He feverishly typed away at his keyboard, if only he can figure out how to gain access to this system. He’s tried everything he knows, when finally something works. A simple buffer overflow crashed the webserver which allowed him to gain access to his local ISP. “Great I’m in!” he exclaims, now to grab the password file. He types a couple more commands before successfully acquiring the secret password file for all of WorldServes customers. He logs out and then starts up John-the-Ripper to start to decrypt the encrypted passwords.
“16 hours, aw man this is going to take forever” he sighs as he turns off his monitor and prepares to go to sleep.
Meet Matt your average 17 year old kid with a unique ability to understand code more than most people. However he uses his talents to create problems. You see Matt is a Hacker. He may look like your average teenager on the outside, but on the inside he’s like a machine, he can go days without sleeping, when he does sleep he sees dreams about fragging his online adversaries in Quake. Computers, that’s all he could think about. He just couldn’t get enough. He has no motive for what he does, other then the ability to learn about computer systems inside and out.
Matt barely gets good grades in high school. He’s failing out of English and Phys. Ed., but manages to get good grades in Beginners Programming and Math. Those are the only classes where he gets along with the people in class. Matt is not part of the “in crowd”, and doesn’t have very many friends. He doesn’t care for friends anyways, he would much rather be at home breaking into computer systems, or playing Quake.
*BEEP* *BEEP* *BEEP* Matt slams his hand down on his alarm clock and tries to grab a couple more minutes of sleep, only to be awaken by his mother. “Leonard, get your ass out of bed and go to school, I don’t want to wake you up one more morning. Your 17 years old start being more responsible! And clean your room to it is disgusting!”
“My room isn’t disgusting” he thought to himself. “A little cluttered, but certainly not disgusting.”
Matt’s room is a cramped dark space that is littered with empty Jolt Cola bottles, dirty dishes, overflowing ashtrays, stray cigarette butts, month old pizza boxes with half eaten pizzas still inside. Cables ran across the floor run under piles of paper and clothing. Monitors were the only source of light he had painted his window black to block the sun and thrown away all his lightbulbs. Old computers are stacked around everywhere, whirring and chattering away.
“Its not that disgusting” he thought to himself.
This was Matt’s queue to get out of bed and go to school if he didn’t want to hear his mom yell and scream anymore. Just before he leaves he checks on how his password file is doing. “Great only 9 more hours to go, I will get to have some fun tonight.”
Matt grabs a cereal bar and a bottle of pop and heads off to school with his mom yelling something about taking out the garbage when he got home out the door after him. He just tuned her out and popped his headphones on to listen to some tunes on the way to school. After about 15 minutes of walking Matt arrives at school.
*WHAM* Matt falls to the ground, and rolls over. “What the hell do you think your doing nerd. Your not supposed to come through this area, this is our area, you must now pay a fee”
“… err I don’t have any money on me”
“That’s a load of crap, what do you mean you don’t have any money?” The bully said as he kneeled down to Matt. “Well you know what that means. I’m going to beat you senseless.” Matt tries to get up to run but the bully pushes him back down to the ground, and jumps on to of him. He starts punching Matt in the face. “You think you’re so smart huh? Well then how come you’re not smart enough to stay away from us? Huh smart guy?”
A crowd started to form around the two fighting, “FIGHT, FIGHT, FIGHT” everyone was chanting. Matt tried to fight back, but he couldn’t, he didn’t know how to fight. The harder he tried, the harder he got hit. Finally a teacher showed up and broke the fight up.
Matt got up and took off, he couldn’t take it anymore. “I’ll get that bastard” he thought to himself. “This is the last time he is going to beat me up and get away with it.”
He ran all the way home, he checked the driveway, and sure enough his Mom’s car was gone. He unlocks the door and goes upstairs. “I have to get him back” he kept saying to himself, then it came to him. “I can hack the police department and change his criminal record. Get him back good.” He checks on how his password list is doing. “That should be good enough, 450 passwords will tied me over for the time being.”
Matt dials out to the internet to start his crusade against his bully. He has to be made a fool out of just as much as he makes a fool out of Matt. He finds it easy to break into the police mainframe. A couple of old security holes and he was in. “Lame system admin, can’t even patch against old known vulnerabilities, this is going to be so easy” he chuckles to himself. “Now let’s see where is the database containing everyone’s criminal information?” He types a couple of commands in, and then a couple more. “Here we go” he mumbles to himself. “Let’s do a quick scan to see if this guy already has a criminal record.”
Matt types in ‘Brad Wilkins’ and finds one single entry. ‘Shop-lifting’ he mutters to himself. He selects the entry and is prompted if he would like to add a new entry. He hastily hit the y button to add another entry. “Assault” he types in. “Add another? Don’t mind if I do.” Matt types in ‘Grand Theft Auto’ and laughs to himself “Well Brad, your now a car thief”
This wasn’t enough though Matt added about 5 more charges to his record before deciding it was ok to stop for a bit. Three counts of drug possession, one assault with a deadly weapon, and one for trafficking a controlled substance. “Oh man this is so fun, its too bad Brad will never know this came from me. I wish I could see the look on his face when he gets busted at school tomorrow.” He thought to himself as he deleted the systems log files so he couldn’t be traced, before disconnecting from the internet. “I’m starving lets get some food”
*Ding Dong* the doorbell rings Matt drops the controller for the game he is playing and runs to the door to grab his pizza. “Yum pizza, food of the gods” Matt says to the pizza deliver person. “Yeah whatever kid, just pay me so I can get the hell out of here. This area gives me the creeps.”
Matt pays the pizza guy and gives him a really bad tip, the pizza deliver person turned around and mumbled something as he was walking to his car, Matt couldn’t quite understand it, but it sound something like “White trash kid, no wonder your in the ghetto.”
He never really noticed that his neighborhood had changed so much since he was a young kid. He has always remembered it as being a pretty nice area where kids can play on the streets, but now he looks around and sees garbage littered in the streets, broken down cars lined up along the sidewalk, with bullet holes in the windows, and in the doors. “I need to get out of here, I need to go. I’m going to get sucked in and never be able to leave.”
Matt retreats back to his room to eat his pizza and play some Quake online. Relax a little by blowing away his friends. Not long after starting his fragfest his mom returned home from work. Matt heard her come through the front door and walk straight up to his room. He knew he was in for it. He didn’t take the garbage out. Sure enough Matt’s mom bursts into the room screaming “I thought I told you to take out the garbage this morning!? Why don’t you listen anymore? You used to be such a good kid.”
“Aw Mom, ok I’m sorry I forgot to take out the garbage, Ill do it now.”
“That will get her off my back” he thought to himself. He turned around and got up to take out the trash, and his mother screamed “Oh my god, you look like hell! What happened to you?”
“It was that bastard at school Brad Wilkins. He laid a beating on me because I walked across his part of the school ground. He wanted me to pay him some money, but I told him I didn’t have any. So he started pounding on me, a teacher came and broke it up, and I ran away. Mom this school is crazy I refuse to go back there.”
“You have to go back, it’s the only school that you can get to, and you’re not turning out like me or your deadbeat father. You’re going to finish school and go to college and make something of yourself. Don’t worry about a school yard bully you will be dealing with people like that for the rest of your life. Just learn to deal with it without letting things blow up.”
“Thanks Mom, I get what your trying to say, but you don’t understand what I go through day after day. Whatever, I’m going to take out the garbage.”
Matt’s mom thanks him for taking out the garbage, and he tells her that he is going to go to bed so that he had a good sleep to start a new day at school. He had his next day all planned out. Brad was going to get what he deserves.
The next day at school, Matt made sure to show up late. Just so he wasn’t harassed by Brad and his friends. He didn’t mind that he was late for class, its not like it was the first time that it happened. Matt patiently waited for lunch to start. He would unleash phase 2 of his plan starting at lunch. The bell rang and Matt quickly made his way to the payphone. He disguised his voice and called the police. He convinced the police that he was a concerned neighbor of the school, and there is a couple of kids dealing drugs right outside the school. He told the police that the young man’s name was Brad and gave a physical description of what Brad looked like.
The police took the tip for what it was worth, and decided to check it out. They pull up to the spot where Matt had told the police where Brad was allegedly selling drugs. Of course Brad was there, after all, it was his spot. The police didn’t even bother to do a search on him, they asked for his name and quickly did a background check. To their surprise Brad was a known drug dealer, and they picked him up for suspicion of dealing drugs. He didn’t have anything on him, but that didn’t matter, as far as they knew he was previously a drug dealer who had gotten nabbed by the police, he could have thrown the drugs away when he saw the police show up. There were too many what ifs, so the police arrested Brad in front of all his friends and took him to the police station for questioning.
Matt watched from afar and snickered too himself “That will teach you for messing with me.” Matt felt an overwhelming sense of power. He had just had his bully embarrassed in front of his friends, and got him arrested, all with a phone and a computer. He was giddy for the rest of the day, and ran all the way home to brag to his friends online about the amazing hack he had just pulled off.
Feeling invincible he goes on a little bit of a spree, defacing websites, taking over email servers, and crashing corporate networks. He was on top of the world. Matt felt like ‘da man’. Matt came across a company called Evil Inc. and snickered to himself “I love lemon jello, I wonder if their firewall is as unstable as nice jiggly jello.”
To his surprise it was a hard network to get into, the system administrator really knew what he was doing. Matt decided to not do anything harsh to this network, just incase he gets traced. These admins knew there stuff my Matt knew just a little bit more. He could write his own hacks himself, ones for flaws in software flaws that nobody knows exists, because they never took the time to read over the code. Not like Matt, he reads code like most people read books. He decided to clean up his tracks and leave the network be. He logged off for the night and tried to get some sleep.
That night Matt was dreaming about running around in his favorite Quake level, when his dream was interrupted by his phone ringing. He answered it quickly so it didn’t wake up his mother. “Hello?” he groaned.
There was no sound, he wakes up a little more, “Hello?” he asks again. This time someone responded. “Yes hello, are you the owner of the computer in your house?”
Matt thought to himself “What the hell is going on here? What kind of question is this?” He responded “Yes, I own the computers at this location, what are you selling?”
The voice on the other line responds “I’m selling you a new life. I know what you did, you have been traced. Please listen to me, so we can work together.”
Matt slammed the phone down, hanging up on the person on the other end. Seconds after hanging it up, the phone rang again. Matt let it ring twice, but decided to pick it up, so they didn’t wake up his mom and tell her what he has been doing on his computer at night.
“Listen here kid, I know you hacked our network, we can send the FBI to your house to pick you up and charge you formally, messing up the rest of your life. You will probably spend time in jail. Or you can listen to what I have to say, and accept my offer.” The man hastily said when Matt picked up the phone again.
There was a brief pause and the man continued on again. “Good, I didn’t want to have to call the FBI, you are a smart individual and you should be using your skills for being constructive, not destructive. I work for Evil Inc. I noticed you hacked our systems earlier this evening, and I was very impressed at how you got it. I didn’t even know an exploit existed for the piece of software you hacked to get it. Nobody uses that software but us, its our proprietary software. I have called you this evening because I would like to meet with you in person and perhaps offer you a job.”
“Wow man, I never expected something like this to happen to me, I don’t know what to say, I don’t know if I should trust you.” Matt responds.
“You don’t really have a choice, you either meet with me, or you go to jail, and I know you don’t want to go to jail. We can meet in a public place, I promise, I want to offer you a job, but I have to meet with you first.”
“Ok, I guess I can live with that, what did you have in mind?” Matt asked.
“How about we meet at the Starbucks downtown at the mall? You know where that is don’t you?”
“Yes I know where it is, I’ve been there a couple times. What time do you want to meet at? I have school.”
“Don’t worry about school, with the looks of your records, you don’t go anyways. This is a job interview, most people had to go to college to get to the position you are in, all as you did was hack my network. We will meet at 12:30. I will be wearing a blue suit.”
“12:30 sounds fine, but I still won’t be able to find you, everyone there is wearing a blue suit.”
“True, but I will be the only person wearing a blue suit waiting for someone to arrive. Don’t worry I will see you come in, not many teenagers go to Starbucks at that time of the day.”
“Ok 12:30 it is, I will see you there. Can I at least ask you a question?”
But before he could ask his question the man had already hung up. “Weird” Matt thought to himself. “Very Weird.” He had a hard time falling back asleep, he was wondering to himself how this person found his phone number, and knew his school records. He wanted to know what this Evil Inc. company really was, but he didn’t dare go back online to check their website. He eventually worried himself to sleep.
The next morning he woke up, and thought what had happened during the night was a dream. He went downstairs to eat some breakfast and his mom asked him who kept calling throughout the night. That assured Matt that it wasn’t a dream.
He had a shower and got dressed up a little to head off to this ‘job interview’ that this stranger had setup over the phone with him really late at night. At least it was in a public area. There will be lots of witnesses around so this guy won’t try anything crazy. Matt had to stop at a bank on the way to grab some cash, he knew Starbucks was expensive, but he was hungry as well.
12:30 rolled around and Matt showed up on time. A man approached him, about 5’11”, skinny, brown hair, blue eyes, pale white skin. He held out his hand to shake Matt’s. “I’m Jack” he introduced himself.
“Ah, so you do have a name, I tried to ask you last night but you hung up the phone before you gave a response.”
Jack explained “That is for my security. I wasn’t going to give you my name unless I knew for sure that you were going to show up to meet me.”
“Sit down, let’s get down to business” Jack motions to a small booth off in the corner. Him and Matt go to the booth, and both order coffee.
“As you know I work for a company called Evil Inc. What you don’t know is that Evil Inc. is a laboratory for the U.S government. We develop software to provide more security to the government computers. As you can see, this is kind of a problem. You hacked into a company that is supposed to be known for developing the most secure software in the world. I don’t understand it. You didn’t even look around the system. You had the ability to find out some pretty secret information, but you didn’t, why?”
“Honestly, I didn’t want to cause any trouble, your system was chosen randomly. When I got in I realized that I had intruded on the wrong type of system, and wanted to minimize my chance of getting caught.” Matt responded.
“Well how did you get in? How did you hack our firewall?”
“Oh that was easy, it was based on an open-source firewall package that I know everything about, I tried some older exploits that I had written and they worked. I guess when you developer used the code he didn’t check whether there was a bug in it or not.”
“That’s impressive. Well then let’s move on. I came here to check you out and offer you a job. I am very impressed and I would be overjoyed if you joined our team. You wouldn’t have to finish high school. You will be paid a salary with benefits. We can even make your benefits cover your mother as well.”
Trying not to sound too excited, Matt blurted out “Hell yeah … uh, I mean, Yes, I will take the job.”
Jack pulled an I.D badge out of his pocket and tossed it across the table to Matt. “That is the card you will use to get into the building, it will also give you access to all the computer labs in the building, no other rooms though, just the labs. Here is where we are located. It’s not very far from your school, so you won’t have a problem getting their. When you get inside the front door, you will be questioned by a security guard named Barney. He knows what you look like and will be expecting you, so just show him your I.D card and he will escort you to me to start off your day.”
“Whoa, he knows what I look like? How?”
“Matt, come on, we are the government, we have access to the pictures on your identification. I didn’t want to tell you that last night either. I didn’t want to freak you out too much.”
“That was a good idea.” Said Matt.