Hacking the Naked Princess

Dev Manny - Information Technology Private Investigator

by Andy Kaiser

Chapter 0x03

The mystery kid was gone.  He'd left Downway sometime after I'd recorded him, before I got up and paid my bill.  Just to be sure, I jogged outside and scanned around the dingy parking lot.  It contained many cars, but just one human: Me.

I walked back into Downway and up to the bar.  Ron-Don was there, filling glasses with liquids for two new customers, a guy and a girl.  It caught my attention, because they were the opposite of Downway's usual crowd.  They seemed happy with their lives.

I caught Ron-Don's eye.  He nodded.  He handed the couple their drinks - one light beer and one potion featuring blue liquid and a pineapple slice - and came down the bar to join me.

I had my phone out.  I played the video I'd just shot, and paused it at the point that best showed the kid's face.  It was an almost-profile, showing an intense face angled in shadow, the dark hair falling partially over one eye.  I was impressed with my accidental stylistic excellence.  Give the kid male-pattern baldness and a lens flare, and it could be Joss Whedon's graduation photo.

I showed it to Ron-Don.

"Have you seen him here before?"

"Before today?  Nope."

"Would you remember if you saw him again?"

"Sure."

"You see where I'm going with this, right?"

"You want me to let you know if he comes in here again."

"Bingo."

"I can do that."

"Thanks, Ron-Don." I pushed a bunch of bills over to him. The denomination made the the pile less impressive than it should've been, but it was my thought that counted.

He pushed them back.  "You need these more than I do."

"Yeah?  How do you know?"

His expression indicated the answer was obvious.  I didn't argue.  I nodded my thanks and re-increased the width of my wallet by a few millimeters.

If the kid was following me, I might have a problem.  Unless he regularly went around recording strangers for fun, he and maybe others were keeping tabs on me.  I had to find him, or find out why I was on his radar.  Preferably both.

I straightened up and got ready to leave.

"What do you think?" I asked Ron-Don, nodding briefly at the couple at the other end of the bar.  Whatever it was they were talking about, it required a lot of flirtatious laughter and touching of the upper arms.

His eyes flicked over to them and back to me.  He grunted, and again showed off his impressive shrugging ability.

"Married."

"Those two?  They're not married."

I saw no clues to indicate that.  There were no angry glares, no unspoken passive-aggressive behavior, no bitter mutterings while the other one pretended not to listen.

"They're married," he said.  "But not to each other."

I looked again and absorbed.  He was right.  I saw it.  From their body language, they had something to hide.  Both bent toward each other, as if sharing a secret.  That meant they were into each other, but there was more: Every time a patron came in or left, both of them would drop their smiles and throw guilty looks at the door.  They weren't supposed to be here.  They were doing something illicit.  Forbidden.

I looked at Ron-Don with a new appreciation.

"Their body language and situational awareness," I said.  "You're good.  Get some IT training and you could go into my profession."

That made him laugh.  Several customers shot frightened stares in our direction.  He dropped into a gravelly chuckle, sounding like a fully-loaded 6U server being pulled out slowly on old rails.  He shook his head.

"No, man.  No way.  I don't care about your crap."

"Then how do you know -"

"Look at them," he gestured with a tree trunk that was probably his arm.  "They're that age, together, and came here?  Not the usual couple for my place.  One is hiding something.  Or both of them are.  They also didn't know who was going to pay for the drinks.  It took them a second before the guy said he'd pay.  Then the girl looked away, and he looked guilty as all hell.  It'll end soon enough for them."

"What?  Why?"

"It's fun sneaking around, until you get used to it.  Then you lose the joy.  The excitement.  When I look at a couple like that," he shook his head, disgusted, "I just feel sorry for them, because I see their future.  I see their decay."

I'd never asked the details of Ron-Don's past, but I now knew to never set him up with anyone.

"Ron-Don, it's a wonder no lucky lady's swept you off your feet."

He snorted.

"It's like I'm looking in a mirror."

Chapter 0x04

My office, in the tradition of low-rent buildings everywhere, was not a particularly useful place.  It was somewhere to send the bills, for those clients clutching so tight to the archaic past that they couldn't send me electronic payments.  It was just somewhere to be, or eat, and often a place to sleep.  While awake, I could just as easily go elsewhere.

Not today.  Today, my office fulfilled an additional need: It was a private place to meet.  I sat, bored and emotionally rumpled, waiting for a visitor.  A potential client. I was waiting for "Oober."

Oober was a self-described hacker.  I'd done a little research before this meeting, and traced a few of his online adventures, so I had at least a rough idea of who he was.  From what I'd seen, he seemed young and inexperienced, but was also intelligent and learning fast.  Along with the usual script-kiddie stuff, Oober had managed some minor hacks from zero-day systems exploits and had done basic social engineering.

Put simply: Oober was new to the scene, but was learning.

An aspect about this situation was odd: Oober wanted to physically meet me.  It was strange because a hacker who knew what he was doing shouldn't want - or need - to be here.

This kid should be as tech-savvy as a drunk is thirsty.  Technophiles prefer to communicate with an alpha strike of hardware, software, and wetware.  Efficiency, speed, convenience, and cost were factors, but here I'd received an email asking to meet at my office at this time on this day.

I assumed speaking would be involved, and again that was strange.  Eye contact was old-school, reserved for dealing with mundanes.  Given the right situation, face-to-face was for when you were excluding technology.  It was for desperate measures.

Maybe that's what this was.  Maybe Oober was desperate.

My phone buzzed.

My security cameras had picked up a car pulling up outside my building.  I watched the camera's video stream on my phone.  I verified I got a good capture of the car's license plate.

There had been multiple times in the past where I'd been surprised by visitors to my office, sometimes violently.  I hate violence almost as much as I hate surprises, so both together had been doubly irritating.  I'd vowed not to let either happen again, and that led to my monitoring system.

A woman got out.  A second person remained waiting in shadow in the back seat of the car.

She was obviously here to see me, because she looked around conspicuously as she approached my building.  Almost all of my clients did that, though none had found my camera.  The tiny lens sat recessed inside of a rusted metal sign reading "Beware of Grue."  No client had yet asked what a grue actually was, but the warning did its job and put people on their guard, and - ideally - me in control.

Another part of a visitor's concern was my neighborhood - it was uglier than my Yoda lunchbox.  There were only two positives about my legally-recognized work and home address.  One was the tax write-off.  The other was that I never got any door-to-door sales of the many flavors of candy bars or religions.

Of my newer clients, only a few knew what it meant to be an Information Technology Private Investigator, so first impressions often began with some confusion.  But what my job lacked in clarity, it made up for with intrigueability.  And while that last word had debatable validity, the fact that I just used it with confidence proved my point - sounding competent was sometimes better than actually being competent.

I pretended to be surprised as the door to my office opened.  I looked up from my phone and smiled at the non-video representation of the woman as she stepped in.

"Mr. Manny?  Are you Dev Manny?"

"Only when people want to see me."

She smiled faintly at my attempt at a joke, but her dark eyes told me she had a problem.

She couldn't be called "old," but was still older than me: She was in her thirties, or maybe early forties.  She'd pulled back her dark brown, shoulder-length hair into a stubby, slightly messy pony tail.  She'd dressed in a bad guess at style.  Her look was like a Flash-based website - it was full of bad decisions, good intentions, and was years out of date.

She was worried.  This wasn't time for chatter.  While social pressure rarely dampened my personality, this was different: She might have real, government-guaranteed, spendable money.  While I wasn't the smartest guy around, I wasn't stupid enough to get between a client and my bank account.

I tried my best to look like what I thought she was expecting.

"Call me Dev.  How can I help you?"

She glanced around, distrusting the look of my office.  That was okay, because I didn't trust my office either.  The ancient paneling, disorder, and faint musty smell didn't quite scream "technology professional."

"It's okay," I said.  "I get a lot of people here, with a lot of problems spanning a lot of topics.  I'm a technology guy, and I'm a private investigator.  Put those two together, and I'll help you with any tech-based problem you can come up with.  Or," I winced at having to even speak the next three words, "your money back."

In a normal situation, I would then offer her a chair to sit on, and some instant coffee to sip.  But since I had only one chair - currently occupied - and the coffee tools were part of a fascinating but long-term fungal experiment, I let her make the next move.

She opened her mouth.  Words tumbled out of it.

"My son wants to talk to you.  He needs help.  His friend is missing."

I took a mental step back.

"Well," I said, being careful not to sound dismissive.  "My specialty isn't missing persons.  I can introduce you to my contacts at the police.  Maybe they could -"

"No police.  You know my son, Mr. Manny.  His name is Westley.  Westley Miller.  He's just a child, and I didn't want him coming here by himself.  He wanted your help.  He's waiting in the car now, and he was going to come up after -" she looked at the ceiling and sighed, "- after he 'finishes the reconnaissance.'"

I queried my mental contact lists, and returned with a negative.

"I'm sorry," I said.  "I really don't know who -"

"Mom!  You're not supposed to tell him my name!"

Westley Miller stood in my doorway.  I'm sure I had him recorded from the car to whatever route he took to get to where he was now, but it probably wasn't necessary.  Mrs. Miller had been right.  I did know Westley, with his dark, limp hair hanging partially in his face.

He was the kid who'd been recording me at Downway.

"You're Dev Manny," Westley said.  "I'm Oober.  We really gotta talk."

Chapter 0x05

After a moment, I spoke and tried to recover from my surprise.

"Oh.  That Westley Miller."

"Mom, just give us a minute, okay?"

Mrs. Miller looked at me, clearly uncomfortable.  This could be tricky.

"I know we've just met, Mrs. Miller -"

"That's Miss Miller."

Strike one.

"Sorry, Miss Miller.  I know we've just met, but check my website for plenty of referrals.  I understand if you're not comfortable leaving Oober -"

"That's Westley."

I was on a roll.

"- and I'm willing to point you to clients, police contacts, and others who can vouch for my quality of work.  You can trust me."

"Trust?  No."  She flapped a hand dismissively.  "I was more worried about the bill.  I don't have much -"

It's the little things in life that make me happy: My turn to interrupt.

"Not a problem.  Let me just talk to your son alone for a few minutes.  No charge until I really start working.  You'll get your money's worth.  Whatever I get paid should satisfy both of us."

I hated to give those kinds of promises, but sometimes they were needed.  And in this case, it was what Miss Miller wanted to hear.  She left me and Oober to talk alone in my office.

The kid hunched further into himself.  He looked haunted, eyes staring at something I couldn't see.

"Do you know P@nic?"

"I'm sorry?"

He spelled it for me.  "She's my - friend.  Actually, I'm in love with her.  I guess."  His dark eyes flicked past me and he smiled slightly.

"We're both hackers."

This kid's chosen profession made it clear why he came to me, and not the police.  They'd want more information from him than he was comfortable giving.  Me?  I'd just get to work and fix his problem.

"I've been hanging out with P@nic for like months now.  Online and off.  She's awesome.  I've really been learning a lot from her.  We were pretty tight.  And then she -"  He paused to think, and shook his head.  "She just dropped off.  Haven't heard from her in like five days.  She hasn't been online.  No forums.  No channels.  She's not even at her house."

"You're going to have to back up a bit," I said.  "First, who exactly is P@nic?  How did you meet?  How do you know there's something wrong?"

"You sound like my shrink," Oober said, smirking.

"You see a psychiatrist?" I said, surprised.  He couldn't have been more than fifteen.

"He's no psychiatrist.  Definitely a shrink.  I've got antisocial personality disorder.  It could escalate and eventually become a serious societal threat.  I need a program of positively-reinforced behavioral modification and drug therapy."

Kids grow up so fast.

"Your shrink told you this?"

"No.  But I read through his notebooks one time when he left the room.  I made copies.  You want one?"

"Yeah, I might."  I logged a mental note not to leave any room Oober was in.  "I get in trouble at school a lot.  Not my fault, though.  There's a couple guys with heat on me.  It really bugs my mom when I get home all beat up.  She cries a lot.  My dad left a long time ago."

By his bored tone, he'd obviously said these things before, and often.  His apathy looked like a defense mechanism from what was a nasty situation.  Instead of rehashing a recent psychological evaluation, I tried to move to the more pressing question, the reason he came, the method by which I would somehow scrape together another few dinners.

"What about P@nic?  How does she fit into this?"

"She was new at school," he smiled, remembering.  "She didn't really fit in.  A lot of the other girls wouldn't talk to her because she ignored their crap.  Or they didn't care about what she was interested in.  But she talked to me."

"What about?  Tell me more."

Oober was right.  I did sound like a shrink.  Information technology private investigating required a little something of everything, including the study of an unreliable, buggy, complex, neuron-based computer.

"It started easy.  I don't really talk to people unless I have to.  But like on day one, she turned around in her chair and asked to borrow some paper.  I gave her some.  After like the eighth time of that, we started talking.  Turns out we got lots in common.  Like we're both hackers."

He'd used that word again, but I wasn't sure exactly how he meant it.  "Hacker" had a lot of definitions.  For most humans in meatspace, "hacker" is derogatory.  It's the definition we get in movies, and describes the bad guy or Angelina Jolie who breaks into computer systems and causes havoc.  The correct definition describes someone so interested in figuring out the world, they love taking things apart to see how they work, or solving a problem for the sheer challenge of it.  Often these included networks and servers, but not always.  A hacker may describe a person, but it's also a pretty sweet philosophy.

I nodded, accepting Oober's self-generated certificate of authenticity.  If that's what he wanted to call himself, I'd soon find out the detail of how he meant it.

"How did you find out you were both hackers?"

"She told me about all the systems she broke into.  Started out with our school network and the teachers-only databases.  I had no idea how she did it, but it sure was cool."

One question answered, then.  P@nic was more talented, and Oober was more of a newb.

"Then we started getting together after school.  And that was even better, because then she showed me!"

"Showed you what?"

Shrink mode: Fully engaged.

"At her place.  Her parents were never there and we hung out.  She showed me her hacking tools."

A script-kiddie, then.  It was just a couple kids who got their hands on a few free tools easily found online.

"So what were you doing?" I asked.  "Pen-testing?  SQL injection?  Brute-force stuff?"

"Some of that, yeah," he shrugged.  "Then she showed me her zombie botnets."

Uh oh.

I can admit when I'm wrong.  It happens a lot.  The last two words of his sentence told me that P@nic was far more advanced than I thought.  Playing around with common scripts and tools was one thing.  But to have your finger on thousands of malware-infected computers?  That moved the conversation up another level.  Or five.

"When we started hanging out, her systems were in the middle of a DDoS attack against some botnet in Romania.  It was like a game - they were trying to see who could knock each other offline first.  She won."

Oober was a kid who not only needed someone to talk to, but seemed to trust me with some very illegal information.  So, no police.  He sure couldn't tell this story to the school guidance counselor.  Going to a religious confessional would only scare the poor priest.

But unlike a priest, it wasn't my job to pass judgment or wear funny clothes.  Unlike a guidance counselor, it wasn't my job to offer advice.

My job was to solve.

"How did P@nic disappear?" I said.  "What do you think happened to her?"

Oober's face dropped from wistful to worried.

"I don't know.  Besides the botnet stuff, she talked about security hacking.  She's like that.  She's always trying new things.  Like her brain can't keep still and she needs to hop from one thing to another.  She told me once she hates being bored.  Like it actually, really scares her."

I could empathize, though my method of boredom management wasn't quite the same.  Even still, I was really starting to respect P@nic.  I could see already what Oober found attractive about her.  She was smart and did exciting, dangerous things.  If I were Oober's age, I'd probably fall in love with her, too.

So yeah: I was more than willing to help.

"She found something," Oober said.  "In one of her hacks.  She found some information.  After she found it, she disappeared."

He dug around in his pocket and fished out a piece of paper.  He stared at it a moment, then looked back at me.

"All her stuff's encrypted.  I don't know any of her passwords - she typed way too fast for me to catch anything.  She hardly ever wrote stuff down.  But I found this."

He handed me the paper.  I looked at it:

dante collection
patient zero
agent_from_harm
dragon_bawls
minotaur
chixor zed

"That's all I got," Oober said.  "I have no idea what it means."

"It's okay," I said.  My eyes were locked on the list.  I felt a chill, and it had nothing to do with my office's struggling A/C.  It had everything to do with the hastily-scrawled list glaring back at me.  I looked back at Oober.

"You mind if I copy this?"

"Yeah, sure.  Why?"

"I know what this is."

"What?"  He was surprised.

"The first line is the tipoff.  Have you ever heard of 'AnonIt'?"

His expression and quick head shake gave me an answer, so I continued.

"AnonIt is a contest.  A hacking contest.  It's run once every year.  If a hacker or hacking group can complete the goal, they get bragging rights.  Those are huge, plus they get access to people who might want their ability.  Depending on which government is hiring, that could mean a lot of money.  The goals are incredibly tough.  And always illegal.  Except to design the contest and confirm the winners, the AnonIt admins stay quiet, and always anonymous."

"So how do you know -"

"I'm not in the hacking community.  I'm an Information Technology Private Investigator.  But I lurk.  Enough to know when anything big happens.  Like this."  I waved the piece of paper: "The latest AnonIt contest started a couple months ago.  Guess what the goal for the contest is?"

I held up the paper so he could read it.

He looked from the paper to me.

"The Dante collection."

"You catch on quick."

"Yeah, man, I do.  So what's the Dante collection?"

"That," I said.  "I don't know.  Not yet.  I need to do some research.  Give me a little time, okay?"

"Yeah, okay, I guess."

"Give me a way to get in touch with you.  Another day or so and you'll hear back from me."

I knew exactly where I needed to go next.

It was time to venture back to a place I'd loved and hated.  It was a place of possibility and stagnation.  It was where heavy conformity taught me what it meant to be an individual.  It was where I'd met people who defined their lives by what they couldn't do, and where others were destined to change the world.

Time for school.