Hack Read Online Free PDF Page B

them.
    “Anything else?” Philips said.
    “No.”
    “Let me warn you, you’re going to be cooped up in a house for the next month with Richard and Hannah, and I expect you to try to treat them with some respect.
    They’re experienced federal agents. They deal every day with the worst that society has to offer. They have both made major busts and received citations for valor. So, any sarcastic remarks are going to roll off them like water off a duck’s back. My advice to you is to be good and try to get along. Soon, this will be over, and we’ll all be smiling.”
    “Okay,” I said. “I’m not going to make waves.”
    “I’m glad to hear it. Go with Hannah. She’s going to change your hair.
    Then put on your new clothes.”
    16

    I went into the bathroom as Karl Ripley, and emerged fifteen minutes later as David Johnson. Philips nodded without speaking, as if to say, “I’m right about nobody recognizing you.”
    That was true enough. In the mirror, even I didn’t recognize me. I looked like a chatroom junkie. I stood in the middle of the room, while Philips, Garman, Richard, and Hannah looked me over. But they were not just judging whether my new image would be good enough to pass as an ordinary high school student. They were weighing me up. Was I up to the job?

    It reminded me of that time in drama class, when Mr. Ronsen unexpectedly picked me to play Horatio in the school’s dismal production of Hamlet . I could see everyone staring at me, wondering who this nerd was, and why I had been given an important role in their play. Come opening night, I gave a good-natured performance that was neither good nor bad, and somehow got the loudest applause, much to everybody’s surprise, and my indifference. The gorgeous and popular Anne Noble even said hi to me. But apart from its use in hacking, being an actor sent me to sleep.
    I stared back at the feds, and kept the idea in my mind: it’s just another hack—
    no sweat.
    “You’ve heard everything we have to say, and now you know almost as much about Malik and his organization as we do. This is your last chance to call this off.
    You can leave now, and get a job making pizza. It’s up to you.”
    Well, maybe I did have a couple of reservations about what I was doing. But I looked again at the pictures of Malik and Zaqarwi that were still on the table. For all I knew, the FBI had their information right, and these men were the front of an organization dedicated to murder and mayhem at any cost.
    If that was true, then I had no problem with doing what I had to do. Then the FBI would crack the case, and I’d have a free ride to college. Win-win, as they say.
    Sure.
    “It sounds like a good plan,” I said. “I’ll need to download some hacker tools and stuff.”
    Philips nodded, and I set up the notebook, connected to the motel’s broadband connection, and started surfing.
    I soon realized that being away from the game for over six months had made me rusty. I had by then forgotten many of the details of the warez sites I had used for downloading tools and uploading my own contributions, hacker to hacker.
    I rolled my eyes upwards, navigating through the universe of memory where I had left several important details hidden away. With a bit of effort, I managed to grab them. Within a minute, I was downloading the sort of scripts and hacker programs that would have incriminated me in a court of law, if it weren’t for the fact that the FBI was paying for the line.
    Still floating around the Internet, despite the hacker crackdown, were some of my own old scripts. Once I had my old tools, I ran one of my programs that let me see the vulnerabilities on the notebook that the FBI had just handed to me. It soon came up with a list:
    1

    sttd vulnerability

    DOS
    2
    zty
    overflow

    possible
    root
    I was going to say something about the FBI giving me a computer that was full of security holes, but then I saw it hadn’t been booted for weeks. It was new, and had