Previous ||| Next
Smooth Criminal
I used to be a cyber cop, a guardian of the online superhighway. I caught cyber crooks by tracerouting them, blocking their hacks with black ice and spiking them, causing their systems to fail and crash. I was the pioneer of the heuristic firewall that could repair itself as it was being attacked. Never got the patent on that.
I hung up my keyboard and mouse a few years back with only one rogue who ever got away from me. The guy lived, breathed and ate through the Internet. He had interfaces that the games and theory boys at Langley would have killed for and on one occasion they tried to have me trace the guy so that they could. He was the ghost in the machine, he was my nemesis in every way. I retired without taking him down.
The ringing phone woke me up one morning and when I answered it I heard the screach of a 28.8bps modem trying to establish a connection. Nobody does old-school like that anymore so I immediately dropped the handset onto the Cermetek 212A acoustic coupler I have beside the bed, a stayover from my old crime-fighting days. Old habits die hard. The hard-lined 386 SX at the side of my bed came to life and in yellow and black an image formed.
A Mandelbrot; somebody was sending me a message, but what?
I sat pondering this as I waited for the lights to change at the corner of Lexington and Concord on my way to the store. They didn't. It took me a while to realise that they weren't changing when the guy in the car behind me got out and checked the pedestrian button hadn't been wedged in place. Another message? Was somebody trying to tell me something?
The real kicker came when the elevator in my building stopped dead halfway up the shaft. From behind the wall panel came the grating mechanical cackling of a digitised voice. Shrill laughter followed by the ASCII coding of an e-mail address in binary. My mind mentally decoded the sequence and I climbed out through the access hatch.
There is only one way to thwart a pure-blooded hacker when you're an old-school cybercop; I emailed him two images of bullets.
Oct.18.2005