Hacking the Naked Princess

by Andy Kaiser

Chapter 0x14

With keypresses logged from Reboot's visit, P@nic went heads-down and began to hack into RedAction with speed, intensity, and maybe just a little bit of fanaticism.  Fueled by white-hot anger at Reboot, she punched her keyboard's keys like each one owed her money.

Her face glowed as she worked uncomfortably close to her laptop screen.  Hunched over, staring, her position had the intensity of a bird of prey.  The rest of her burned with barely-contained energy as she typed, thought, moused, and occasionally cursed.

Translation: I should stay out of the way.

I almost jumped as she leaned back with a huff.  She rotated the screen so I could see it, and pointed to lines of code I couldn't understand.

"It's good and bad," she said.  "They're really secure, but I can get in if I had time.  Problem is, we don't have time.  The servers Reboot used are exposed to the Web, okay, and whoever locked them down knows what she's doing.  It's a secured environment.  Patched firewalls with heavy port restrictions.  Three separate honeypots.  Probably monitors for all traffic in and out, and I assume flags for any admin logons.  Still... I can use these external servers to get inside, but yeah, I need time."

"How much time?"

"To do it the safe way, undetected, I need time we don't have.  They might have alerts on what I did just now - if they're smart, they're reviewing access logs and will see me logging in with Reboot's creds."

"They'll terminate all access," I said.  "Maybe shut down the web-facing servers until they deal with us.  They'll come right back here.  It won't just be Reboot.  He'll bring friends.  We shouldn't be here if they are."

"Yeah."

My instincts to do this more carefully had been right.  We'd moved too fast.  P@nit's desire to hurt Reboot was justified, but her jump to immediate action was like using the Konami cheat code without knowing the game: You start out all excited and confident, but still end up losing.

"We should move, right now," I said.  "Leave the house.  Take your laptop.  I can get you mobile from my office."

She was already shaking her head.  "That'll just use up minutes we don't have.  Didn't you tell me RedAction's already been to your office?  They'll find us no matter where we go."

She stared intently at the space behind her laptop.  Her fingers tapped as she thought.  The longer we waited, the more likely it would be that we'd get caught.  "We can't hide," I said.  "If they haven't seen us already, they're about to.  What we need is a distraction.  Give them something to worry about besides us."

Her fingers stopped their tapping.  She looked at me and smiled.

"I could do that.  I'm already in the web-facing servers.  I could leave something big.  Let them know someone's knocking on the door.  That's the distraction.  While they deal with that, we insert a second present they'll never notice: A little, tiny, hidden present that will let me in unrestricted after they think they've patched all their security holes."

"What's the distraction?"

"I've got my botnet.  I'm going to point it at their servers.  Have ninety-nine percent of it run a DDoS attack.  Meantime, the other one percent of the time I'll pause the attack, and when RedAction tries to breathe, they'll see I'm running brute-force password attacks on their firewalls."

"That's like knocking on their door with a sledgehammer."

"Yeah.  They'll notice.  That's the distraction.  But for the second thing - the 'present' - I can't do that quickly, unless we can get onsite."

"I see where this is going.  Or rather, where I'm going."

"You have a fast car, right?"

She was half right, so I nodded confidently.

"Yeah. It's definitely a car."