Runaway Heart Read Online Free PDF

3,500
Gen-A-Tec employees:
     
    Rhyde                                     OROTHu
    Pzimmer                                 2Bfib7
    Bnorton                                  SEoblp#w81
     
    Flieter                                     COM725M
    Jsasson                                    13Jen45
    Klezso                                     1415ube
     
          It went on for pages. Roland knew it was mathematically impossible for
him to decipher these encryptions, but he also knew that most corporate
executives were pretty sloppy about what passwords they used. Usually a wife's
name or a child's was a good candidate. Roland picked a program out of his CD
case. The one he chose first had the two hundred most common adult names
already encrypted. He quickly ran that program against the list the e-mail host
had just supplied him. Nothing. Then he picked out a second CD and did the same
for the two hundred most common baby names.
          Bingo! Two matches popped up. One was a secretary and not worth working
on. She wouldn't have top-shelf security. But the other match was jsasson. He already knew from studying
the corporate prospectus that this was probably the user name for Jack Sasson.
Sasson's encrypted password was "2Bfib7," which matched the
encryption in Roland's baby-name file for "Brandon."
          "Go no further, my man," Roland told himself. Jack Sasson was
major corporate cheese, Gen-A-Tec's chief financial officer.
          Now Roland could go right through the front door, right past their
bullshit security system directly into the company e-mail. He logged in with
the user name jsasson, then typed
the password brandon. The e-mail
host immediately displayed a Gen-A-Tec welcome screen. One of the choices
listed was systems prompt.
          "Fuckin' A," Roland giggled. This system has more holes than a
military rectal exam, he thought. Roland quickly clicked on systems prompt and was immediately into
their Local Area Network inside the Gen-A-Tec building. Roland was losing
respect for this systems administrator at warp speed. The fool hadn't patched
the known security holes in his software. He hadn't even guarded against
frequently used passwords. The guy was a complete pant-load. Butt toast.
     
    The Gen-A-Tec nighttime systems
administrator's computer beeped a warning and Lincoln Fellows, a skinny,
twenty-three-year-old African American, master geek and computer nerd, whose
net handle was Darkstar, ambled over and pushed his ebony features down
into the blue-lit screen.
          "What have we got here, my man?" he said softly as a window
popped up on his screen with the warning:
     
    CRACKER IN THE
SHADOWS. MONITOR?
     
          Lincoln clicked on ok and
the alert window went away.
           Line got one or two of these a
day. Kids mostly, trying their skill against an organized security system,
trying to see if they could break in. Everything here, the holes in the version
software, the easy-to-crack password files, everything was put there
intentionally by Lincoln Fellows. Just hard enough to seem real, just easy
enough to let them in. Once the kiddy crackers thought they were in, they would bounce around
inside his BS shadow system thinking they had found the real deal, but it was
just an elaborate stage set designed and orchestrated by Lincoln Fellows,
master of the game. The crackers would screw with worthless data, download
dummy files, do their best to steal or change shit, and leave their mark on the
system. But as soon as they logged off, the shadow system went back to the way
it was before they came in, waiting for the next moron to try. The cracker
always left without ever getting past Lincoln's little funhouse to the real
computer and data systems beyond. Brilliant. Unorthodox.