Hack Attack

Hack Attack

Ken Hyder

Copyright 2010 by Ken Hyder

Smashwords Edition

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Hack Attack

by Ken Hyder

Chapter 1

Tanya had made a big effort. She had scoured the open-air market for something special to cook. She found wild mushrooms, bruisnika cow-berries, large irregularly-shaped tomatoes, good, tasty country potatoes, two goat-chops, home-made smetana sour-cream and a tin of salmon ikra – large orange baubles of caviar.

And the flowers. Nine large sunflowers. And she made sure that they added up to an odd number, because she didn’t want any bad luck tonight.

Tanya was plumpish, but on the sensuously voluptuous side of plumpish. Her five foot ten inch frame allowed her to carry her weight without looking heavy. She had shoulder length hair women sometimes call honey blonde, and her light green eyes sparkled when she was having fun. And tonight she would be happy. It was four years to the day since she had started going out with Kolya.

They had had a good summer. It had been blisteringly hot, and for a few weeks Tanya forgot about the oncoming winter and the long, dark days she detested.

Kolya and Tanya met when they were both students in Akademgorodok, the eltite city built in the fifties for elite scientists, and now an elite city for their sons and daughters, too. They had grown up in that purpose-built science-city – a lifetime of special treatment in a special place.

Tanya was the one for Kolya. He couldn’t really say exactly why she was the one. But that didn’t matter because they knew. They both knew. And they knew they were privileged in other ways. The compensation for the isolation of the residents in this super-intellectual satellite of Novosibirsk was the lifestyle. Better homes, better food, better education. But that was then. Now it was crumbling, as the post-Soviet economics clicked in. Scientific institutions in the town – set up by Khrushchev to keep Russia’s scientists out of the gaze of the West – were being neglected.

The table in the small apartment was dressed in a white lacy tablecloth which had once belonged to Tanya’s grandmother. There were three candles illuminating the food.

They had begun with the ikra and smetana on blinis with Pshenitsnaya wheat vodka. Now they were attacking the goat chops. Tanya had found some of Kolya’s other favourite vodka in the market. It was usually slightly more expensive than most other brands. But it was worth the extra Kolya always said. So they switched to Altai Pertsofka, which Kolya insisted must be chilled in the freezer. He loved the sharp contrast between the liquid frozen to the consistency of single cream, and the bright, penetrating bite of the chilli peppers which flavoured it. Pshenitsnaya for ikra, Pertsofta for goat chops.

And then Kolya heard the electronic chime of Midnight in Moscow he had been expecting. He set up the theme which imitated the pre-announcement signal over the public address systems of Russian airports. It was cheesy, naff, corny … but it amused Kolya, so he set it up on his computer as an alternative to the Microsoft attention-grabbing sounds.

The signal indicated that the programme he had been running for the last six and a half hours had finished its run.

His sensuous enjoyment of the occasion, the food and the vodka faltered as his impatience for computer action began to nag away at his mind. Tanya had heard the chime too, but she didn’t know what it meant, so she ignored it. She put it down to some computer fixation of Kolya’s she could never understand – even if she wanted to. And she was unlikely to want to. He was always playing with his computer. He used to explain with enthusiasm, some new wheeze, some way of hacking a website, say, and defacing it. She would look at the defaced website and laugh maybe, but she had no interest in the hows of the operation, so gradually Kolya stopped trying to excite her with his spoddery.

Although Tanya ignored the chiming signal, Kolya couldn’t. How soon could he decently leave the table for the computer? He finished the grilled chop, buttered potatoes and the sliced tomatoes sprinkled with chives.

I’ve just got to check something on the computer, he said as he raised his body from the table.

Tanya playfully smacked his arm lightly, commenting, Why don’t you get a computer put inside your head so it can control you more directly?

He put his arms round Tanya and squeezed her tightly, nipping the flesh just above her hips with his hands. He grinned, and said: Yadronnaya deva – strapping lass! And before she could say anything, he was on his way out of the room, adding – without looking back – But MY yadronnaya deva.

In the spare bed room, in a corner by the window which looked out from the third floor flat on to a mini-park of birch and pine trees was Kolya’s work station. A table, a chair, a PC and little else. There were no handbooks to be seen. Kolya was a Russian hacker, the equivalent on computers, of a Russian car driver. Or maybe more accurately, a Siberian car driver. From out of town.

Siberian drivers know everything they need to know about driving. And that’s a lot. The roads are mazes of potholes and bumps and piles of stones set as obstacles along the way. A Siberian driver knows how to negotiate this maze in the summer, when it’s easier to see. And in the winter too, when the driver has to look ahead and recognise different gradations of colour in the hard-packed snow-ice. Swerve here, accelerate slightly there, lift off the power here. Then there’s more. A Siberian driver does not win all the time. From time to time the road wins. It can be a puncture. Easily fixed with a spare wheel. But at minus 40 degrees, it requires a toughness few drivers anywhere in the world can match. But a wheel almost sheered off completely on a bent axle? Something else. First catch your lorry. There are plenty ex-Soviet army lorries on the roads. They were built for these roads, and their drivers are maybe a grade above the Siberian car drivers. So you find a log. Easy enough. We’re talking country roads here. So you chop a couple of notches in it. With the axe you always carry in the boot. Then you build a fire. To heat the wire-rope. You attach a length of wire-rope to the log and bind it to the axle. The wire cools, contracts and holds it in place. Then you attach another length of cable to the notch at the other end of the log. You jack up the front of the car, fix the cable to a hook on the back of the truck, lower the jack and you are in business. The car is now ready to be towed behind the truck. The log acts as a front wheel, taking the weight of the car. It’s a bumpy ride. But it works. And it gets you back home.

And Russian hackers are like that. They never had any money for expensive equipment. When they started, they had to use straightforward Unix commands for everything. Including normal computer work. Everything was clunky, and rough, and full of obstacles. And like the Siberian drivers, Russian hackers had to know their way around. They had to improvise. And the more they improvised, the better they got.

Maybe it was to their advantage that they didn’t start in a Windows environment. They had to be hands-on with everything they did. It came a surprise to many when a Russian hacker made the first major killing by hitting an American bank. But to those who knew hackers and hacking it was to be expected.

Kolya learned his hacking skills the Russian way. There were a few hackers in Akademgorodok and they learned from each other. Most of their targets for fun were abroad. Because there weren’t many at home. And besides, there was the KGB – now the FSB. And the KGB were all over Akademgorodok.

They were not frightened of the KGB for obvious reasons. No, there were other reasons to fear the KGB in Akademgorodok. Too many students had been roped into experiments. Psychological experiments. Akademgorodok was a town full of scientists and some of the scientists were working on psy-ops, and even para-normal techniques for hitting the enemy. And they needed volunteers for their experiments. That’s where the students came in. And many never recovered, living out a nervous, anxious life in the shells of their shattered personalities.

But the KGB were also on the lookout for smart young things. Smart youngsters whose skills could be used by the state. And of course, Akademgorodok was full of smart young things. And the hackers didn’t want to be discovered by the KGB talent scouts.

Throughout the world junior hackers hone their skills on Japanese targets. Japanese institutions and Japanese websites are the easiest to get into. So it’s a good way to start. But the Russians aimed higher. America was a favourite starting point. And it had harder targets too. A big challenge. Lots of fun to be had. And that’s what it was. A big challenge in a dull, local world.

Although, of course, many go on to hacking for profit.

In the spring of 2000, the Center for Internet Security – an organisation set up to combat Russian hackers – issued a free tool to potential targets to help protect them from an increased threat. The FBI had previously warned businesses that Russian and Ukrainian crime gangs had hooked up with top Russian hackers and were mounting blackmail scams. They use their hackers to get into business systems, gaining credit card information. Then they say to the firms – give us money, or we’ll destroy your business.

It’s a scam that works. And it works and it works. And it works all over the world. And around the mid-2000s hackers were getting away with it. Because firms don’t want their customers to know they’ve been hit. They don’t want customers deciding not to bank with them, or buy from them knowing that their credit details can be stolen so easily. And the firms don’t tell the police. Because they don’t want the hackers caught, and for there to be a court case. And for the public to know.

Better to pay up. And they do. Today, big firms expect to lose 10 to 15 per cent of their profits on this kind of theft, shrinkage, pay-offs – whatever they want to call it.

Kolya wasn’t that kind of hacker, though. Tonight’s hack was personal. Kolya’s father, Sergei was an engineer. A top engineer. In a university department in Akademgorodok. The department specialised in combining geological and engineering approaches to finding out the solutions to problems of extracting oil from Siberian oil fields.When the new Russia was born, however, the state support for academic institutions evaporated in the state poverty of the new capitalism. That’s when the Americans came to Akademgorodok. They could afford to buy up whole departments. And they did. And they made promises of continued employment.

But in a lot of cases, they stripped the knowledge. Then closed everything down. No continued employment. No money. No compensation. And that’s what happened to Sergey Trofimov. And that’s why Kolya was hitting Crabtree Brown Oil.

He had been running a programme which systematically checked all the Internet Protocol addresses owned by Crabtree. The programme effectively knocked on all the doors in Crabtree’s electronic house testing the locks to see if there was a way in. It’s why a lot of hackers start off with a company website. The website has an IP address of 12 digits – like 123.123.123.123. Then you can run a programme to check adjacent numbers. These other numbers are usually not public, but rather like ex-directory private telephone lines.

Once the other IP numbers are established, the hacker runs a port scan on each one to see if it is connected to a computer. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of possibilities. The trick is to find the right port to take you into one of the company’s computers. Then you begin to work.

That was where Kolya was at now. He had a choice. He could destroy, but only temporarily. Or he could open up Crabtree’s system to the whole hacking community. And that’s what he did. He used the port to get right through the system to the main file server. Just before he disconnected, he found the log files and amended them to obliterate all trace of his intrusion.

Then he posted details of the wide-open pathway he had created to three different hackers’ usenet groups with an invitation to commit mischief. As it was wide open and simple, even beginner hackers were able to get in on the act. And what fun they could have. Crabtree’s production programme was computer controlled, including its operations in West Africa.

Kolya – don’t you want some bruisnika and coffee?

You go ahead, darling. I’ll just be a few minutes.

Within hours Crabtree’s system would be a complete mess. Totally frozen. Nothing moving. Branch offices throughout the world locked tight. In bits. And almost beyond repair. The damage would run to millions of dollars.