Invasion of Privacy: A Deep Web Thriller #1 (Deep Web Thriller Series) (10 page)

After a few weeks, Leroy started inventing fake occupations for themselves during their nights out. They started off with the classics: firemen, policemen and lawyers. In character, Brody actually found it much easier to talk to women, and even men when out on a Leroy night. Justified by the need to strengthen his improvisation skills for his Drama degree course, Leroy kept upping the stakes, coming up with obscure professions for them both; micro-biologists, key grips – they had seen the job title in movie credits – zookeepers, rocket scientists, politicians and even circus clowns. Brody’s degree had been Film Studies and so he didn’t have the same incentive as Leroy to keep inventing new characters for their nights out. But it had amused him to see how far he could go with the games. So much so that all these years later, false backstories remained a key part of his life. It was strange to consider that Leroy seemed the one who had grown up first. Although looking at him now, slumped on the sofa, he didn’t seem any more mature than the version Brody had first met.

Leroy finally turned off
Little House on the Prairie
. “Okay, okay. I give in. I’m sorry.” 

“Thank you.”

He stood up, tentatively. “You want a cuppa, darling?” A peace offering.

“No ta. I’ve already had way too much coffee.”

Leroy disappeared into the kitchen and banged about. Brody knew better than to try and begin his hacking session until he settled. Eventually, he returned to the living room, carrying a mug and a plate of buttered toast. He perched on the edge of Brody’s desk. Brody sighed audibly, but Leroy ignored it.

“Thought you had that job in Birmingham today.”

“I finished it, but I’ve got stuck with another one already.”

“Since when do you get stuck with anything, Brody? We both know you don’t
have
to work.” 

That riled Brody. Leroy knew full well that it hadn’t always been that way for Brody, not like Leroy whose parents had been rich enough to fund his university course, his ever growing collection of video games and his expensive social life. Brody had come from a working class family in Hertford, his father a civil servant in the county council and his mother a hairdresser. He had always been deeply into computers and the hobby became a necessary source of income during university. Initially, he did what other capable programmers did and built websites for local businesses. But it was time-consuming and mundane, it didn’t challenge his skills and the income was minimal. 

Then Brody stumbled across online poker and spotted an opportunity. He created poker bots, programs that automated playing poker hands to a standard set of scenarios that he programmed in from books he loaned from the library on poker strategies. The bots would impersonate humans in the online poker rooms, their human opponents having no idea they were playing
Texas Hold’Em
against a computer. Individually, the bots held their own against inexperienced players, but stronger players who bluffed more effectively, would beat his bots consistently. It was while watching a rerun of an old
Star Trek: The Next Generation
episode with the ‘Borg’, a collection of species that functioned as drones of a collective hive mind, that gave him the money-making idea of having his bots gang up as one. He would partially fill an online poker room with the artificial bots, leaving one or two seats free for gullible humans. He upgraded their programming so that the bots secretly shared with each other which two cards they had each been dealt, massively enhancing their odds as a group. Five bots in a poker room meant that between them they knew ten of the cards dealt from the pack, whereas the human opponents only knew the two in their own hand. Humans in these bot-filled online poker rooms had no idea what they were up against and only ever won with an outrageously lucky hand. To avoid drawing attention, Brody only let them play until they had amassed enough winnings to cover his personal outgoings for the next night. In order to fool the poker site administrators, who actively traced Internet addresses to ensure there was no collusion amongst players, Brody logged in each bot via Internet proxies located all around the world, giving the impression that the players, his bots, could not possibly know each other. 

Only Leroy had known about Brody’s secret source of funds that got him through university. He decided to ignore Leroy’s comment about not having to work. 

“This job’s different.”

“Yeah, sure.” He clearly didn’t believe Brody. “So that means you’ll be head down and boring all afternoon and night, just like usual.”

“Depends. I might be able to crack this in a couple of hours – if I had some peace . . .” Maybe he would take the hint.

“It’s my day off, darling.”

“Come on Leroy, you know I can’t work with you distracting me. And I’ve got to get this done straight away.”

“I’m not your only distraction today, or have you forgotten?” He took a large bite of toast. “You’ve got that date later.”

“Oh fuck. Yeah, I nearly forgot. What was her name again?” 

“I should be asking you that. Come on, bring up her profile.”

Brody opened the dating website he’d been using for the last two years and logged in. He found the long list of matched dates and scrolled to the bottom. Leroy looked over his shoulder. Brody clicked on the bottom entry.

“Harriet, eh? She’s nice,” said Leroy. “Well, nice for a girl I suppose. What’s that? A property lawyer. Ha! She’ll rip you apart.”

“Don’t worry, I’m a big boy now.”

“Yeah, sure.” He pulled a doubtful expression and pointed at a framed poster on the wall. “So you’re going to introduce yourself as Brody, computer hacker, wanted in fifteen different countries!” 

Brody didn’t really like the term computer hacker. He had certainly never intended to become one, deliberately taking a Film Studies degree instead of Computer Science in order to offer him an alternative career path. And anyway, the level of technical proficiency he had gained programming computers from such a young age meant there was little he was likely to learn by formally studying computing. It was this technical prowess that gave him the taste of the financial fruits of what he could achieve with computers during his degree course. And, after graduating, he’d never really found a good use for his Film Studies degree. So, his first job was working in the IT security department of a major high street bank chain. After a few years he gave it up, having found corporate life too monotonous and the job unchallenging. He set up as an independent security consultant, completely separate from his online persona as Fingal. At one time he flipped to poacher-turned-gamekeeper and advised some of the online poker sites on how to redesign their systems to make it harder for automated bots to work effectively. As part of the assignment, he had tracked down some of the people running similar scams to his own and the poker companies had brought the police in, arresting them for fraud.

By then, he had discovered a new completely legal source of income: Internet-based betting exchanges, where gamblers competed against each other rather than against bookmakers, backing or laying the outcomes of sports events. He developed statistical betting and laying systems for horse races and tennis tournaments, which he then automated with bots so that they ran themselves. He felt much better about them as there was no ganging up on unsuspecting opponents. It was simply his statistical betting strategy versus lots of other anonymous gamblers willing to accept his proffered odds to test whether their own betting strategy or, more often, their hunch was a better prediction of the event’s outcome. While his system didn’t win every bet, it won more often than it lost. Within a few years, the regular tax-free winnings had amassed into a fund so large that it freed him from the necessity of working for a regular salary. 

To keep him busy and current with technology, Brody branched into white-hat hacking and penetration testing services. He enjoyed the work and would gladly have done it for free but, as a matter of principle, he always charged very high rates to substantiate the value the multinational corporations gained from his work. 

In his early hacking days, he particularly relished the intellectual challenge of identifying zero-day exploits — coming up with a brand new attack vector that exploited a previously unknown vulnerability in a vendor’s operating system or application — and then publishing them so that the vendor could block the hole. More recently, Brody had found himself exposing unknown Advanced Persistent Threats — cyber attacks that employ advanced stealth techniques to remain undetected for long periods of time while they replicate themselves and carry out their work of sending compromised data back to their authors. In most of the cases large corporations, usually banks or utility companies, had hired him. Unknown APTs have no signature because they have not been discovered, and so remain invisible to traditional countermeasures. Brody usually uncovered their existence by analysing network activity to identify anomalous traffic, especially heading in the direction of known Command and Control servers. Once installed on a target system, APTs needed to ‘phone home’ to a CnC in order to receive instructions or to send back compromised data. Once he detected the existence of an APT, he then narrowed down on the infected computer and analysed the APT. Under his Fingal handle, he always posted full details on the Internet, where the anti-virus vendors would pick them up and write new signatures to detect them, foiling the malicious aims of the APT authors, all of which served to increase his credibility and infamy in the online hacking communities.

But hunting zero-days and chasing APTs was nothing compared to the rush he got from carrying out social engineering based pentests. The buzz was like nothing else, especially when he physically conned his way into a secure facility like he’d done with Atlas Brands that morning. He supposed that his proclivity to trick and deceive must be rooted in his nights out with Leroy all those years ago. And the combination of the two sets of skills, computer hacking and impersonation, made social engineering his true vocation in life.

And while Leroy’s passing comment about being wanted in fifteen different countries was said in jest, there was, unfortunately, some truth to it. 

Over the years, Brody had enraged a lot of black hats around the world, many of whom were members of organised crime rings. These cyber-criminals applied their hacking skills to steal or launder money, facilitate sex trafficking of women and children, aid the smuggling of drugs and a number of other illegal activities. Brody had interrupted many of their schemes — sometimes deliberately but mostly inadvertently — by exposing many of their lucrative APTs, enabling their targets to defend themselves, anti-virus vendors to create signatures that detected their existence and software vendors to block the exposed vulnerability completely. Halted in their tracks, the black hats were then forced to devise alternative techniques. 

In the online forums, Fingal had received numerous death threats. Secure in the stealth tactics he employed to protect himself online, Brody flagrantly laughed them off, frustrating them further. All of which fed Fingal’s online infamy and strengthened his status in the global hacking community. If any of the cyber-criminals somehow found a way to track him down in the physical world, where his defences were weakest, they would exact a terrible revenge.

Vorovskoy Mir
,
one of the leading Russian cyber-gangs, had become so enraged at him that they had added him to their infamous ‘most wanted’ list. They were parodying the American FBI’s ‘cyber most wanted’ website, which published the names of suspected cyber-criminals. On the FBI site, headshots and real names were provided, along with a description of their alleged crimes, aliases and reward amounts in exchange for information that could lead to their arrest (usually upwards of $100,000). On the Vorovskoy Mir list, the online handles of eight well-known hackers in the cyber-community were listed beneath blacked-out head silhouettes. At the bottom of the page were four others, but this time displaying real faces. Only they each had the word ‘ELIMINATED’ in red splashed diagonally across them. The third silhouette in the list of eight was labelled ‘Fingal’. The reward for information leading to his capture was $1 million in bitcoins, no questions asked.

As a very visible reminder to always be careful online and mask his identity and IP address, Brody had printed off the Russian cyber-gang’s ‘most wanted’ website, blown it up into a massive poster, had it framed and mounted it on the living room wall.

“I’m not wanted anywhere, you fool.” Brody always made light of the death-threats against him. As long as he maintained his anonymity online, he was completely safe. And so was anyone associated with him. “Anyway, Harriet the lawyer thinks she’s meeting Brody Taylor the cinema photographer, just back from shooting a
Bourne
Identity
movie sequel in Morocco. In the UK for one night and then flying out to Rome tomorrow.”

“Brilliant! I especially like the time limit.” Leroy laughed and then shook his head sadly. “You know something, darling. One day you’re going to repeat what happened with Mel and you’ll be completely screwed, caught in your usual web of lies, broken, lonely and miserable all over again. Why can’t you just be yourself?”

Mel had been Brody’s last serious girlfriend, a relationship that had ended just over a six months ago. They had met via the dating site, but for once a one-night-stand wasn’t enough, not that they’d had sex on that first night. She was zany and funny. She spoke with a French accent that he could listen to all night. But the clincher was her altruistic nature. She wanted to fix the world, joining any good cause that caught her attention. She fitted them in around her shifts as a nurse in a care home. She stood outside pharmaceutical offices protesting about animal cruelty. She fed London’s homeless in a soup kitchen. She took disadvantaged children to the countryside on her spare weekends. And she helped out in her local Oxfam shop. Her relationship with Brody was the only thing in her life that was about her.