available for comment, but attorneys for the account holder maintain that no one associated with the account made any such transfer.

  Bellingham stated that it was virtually impossible for anyone else to have done so. "First, we need a secr
et command from their computer system. Then, a fax must follow to confirm the transfer. There is no doubt that these were received, or that both of them originated with the account holder's computer system. If there is a problem, they had better start looking for it inside their own organization."

  Tempers are likely to remain heated until the missing money is located. The FBI will be involved in tracing the funds transfer. Local special agent Larry Borden said today "These things are usually traced to someone inside an organization who has knowledge of the banking arrangements. We have several good leads to go on here. The best thing the guilty party could do at this point is to come in and confess. The FBI is on the case."