Invasion of Privacy

Chapter 6

Brody’s fingers were shaking over the keyboard. He wasn’t sure if it was too much caffeine or an adrenaline rush from the challenge he’d foolishly got himself caught up in. He wondered whether Doc_Doom had manipulated him into taking on the challenge against Matt_The_Hatter. He scanned back through the chat logs but there was no real evidence of that. Like any hacker — white, grey or black — Brody’s reputation online was built up over time, through publishing new exploits, sharing code, blogging, tweeting and answering questions on the forums from other hackers. Brody had spent years getting his reputation as Fingal to its current elite status. And here he was putting it all on the line in a childish race to gain root access to a website. If he failed, then word would spread rapidly across the global hacker community. That was one of the downsides of the Internet; it only took seconds for news and gossip to spread. His online reputation would be in tatters. 

Brody slammed the tablet PC shut, looked up and caught Stefan’s eye. The barista came over immediately.

“Ah, Mr Brody,” said Stefan, “Let me think . . . ”

“— same again,” said Brody, in no mood to play Stefan’s guessing game. 

“Oh! Okay . . . as you wish, Mr Brody.” Stefan shuffled off.

Brody wondered if he could have avoided trapping himself in the challenge. The root cause was his perfunctory approach to reviewing Crooner42’s original request for help during the Atlas Brands pentest at that morning. He should have waited until he’d returned to London, when he would have gone thorough due diligence before offering to help. He would have carried out an initial set of penetration tests before responding to make sure that he knew there were some holes he could quickly take advantage of once he was formally given the job. He would also have devoted time to checking out Crooner42’s online background more thoroughly to make sure the request for help was legitimate. After all, no one other than Matt_The_Hatter and he had responded to the Crooner42’s unusual broadcast for help. Perhaps all the others had figured out this was a tough job and didn’t want to risk their reputation. 

Now he was in the unpleasant situation where not only did he have to take on the challenge, but failure would be very public. He just hoped he had a few more tricks up his sleeves than Matt_The_Hatter. 

A fresh cup of coffee was placed on his table. Brody looked up to say thank you to Stefan, but it was Stefan’s trainee waitress who had brought it over instead. Stefan was behind the counter, wiping it down and deliberately avoiding eye contact. Brody thanked the girl anyway and made a mental note to apologise to Stefan before leaving. Maybe a larger tip than normal would help.

Brody rolled up his sleeves and began.

The first step was to familiarise himself with the website in the way a normal online visitor would do. Well, not quite a normal visitor. First of all he would disguise who he was and from where he was connecting. He logged into TOR and two additional proxy connections, one in Russia and the second in Bulgaria. The proxies slowed down his speed a little, but it was worth it to make him impossible to trace. Anyone tracking his address would think he was accessing the Internet from Bulgaria rather than his apartment in Islington. And even if they somehow tracked him down through the first proxy, they’d then think he was really from Russia. And after that, they’d have to take on hundreds of randomly selected relays within the encrypted TOR network.

Brody remembered Crooner42’s concern that police around the world might take an interest in the site. Double-proxying should handle that. 

He clicked on the site.

The site Crooner42 had built was called www.SecretlyWatchingYou.com. Its name and description implied that it was serving live webcam footage without the knowledge of the inhabitants. Brody knew enough about webcam sites to know that this was very rarely the case. A whole new industry had popped up the day a redheaded American student called Jennifer Ringley chose to broadcast her day-to-day life over the Internet, clothed or naked. Fully aware that she was watched all the time, JenniCam had become an Internet phenomenon at much the same time that Big Brother was beginning to take off in the UK. Millions of voyeurs paid to watch and Ringley became very rich, spawning thousands of copycat sites. Brody couldn’t understand why anyone would want to watch someone else’s life like that, never mind allow it to be watched in the first place.

At first glance, SWY — the techie in Brody had automatically shortened SecretlyWatchingYou to a more usable acronym — seemed harmless enough. Brody was able to look at a few taster videos without registering any personal details. One of the teaser clips was of a girl taking a shower, with the camera directly above. Brody couldn’t see her face and the steam blocked out anything interesting. Another was of a man doing the washing up. His back was to the camera. There were five or six others. Big deal. It all seemed boringly innocuous. 

He clicked through to the registration pages. Eight US dollars a month or $66 for a year. And that was just for the ‘basic’ locations. There were newly added ‘premium’ locations available where users needed to pay more. The site was quite expensive. Who the hell would pay these rates? 

The fastest way for Brody to check out the website was to pretend to be a customer. He quickly registered with a brand new anonymous and untraceable email address. The default payment option was PayPal, which meant only needing to disclose his PayPal email address to the website. Although PayPal would never share those details with the website, it was traceable and so not something Brody wanted to use. However, there was one other payment method — bitcoin — and Brody was impressed to see it listed. It was a cyber-currency, which used a peer-to-peer network coupled with cryptography to control and secure the transactions. But most importantly, it was completely unregulated by any government. For Brody, bitcoin’s main benefit was that it was virtually untraceable, especially for smart people who masked their credentials when creating accounts. Brody always set up a new account for every job he took on, just to further confuse anyone who attempted a trace. 

He pressed submit. His account was created. He was inside.