A Matter of Trust Read Online Free PDF Page A

the system prompts me to. I’ve never paid any attention to the way the network was constructed. It’s just a tool to me—I know as much about it as I do the engine in my car.”
    “You’re not much different than most business execs in that regard,” Sloan observed, completely without censure. Settling into the molded leather chair, she spent a few seconds with the keyboard and mouse, and the 19-inch flat-screen monitor leapt to life. After downloading a program from the Web designed to crack passwords, she began routing through the files, muttering absently. “Information is almost never truly deleted, merely layered over. This is a little like archaeology—you just have to dig down to it.”
    “Wonderful,” Michael commented acerbically. “I should at least be happy that Nicholas doesn’t have much more interest in the finer points of these things than I do.”
    “He doesn’t need to.” Sloan looked over her shoulder at the woman behind the desk, thinking once again how damned lovely she was, even with the lines of stress etched a little deeper around her eyes tonight. “He can hire someone.”
    “Yes. Exactly as I did.” Michael worked not to let her uneasiness show. She didn’t like the idea of drawing battle lines with Nicholas, or of living in what could amount to an armed camp until their affairs could be disentangled, but she had to protect her business. It was all she had.
    “What you should be pleased about is that you hired me first,” Sloan joked. She frowned at something that appeared on the screen, clicked through a few items, then pushed back in the chair to look at Michael again. “Is this where you do most of your project designs?”
    “Here or my laptop at home. I just synchronize the files when I come in. The division heads get summaries of future lines of development, but no hard details. I work them out alone.” Like I do almost everything, she thought.
    She had been an insular child, an awkward teenager, and a reclusive student until Nicholas had taken the time to listen to her. Somewhere in the last fifteen years she had grown up and, in turn, outgrown her simple need for his validation. And when that had happened, they had little left to bind them. A shell of a marriage, and now, not even that.
    She was suddenly aware of Sloan’s deep voice. “What? I’m sorry, I was...wandering.”
    “I was saying that one of the first things we need to do is beef up your personal security.”
    “How?”
    “Encryption, for starters.”
    “Which will do what?”
    “Plenty,” Sloan muttered, still mentally cataloguing her work list. “It can authenticate user identity, protect e-mail transmissions, assign cryptographic document signatures, and verify authorship. When you’re interfacing with multiple systems, user-to-server security is key. Plus, it adds one more layer around your sensitive data that a hacker needs to wade through.”
    “Okay,” Michael murmured. On the surface it sounded good. The details eluded her, which was precisely why she’d hired an expert.
    Sloan stared at the monitor, scanning through files, looking for traces of tampering or unauthorized entry. This was what she loved—the hunt, the chase. The thrill of finding the hidden secrets. Some of her less kind critics had said that was what she loved best about women, too. The hunt. Had she cared at all about public opinion, it might have bothered her.
    “And,” she said, “we really need to get you an ID chip to lock down your hard drive, too.”
    Michael raised an eyebrow. “Meaning?”
    “An electronic chip keyed to a unique identifier like your fingerprints or an iris scan, for example, so that you can be positively identified and anyone else locked out. We need something like that to prevent anyone else from doing just what I’m doing now—breaking into this drive. It will dissuade hands-on intrusion from inside. It won’t protect you from outside hackers, but that’s going to take me a bit longer.