Black Hat Blues (30 page)

the truth took some real mental cojones.

Oliver’s post was titled “Former Game Designer Paul Reynolds: Black

Hat Hacker Mastermind?” OK, so that wasn’t quite right, but it might

as well have been, and it was a catchy enough title that it was likely to

catch the eyes of plenty of curious surfers. She saw the Digg and Reddit

links along the side and saw it was already collecting links that would

bring it to the front page and thus to the attention of millions within

days if not hours. Right below the title was that goofy picture of Paul

from his old company’s website, looking like a goober. Ugh, that hair.

He’d lost weight and filled out some since then, and his hair was shorter

and a different color, but he still looked pretty much the same in all the

important, identify him in a line-up kind of ways.

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Oliver’s post scrolled down for inches upon inches of screen real

estate. Chloe guessed it was at least 8000 words long. He started off

smart, with a lead line designed to keep the reader interested: “Wanted

con man and former lead designer of the hit MMORPG
Metropolis 2.0

is linked to a ring of black hat hackers who’ve been recruiting at con-

ventions for their criminal conspiracy.” Not only engaging but entirely

true. After that, Oliver went into his own story and told a version that

was very much edited down from what he’d spilled to Heidi and the

other Shmoo Groupers. In this public version someone named Toni

approached him at Toor Con and offered him thousands of dollars

to use his ace pen testing skills to hack into a private company’s data-

base. He’d of course refused, and the mysterious, beautiful woman

disappeared. Then he’d seen her again at Shmoocon last week and of

course immediately reported it to the security staff. After that, one of

the other attendees reported being approached by the same mysterious

woman, who tried to lure the attendee to her hotel room. The attendee

brought along a Shmoocon security person, and the mystery woman

was spooked and disappeared once again.

Once the con was over, Oliver decided to find out what had really

happened. He started scouring the Web for other signs of these con

artists, and before long he found them. They’d also been trying to

recruit people in certain hacker IRC channels (Chloe laughed at this—

it wasn’t true, but maybe someone else was), offering high bounties for

cracking systems. From there Oliver had used some of his connections

from the pen testing profession to get a law enforcement friend of his

to pull some of the security tapes from the Shmoocon hotel. This was

where Chloe really started cursing. They’d done their best to avoid those

cameras, always making sure to keep faces turned away from them

when possible. Oliver said he wasn’t allowed to look himself, but he’d

given his friend a description of Toni and he came back with a couple

of stills taken from the tapes. They showed her entering and leaving the

hotel, but not any of her interacting with the con attendees. However,

one clear shot in the hotel lobby showed her walking almost next to a

figure that seemed very familiar to Oliver. He’d taken the still of both

Toni and the guy who seemed familiar and run them through facial

recognition software and started searching images from across Flikr

and Google Image search using some choice key words to narrow the

field. After a good long chunk of processing time he’d come up with a

match: Paul Reynolds.

Then Oliver went into the whole sordid tale of the disastrous failed

con they’d tried to pull in San Jose and the subsequent fall out. He not

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only tracked down all the media coverage from the time it happened,

but then did some follow-up, contacting some of Paul’s former co-

workers. Although the CEO of Fear and Loading Games, Greg, refused

to comment, the CTO Frank was more than happy to rant about what

Paul had done, along with “that bitch” who he’d worked with. Oliver

made the incorrect assumption that Paul’s cohort was the same as the

woman he knew as Toni, but that was hardly a comfort. The result was

clear: Paul was a con man and generally horrible person who’d attacked

Frank and tried to steal millions of dollars from conservative donors.

But what to make of all this? Oliver said he was going public with

this information so hackers could be on guard against Paul and Toni

and whoever else they were working with. He encouraged everyone

to circulate their pictures and the whole story. He also set up a wiki

devoted to Hunting Paul Reynolds that could serve as a focal point

and central repository for any information anyone discovered about

the mystery group. In the meantime, despite whatever personal danger

or professional risks he might be taking, Oliver would continue his

hunt for these “evil-doers” who were giving the hacking community

a bad name.

“Well, that blows,” Chloe announced to the room. Paul was on her

phone talking to Bee, and Sacco was looking confused and pulling on

his pants. “But I don’t think it’s the end of the world.”

“Hold on, Bee,” Paul said, covering the phone with his hand before

answering. “There’s a lot of fucking room between good and the end

of the world, and this is definitely on the bad end of the spectrum. But

right now I’m trying to convince Bee to not panic over the fact that

c1sman’s apparently panicking.”

Great, thought Chloe, listening as Paul said all the right things to

Bee. Sacco stared at her, confused, probably wondering what was going

on. Or maybe just because she was stranding in the middle of the room

without any clothes on. She explained what was going on while she got

dressed and then the three of them headed back home. Bee was upstairs

in her lair with Sandee, so the five of them crowded into the sealed, com-

puter-stuffed room to plan strategy. In addition to mismatched monitors

showing street scenes from all over Key West courtesy of their secret

network of hidden cameras, Bee had thrown up Oliver’s blog and then

a dozen or so other sites that had linked to it or were discussing it.

“I’m famous again,” said Paul, voice even and calm in a bitter kind

of way.

“More famous than ever,” said Sandee. “I’m sorry Chloe, you were

right, we should’ve done something about Oliver.”

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“I don’t know what we could’ve done to stop this,” she said. “It hap-

pened fast and he’s obviously got a bug up his ass about the whole

damn thing. We would’ve had to really scare the fuck out of him in a

serious way, and you were right, he doesn’t deserve that. He hasn’t done

anything wrong.”

“But I do deserve it,” said Paul.

“I’m not saying that.”

“No, I’m saying that. I do in fact deserve this. It’s all true, or at least

true enough.”

She could sense him slipping into one of his dark moods, but she

wasn’t at all sure how to pull him out of it.

“Should we go after the site?” Sacco said. “Maybe not hack it, I mean

the story’s out there. But we could try discrediting it. Throw up some

chaff. Maybe release the real details about what Oliver’s done that’s

illegal. Or just make some shit up.”

“It’s going to be hard to fight truth with lies,” said Paul as he scrolled

through the comment thread on Digg.

“You’ve obviously never watched the evening news, then,” Sacco

countered. “Lies win out all the time. We just need to give them a bet-

ter story to chew on.”

“No, we really don’t,” said Paul.

“Are you giving up?” Chloe said, although the words didn’t come out

the way she meant them to.

He looked at her as if she’d accused him of something. “No, I’m being

realistic. Think about it for a minute.”

“Why don’t you just tell me.”

“Fine. Look, this doesn’t change anything. It’s awkward and fucked

up and makes me look bad and is probably freaking out my family and

old friends, or it will if they ever see it, but fine. Whatever. I haven’t

been able to talk to them in a couple years anyway, right? It’s not like I

ever forgot I was wanted on suspicion of kidnapping and felony fraud.

I know that. Now a lot of other people know it too, and there’s nothing

we can do about it.”

“Some kind of damage control might be in order,” said Chloe, watch-

ing him slip into what he called his “slough of despond” right before

her eyes. Whenever she got hit with a setback, her first instinct was to

hit back.

“It will just make things worse,” said Paul. “Listen, think about it,

OK? Oliver is right in every detail that matters about me, but wrong on

everything that has to do with why we were actually in Washington. We

weren’t really recruiting people and we weren’t really screwing around

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with anything at Shmoocon besides piggy backing on their network

and TOR set up. All this stuff of Oliver’s, it’s old news. Were we going

to recruit new Crewmembers from other hacker cons? Maybe, I guess,

but we don’t need to. Oliver’s drumming up a posse to come after me,

but he’s looking at where we’ve been, not where we’re going. As long

as we stay careful—OK, extra, super careful—and change things up,

there won’t be any trail for him to follow. It’s an internet thing, a flash

in the pan. We need to ride it out. We’re flush with cash, so let’s just

take some time and let it all sort itself out.”

Chloe nodded. She didn’t want to argue with him and thought he was

making sense, even if it wasn’t what she wanted to do. Except she didn’t

know what she wanted to do exactly. Better to go with Paul’s plan until

she actually came up with something better. “OK, that works. I see your

point. We’ll watch this shit real close, track what happens as best we

can, but take no active measures. Everyone good with that?”

She looked around the room. Paul was back to reading the comment

thread, but Bee, Sacco, and Sandee all nodded in agreement. They

broke the meeting up and went back down into the house, leaving Paul

to follow up with c1sman and try and calm him down. Chloe noticed a

little weirdness between Sandee and Sacco as they descended the stairs.

In the sober light of morning, she imagined Sacco might be having

some confused thoughts about the fun he’d had last night, while Sandee

had been through this morning after thing often enough (including

with Chloe and Paul) to know that he needed to stay friendly and casual

but give Sacco his space. She hoped it didn’t fuck things up between

them. It certainly had been hella hot at the time. Back downstairs she

made coffee and then went for a run, hoping that things would return

to normal in the next couple days.

It got bad before other things got even worse. The story didn’t just fade

into obscurity after a few hours on the front page of various social net-

working news sites. A number of tech news and then some mainstream

news sites picked it up, as did most of the video game sites.
Wired
had it

too. Paul’s face—that same stupid picture—went up all over the place.

Then the podcasts of course had to mention it, and Paul and “Toni”

became a topic of brief snark and mild curiosity on Buzz Out Loud,

TWIT, and of course all the hacker ‘casts. Paul listened to every one of

them, despite Chloe’s encouragement to avoid them. At least they didn’t

seem to make him any more angry or depressed, although they did a

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good job at holding his bleak mood at its current level.

Posts went up defending Paul in some of these stories too, and when

the details (mostly wrong) about their exploits in San Jose came out, a

certain subset started to view him as some kind of hero figure because

he was an outlaw who was trying to stick it to the man in some way.

Paul didn’t like these posts either for whatever reason, but Chloe got

kind of a kick out of them. That is until she overheard Sacco repeat-

ing some of the Paul-praising pretty much verbatim and forced him to

admit that he’d started some of the pro-Paul movement (including, of

all things, a fan page on Facebook) himself. “Just don’t tell Paul, OK.

And stop messing with it. We’re just watching.” Sacco agreed, but they

both knew it didn’t matter now: the movement had taken on a life of its

own. Someone even started selling t-shirts with a heavily photoshopped

version of that damn picture that put a beret on Paul and made him

look like Che Guevara on it.

Laying low and watching might have been the smart move, but Chloe

soon became desperate for some other form of distraction. Going to The

Party was a bad idea according to Paul, who (probably wisely) decided

that he shouldn’t be seen in public at all for a while unless he was heavily

disguised. Towards that end he’d started growing a beard, which was

coming in patchy and scratchy and annoying the hell out of her, but she

kept her mouth shut about that too. That left sitting around the house