Brain Jack by Brian Falkner Read Free Book Online

onto the server using a variant of the old Metasploit tool.
    Now for the e-mail server.
    An Uninterruptible Power Supply, a UPS, protected it against power outages. The UPS was connected to the server by an old-fashioned serial cable, which in emergencies could send a shutdown command to the server. Furthermore, the company that installed the UPS monitored it so they could run diagnostics and respond to any problems in the device.
    Sam crept carefully into the network of the UPS supplier and slid slowly down the wire to the UPS device itself.
    It wasn’t enough to load Cross Fire onto the server, though; it had to be run. The program had to be executed, and he couldn’t do that through a serial connection.
    He encased Cross Fire in a self-executing shell and renamed it to that of a common internal Windows program. Someone inside the White House would unwittingly run the program that would complete the circuit and give Sam access, through the e-mail connection, to the heart of the U.S. government.
    Through the serial connection, he copied the file into the Operating System folder of the e-mail server and closed out of the UPS and the UPS company network.
    Now there was nothing more he could do. It was up to the staff at the White House to open the door and let him in.

7 | NEOH@CK
    He checked his watch a couple of times, not worried but a little nervous. If Cross Fire was detected, then he was sunk. If it simply wasn’t activated, then he would miss the convention.
    To pass the time, he alt-tabbed back to see Ursula.
    The next set of neuro-exercises involved loading a program, such as Photoshop, while thinking about that program. Very soon he could open and close programs, activate commands and functions, and even move things around on a page, all without touching the keyboard. Next, Ursula asked him to visualize each key on the keyboard in turn, while pressing it. That was easy enough.
    A short while later, he was in the middle of an exercise that involved him thinking of a word, then seeing it appear on the screen, when a pop-up message alerted him that Cross Fire was now active.
    “See you soon, Ursula,” he whispered, and minimized her again.
    • • •
    Someone had activated Cross Fire, opening up a tiny pathway onto one of the e-mail servers on the White House network.
    He slipped Ghillie onto the machine, and it lay there for a while, unobserved but observing.
    The amount of data traffic was amazing but not unexpected for the nerve center of a world superpower.
    Sam did not move at all, just watched for intrusion detectors or security spiders. The spiders were everywhere, constantly crawling through the White House network. They passed over him harmlessly, though, without seeing.
    He spun a small data-web on one branch of the network, blocking packets from getting through. Not many, and they would get through on the retry, but enough for him to gauge how the network reacted.
    The White House network was monitored by special software called Therminator. It presented the network as a thermal image, with any problems showing up as hot spots. But there had to be a built-in tolerance level, Sam figured; otherwise, every slight networking issue would set off alarm bells.
    No alarms went off. No searchlights swept the area. A small packet loss was within the tolerance of the network, it seemed, as it should be.
    He extended a probe, a clever device that emulated broken TCP/IP packets and simulated data loss, which would be ignored by Therminator. He scanned the disk structure of the big server.
    There were over thirty disk drives attached to the machine. He scrolled through the list of drives, wondering where to start.
    One caught his eye. A tiny drive, just half a gigabyte. A fraction of the size of the others, which was why he noticed it. It was labeled “NHC.”
    It took a moment before that clicked.
    NHC! Neoh@ck Con! It had to be, he thought as he accessed the contents of the drive itself.
    The hackers had set up