Hacking the Naked Princess
by Andy Kaiser
Chapter 0x0B
My client Oober had just disappeared on me. P@nic, the missing hacker, was involved in a hacking competition which held some connection with the Naked Princess picture, but she and the picture weren't talking. Both were hiding more effectively than an Easter egg in N64 GoldenEye.
Even still, there were a few logic gates I could slam through: I needed to talk to Oober. I knew his name - his own mother had dropped him off at my office. He might not want to meet in person again, but maybe I'd do it anyway if I couldn't ping him in digital form.
As for P@nic, I'd realized she might be operating under an alt, also hacking with the handle "Chixor Zed." My conversation with Lynx had told me that Chixor Zed hadn't been responsive, but I had an in. Hopefully.
It took a while of scanning forum postings and IRC chat logs to find Chixor Zed. The timing seemed to fit my theory - Chixor Zed had appeared out of nowhere - just after the AnonIT hacking competition was announced, and long after P@nic had a solid online presence.
I saw too that P@nic herself was all over social media. Or she was, until just about a year ago, after which the handfuls of anonymously-maintained social media accounts just stopped posting, stopped updating. That date didn't correspond with anything else I knew about her, Oober, or AnonIT, so I saved that for later compiling.
Since she'd gone off-grid and had stopped social media involvement last year, I had no clue if any of her accounts were maintained, but I knew how to find out.
I looked at the list of social media sites that she'd been a part of, and got to work.
I began with a deep sigh. Then I signed up for FriendyFace, SyncedIn, Twitchat, and far too many more of the social media heavy hitters that P@nic and everyone in civilized society seemed to care about except for me. Social media made me want to lurk, not like.
Being Dev Manny and the Information Technology Private Investigator that I was, I had little to brag about. My lack of effort at social media was probably why I had close to zero clients. I resolved to someday throw a new title on my business card and recommit myself to sales. Something like "Best Damn Social Mediator," only with a more family-friendly acronym.
While signing up, I used a temporary email address and fake account info. My highly developed paranoia smiled and gloated just minutes later, as my inbox began to explode with spam spawning from those who thought it ethical to sell my information to scammers. I watched in real time the flood of unsolicited friend requests containing cute/funny/adorable pictures of cats/dogs/penises.
I ignored it all and planned out the only other action I wanted to take on each site. The point of all this was to send P@nic a very specific message, and it had to be crafted. The message had to let her know I knew about her double identity and her involvement in the AnonIT hacking competition, and that I was friendly with Oober - and do it all in a way that wouldn't be understood by anyone intercepting the message.
After trying a few variations, I copied and pasted to P@nic's year-old accounts:
"Don't panic. Need to have an uber-talk, from Anon to Zed."
Then I waited. Not long after, my inbox incremented by one. There was no cute/funny/adorable picture, just a one-sentence response from the P@nic account holder:
"I Retire Chixor right now."
I stared at the message, wondering at the weird phrasing and capitalization. After seven blinks, I understood and scrambled to get on to the IRC channels where I'd last seen Chixor Zed.
That's how I made contact with the missing teenage female hacker and Oober's obsession. I was finally talking with Chixor Zed, also known as P@nic.
Chapter 0x0C
Logic, loyalty, and bitcoins. I did like this girl.
She then relayed some very simple instructions, an address, and what to do when I got there. We broke contact and I headed out, hoping my car would beat its current 30 percent chance of starting.
I made sure my car doors were locked. I didn't like driving to this part of the city. Part of my worry was the state of the houses themselves, their conformity, the visual display that might as well have screamed how the homeowners lived quiet lives of quieter desperation.
The deeper I drove into this community of despair, the more out of place I felt. I took too long poking at the GPS and missed my turn. It took me several tries to convince my car to shift into reverse, but eventually the transmission rolled the right dice, ancient gears slammed into place, and my car lurched in the direction I wanted it to go, punctuated with an angry cloud of black smoke.
P@nic's house wasn't a mansion, but it was close.
The three story house was all brick and stone and modern elegance. A canopy of cheerfully leafed trees covered the neighborhood and cradled above the house like a beautiful green umbrella. The nearest house to this one was hundreds of yards away. All houses here had wide lush yards with bushes so carefully shaped they almost looked plastic. Even with all the trees, not one leaf was out of place.
All in all, this was a perfect place to live, a shiny close-knit community just outside of a big city, full of wealth, safety, space, and beauty. A dream house in a dream location.
I hated this part of town.
My own office - with its coffee-stains-where-there-should-never-be-coffee-stains, the evolving funky smells, the building electrics more temperamental than a rabid dog- that was more honest than the "perfect" home in front of me. I didn't care about comfort. I dealt with the truth about reality instead of trying to hide from it.
I pulled into the driveway, though my car didn't want to. Intimidated by pavement somehow free of cracks and oil stains, my car sneakily dropped into neutral and tried to roll back down the inclined driveway. I sensed that if I shifted into reverse and floored the gas, my car would find its way out of this place without me even needing to drive it.
I set the emergency brake, killed the engine, waited for the car to cough itself to death, and got out. I walked up to an entrance way so large, welcoming, and column-filled, I felt like I was stepping into a movie set.
There was a doorbell, so I pushed it. A faint BONG-bong echoed through the house.
I stood and waited.
When I was reasonably sure that no one was home, I followed P@nic's instructions - there was the fake rock, just under the leftmost bush. The key fit the front door. There was no alarm system. I was amazed at the trust and lack of security. Like building a wireless network with WEP encryption... you just don't do that.
I pushed into the house. The foyer was big. The adjoining rooms were big. The stairs were big. The only thing out of place was the small human looking around the place: I was alone.
Where I needed to go wasn't far. I climbed to the top of the stairs and turned into a long hallway that sprouted bedrooms and offices along its length. On the hallway wall was the row of pictures P@nic told me to look for.
I saw P@nic for the first time.
She was an only child. The first picture leading the mounted row in front of me was that of a happy-looking couple on a palm-tree-studded beach. Must be the parents. They wore outdated clothes, and the photo print was taken with an early generation digital camera, grainy and a little off-color. That told me something interesting: This was a tech savvy family, early technology adopters, dating from before megapixels killed film. That mentality might explain P@nic's head start in hacking.
The next photo was of a beta version of P@nic - what normals called a "baby." Wavy dark hair hung close to bright, eager brown eyes. Looked like a cute kid.
The next picture was her a few years older, wearing a pink dress, a wide grin on a face almost hidden by a massive armful of stuffed animals. Her brown hair was longer, with pink bows. Cute.
The next picture was maybe around nine or ten. She was intentionally posing like a model on a runway, with a self assurance rarely found in any adult outside of Hollywood or politics. Her hair was even longer, double-braided, hanging down almost to her waist. She had serious eyes that tried but failed to hide a shining joy in whatever it was she'd been doing at the time of the picture. Cute.
The last picture in the row wasn't cute. It wasn't of a child.
It was P@nic in her early teens. Her long hair was gone, cut choppy at her jawline. Her hunched posture indicated frustration, irritation, a desire to be anywhere else than where she was. There was no pink in her outfit, just dark colors and simple clothes, a fashion after-thought. The worst was her eyes, which had darkened to something sullen and suspicious. Angry.
This last picture was so different from the others, it took me time to figure out why it was even there. Maybe it was something about kids getting older, and the parents would take what pictures they could get. I didn't have kids. I didn't know how they worked. But I remembered enough of my teen years to know they sucked. Maybe that's what this was - P@nic criticizing the rest of the world until she found her place in it.
At a second glance, I knew I was wrong. I leaned in and looked closer at the picture. The eyes...
The eyes told me more than they meant to. They were cautious, almost feral.
Something in her had been hurt. Injured. Broken.
Lost in analysis, I remembered what P@nic had asked me to do.
I flipped the picture around. I gently detached the image from the frame. Between the thick cardstock backing and the photo was a piece of folded paper. I took it and put it in my pocket, but not before first opening it, verifying what I thought it was, and taking a cellphone shot of the contents.
I began to repair my permitted vandalism and put the photo back in the frame. While doing so, I checked the back of the photo. It had been professionally printed, and I read the imprint of the printing company and the date stamp.
The picture had been taken one year ago.
P@nic had quit all social media about a year ago. She'd later won the AnonIT competition, and part of the winners' booty was the Naked Princess photo. The piece of paper I held was linked to the AnonIT competition.
The data bubble-sorted in my head, and certain events began to line up with others.
P@nic was tied to the Naked Princess photo. Whatever had happened with it had changed her life enough to turn treasured family photos from light to dark, and had caused her to sever all ties with social media. She then later inserted herself into AnonIT, in order to do something with the photo... or despite it.
As proof, I'd seen P@nic's childhood pictures, with multiple pointers to some significant event happening a year ago.
As proof, I was in the middle of a very strange case, between P@nic, Oober, the AnonIT competition, and the Naked Princess - a picture so horrible it had terrified and disgusted all who saw it.
As proof, I had a piece of paper in my pocket. The paper was a note from P@nic. Her meticulous and careful handwriting held what she'd asked me to get: A hand-printed encryption code. It was a 384-digit key needed to open up her cloud-based storage locker.
I knew it was important, so much that P@nic had risked exposure by asking me to get it. I had no idea yet what it would reveal.
The key word being "yet."