Invasion of Privacy: A Deep Web Thriller #1 (Deep Web Thriller Series) (44 page)

“Do you surf the Internet, Mr Pike? After all, not everyone from your generation is
au fait
with computers.”

His eyes narrowed to slits. She wasn’t sure whether it was because he’d taken offence or because he saw where she was going with her questioning.

“Yes, I browse the Internet,
girl
.”

She ignored his jibe. “And what do you use it for? Let’s see, now. Do you read online magazines? Do you perhaps do Internet banking? Or maybe you even shop online? Is that it, Mr Pike? Or could it be that you watch porn?” She turned to Da Silva and, speaking as if Pike wasn’t in the room, said, “You know, I think this could all be porn-related. That’s probably where someone like him started with the Internet. Like a kid in a sweetie shop. Not like the old days when you had to buy a magazine in the newsagents from the top shelf. Now it’s always on tap, with full motion video, no censorship or anything. But no, that wasn’t enough for our dear Mr Pike was it?” She turned back to him and repeated, “Was it?”

His chair thumped back onto all four legs. “I think I want a lawyer after all.”

An hour after Pike’s lawyer had arrived, Jenny and Da Silva brought the interview to a close.

He had capitulated under the weight of evidence, but only in regard to the webcams and the computer they had in evidence with his fingerprints all over it, both physical and digital. He’d had the webcams installed two years ago. This was the second batch of female students from Trinity Laban that he’d secretly spied on while they went about their day-to-day lives at the house in Charlton. Under pressure, he also admitted to having installed webcams in four other rental locations around the country, two in other parts of London, one in Leicester and the last in Southampton. All rented out to groups of female students. But there were only four locations, a mere drop in the ocean compared to the hundreds on SWY. He claimed not to know anything about SecretlyWatchingYou; all of his activities had been contained to his personal account on the HomeWebCam site, which gave him access to the webcams in the four locations.

On the surface, his situation was a complete mirror of Derek Saxton’s: just another voyeur getting off on secretly watching young women. But there were two main differences. Saxton had installed webcams in the home in which he personally lived, whereas Pike had clearly broken numerous privacy laws. Jenny wasn’t specifically certain which laws had been broken and had tasked Karim with researching them. It didn’t stop her arresting him though. 

The second difference was that Pike was linked to Flexbase. He claimed that he only used their remote office service to provide a legitimate business address for his mail and a professional receptionist service for his business phone line, nothing more. He claimed never to have booked a meeting room in any Flexbase office. They would check. 

“Look, I’ve been upfront about the webcams. What more is there? I don’t understand what’s got you lot all riled up. Surely, they’re not that big a deal.”

Jenny raised her eyebrows, not buying it, but he held her gaze, confusion etched all over his face.

“Murder,” she stated.

“Murder?” Incredulity infused his tone. “Fuck off!” And then, after turning to his lawyer, frowning and pointing his thumb towards Jenny and Da Silva, as if to say, “can you believe this?” Pike finally realised Jenny was serious. “Who?”

“One of your tenants.”

“In Broughton Road?”

She nodded.

“Which one?”

“Why don’t you tell us?”

“Well, it’s one of two. Either Kim or Anna. God, I hope it’s not Kim.”

“Why not the other three?”

“They’re on holiday, obviously.” He looked at Jenny as if she was stupid and added some clarification, “Abroad.”

He obviously watched them a lot. Far more than she had anticipated. “Why not Kim?”

“She’s gorgeous.” As if that’s all the explanation necessary.

“Okay. Why Anna?”

His lawyer put a hand on his arm, but he shrugged it off. “Anna’s a right tart. She might look like a good shag, but that’s where it stops. She —”

 “Mr Pike,” interrupted his solicitor, firmly. “I advise you not to say anymore. You are under caution.”

“I’m trying to help, for fuck’s sake. It’s not as if
I
murdered them . . .” Pike’s voice trailed off as he looked from Jenny to Da Silva to his solicitor, while it slowly dawned on him that’s exactly what they all thought.

His face turned ashen. Finally, he looked his age.

CHAPTER 15

Towards the rear of Bruno’s coffee shop, Crooner42 observed the man he knew online as Fingal. Or ‘Brody’, as he seemed to go by in the real world. Crooner42 wondered about that. There was usually some linkage between an online handle and its owner’s real-world name. Although considering his own circumstances, he immediately discarded the thought. Crooner42 had nothing to do with his own name. It was a nickname he’d earned as a teenager after singing ‘It Had to Be You’ in a passable impersonation of Frank Sinatra during a school concert. The addition of ‘42’ in his online moniker was to make it unique. And even then, the number had meaning because it was the answer to the ultimate question, at least as far as
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
, one of his favourite books as a teenager, was concerned.

Once Crooner42 had deduced that Fingal and Brody were one and the same, he had bolted from his flat in Docklands and gunned it towards Charlton, throwing his car around the darkening London streets. He felt like a bullet powering through a rifle as he accelerated through the southbound Blackwall Tunnel, appreciating the sound of the vehicle’s exhaust note rebounding loudly off the tunnel walls, and burst out onto the three-lane A102, braking hard for each speed trap before accelerating again. He exited onto the Woolwich Road but slowed to a crawl as the rush hour traffic clogged the single-lane main road. Even so, he arrived at Troughton Road in under twenty minutes, just in time to spot Fingal and the policewoman getting into a silver Audi A3 outside the student house. Cheekily, he flashed his headlights to let them out and followed behind. After a couple of minutes, they pulled up outside Charlton Station and Brody exited the car. Crooner42 looked around and nabbed an empty space, even though it was clearly signposted that parking required display of a valid resident permit. He just hoped his car wasn’t towed away when he returned later.

On foot, he followed Fingal, who had plugged earphones in and seemed oblivious to all around him, down onto the platform. Crooner42 kept him in sight but maintained enough distance to avoid being spotted during the overground train ride into London Cannon Street, the short distance to Bank Underground Station, the Northern Line to Angel and finally, a walk along Upper Street. Fingal had stopped outside an apartment block and placed his key in the external front door lock and then paused, looking round. Crooner42, who was in the doorway on the other side of the road, thought Fingal had somehow clocked him. But instead, he seemed to have become aware of the coffee shop opposite and had decided upon a nightcap. 

A few minutes later, Crooner42 had slunk into the coffee shop, straight past Fingal who was ensconced by the front windows with his head in his computer. Taking a seat at the rear, he ordered an Americano from the foreign-sounding waiter, who just about held back a tut at the choice, and sank back in the leather sofa, staring at his nemesis.

When Crooner42 had originally concocted his plan to discredit Fingal using SWY, he had never thought it would work out this well. In its best outcome, his plan did little more than dent Fingal’s reputation on CrackerHack and every other deep web hacker forum. By failing so publicly to crack SWY, Fingal would be proven fallible. He would no longer be a god walking amongst mortals. His elite status would be tarnished forevermore. And at the same time, Crooner42 would be elevated to the higher echelons. And there was nothing more important to a hacker than reputation.

But now, here was Fingal in the flesh and in the palm of Crooner42’s hands. It had never occurred to Crooner42 that Fingal would track down the real-world webcam locations. He had assumed that Fingal would do what every other hacker would do — what Crooner42 himself would probably have done — and throw everything he had at an online frontal assault. Begrudgingly, he was impressed with Fingal’s initiative in seeking a back door route into SWY via the source of the webcam feeds. 

It had also never occurred to Crooner42 that both he and Fingal were located in the same country, let alone the same city. It was almost impossible to tell from the chat rooms where anybody was from, other than by deduction from word-spellings, idioms and turns of phrase. But this was difficult to do; so many hackers were from China or Eastern Europe where English was a second language. And those with English as their mother tongue often disguised themselves behind geek-speak and the chatroom etiquette of acronyms and abbreviations. So was it a coincidence that Fingal was also British? A bit, he supposed. But it wasn’t that unlikely. After all, the UK was consistently one of the top ten hacking countries in the world. And anyway, it was to Crooner42’s fortune that they were both from the same country, for it had enabled Fingal to attempt his back door plan, which had led to this very moment, where both hackers were physically in the same place at the same time.

Crooner42 realised he had nearly everything he needed to wreak absolute destruction on Fingal. He had his real-world name: Brody. It wouldn’t take long to get a surname. Or was Brody the surname? Ah well, he’d know soon enough. He had his address: Upper Street. It wouldn’t take a minute to check the building number from where Fingal had paused, his key in the lock. 

Yes, this would be retribution on a biblical scale, way beyond a mere dent in Fingal’s hacker status. 

With a stupid giggle, he whipped out his own laptop and got to work.

He scanned the wireless networks within range. There was an unencrypted network called ‘BrunoCoffee’ obviously provided by the coffee shop for its customers. He couldn’t see Fingal using that one. He fired up Kismet, his Wi-Fi hacking tool of choice. Like a dog tracking a scent, he let it sniff the air for a minute. It revealed a hidden Wi-Fi network, one that did not broadcast its name. But Kismet saw through such a simple precaution and immediately exposed its name: ‘F!NG@L’. Crooner42 almost laughed out loud, but just about managed to catch himself just in time.

Any lingering doubts over whether this real-world Brody and the virtual-world Fingal being one and the same were instantly vanquished. 

Crooner42 reasoned that Fingal sat at the front of the coffee shop in order to pick up the strongest signal of his own private Wi-Fi network, the name of which he’d hidden from being broadcast so that your average coffee shop patron wouldn’t spot it. But even here, at the back of the coffee shop, the signal was strong enough to work with. And Crooner42 was hardly your average customer.

Fingal’s Wi-Fi network was protected with WPA2 encryption, the strongest method of securing a wireless network. He would have expected nothing less of Fingal. Crooner42 rubbed his hands together. This was going to be fun.

Via Kismet, he placed his network card into ‘promiscuous’ mode. Normally, when a computer is connected to a network, its network card examines each frame of data that it receives and automatically discards every frame not addressed to it. By going into promiscuous mode, all traffic is received, regardless of its destination. Crooner42 once explained promiscuous mode to someone using the analogy of a postman making multiple photocopies of a letter addressed to you and dropping one in every letterbox in your street before finally dropping the original through your letterbox. Because you received the original, you’ve no idea that everyone else has also received a copy of your mail. 

A WPA2 network encrypts all data using a 256-bit key, broadcasting clear data as gibberish. Only because both ends of the network — the Wi-Fi router in Fingal’s apartment across the road and the network card in Fingal’s laptop — both shared the same key, were they able to decrypt the broadcast gobbledegook back into meaningful data. So, although Crooner42 was now recording every frame of data being passed between Fingal’s laptop and his Wi-Fi router, it was completely meaningless.

He needed the key. And the key was nothing more than a password.

Because Fingal had already connected his PC to his Wi-Fi network before Crooner42 had arrived at Bruno’s, the authentication of Fingal’s computer onto the ‘F!NG@L’ network had already occurred. Fingal’s computer had validated that it was allowed onto the network by sending a copy of the key over the network for validation. And, of course, even then the key itself was encrypted. 

Crooner42 needed Brody to re-authenticate his PC to his Wi-Fi network. If he did that, then Crooner42 would record the frames, albeit encrypted, containing the password. The easiest way would be for Crooner42 to walk over to Fingal and pull the plug and battery out of Fingal’s PC. After rebooting the computer, it would then be forced to re-authenticate and Crooner42 could record the frames containing the encrypted password within them. But obviously that would expose Crooner42 to Fingal and that was the last thing he wanted right now.

But there was a sneakier and simpler way to achieve exactly the same outcome. From the data he had captured already, Crooner42 knew the network card address of Fingal’s PC and the name of the Wi-Fi network. Using Kismet, he crafted a forged frame of data and broadcasted it onto the Wi-Fi network. The frame of data was an instruction to Fingal’s computer to de-authenticate from the Wi-Fi network. Once received, the network card would blindly carry out the instruction, assuming it had been sent by the Wi-Fi router, never knowing that it had actually originated from Crooner42’s computer, and then it would automatically re-authenticate, sending the password as encrypted data.

Crooner42 pressed send.

He studied Fingal just to make sure he didn’t notice. Even though the de-authentication and re-authentication happened within a microsecond and was impossible for Fingal to notice, Crooner42 was still momentarily concerned. Fingal was an elite hacker after all. Maybe he had set up some kind of alarm on his computer to alert for de-authentication requests? No, Crooner42 realised his imagination was running away with itself. No one would do that.