Invasion of Privacy: A Deep Web Thriller #1 (Deep Web Thriller Series) (48 page)

The HomeWebCam.com domain name was registered to Dwight Chambers and even listed his home address in Redwood City. As far as Brody was concerned, that was a schoolboy error for someone who was supposed to be the company’s lead technologist. A quick search of LinkedIn gave Brody a list of over one hundred employees, their roles and some insight into their relationships with each other. 

Brody gave the parent company a cursory once-over as well. Agincourt had offices everywhere, even here in London. It provided its clients with an impressive portfolio of security services. From security guards for buildings to armed escorts, from installing access control and CCTV security systems to alarm receiving and monitoring facilities, from electronic tagging of offenders to prisoner escorting and from managing ATMs to secure transporting of cash in high security vehicles. Brody suspected the acquisition of Internet-focused HWC eighteen months before had been more about enhancing the attractiveness of Agincourt’s shares on the stock markets. 

Brody knew what he needed to achieve today. First he needed to hack into HWC’s internal network in San Francisco and find a way to view their firewall logs. He was convinced HWC was relaying their webcam feeds over to SWY, despite Chambers’ protestations to the contrary. Whether HWC was doing this knowingly wasn’t his concern. Once he analysed the logs, he’d be able to identify the route being taken and reuse those security credentials to gain access to SWY. If the password was encrypted, he would use brute force techniques to decrypt it. And from there, he’d finally be able to sneak inside SWY without detection.

But his challenge right now was time. Or, more accurately, the time difference. San Francisco was over five thousand miles away and eight hours behind Greenwich Mean Time, which mean it was just after one in the morning there. The implications of this were that there would be few people awake whom he could entice to help him. But as he thought it through, he realised that he might be able to make the time difference work in his favour. A plan began to form.

Ten more minutes of preparation and he had enough to begin.

He took a deep breath and rang the HWC help desk number.

* * *

Manuel Cortez felt his eyes glazing over again.

He forced himself to stand and walk around the empty control centre. If he could get his blood flowing then the tiredness would lift. He hated being idle. Waiting. If only the phone would ring: that would get him busy. Years of experience had taught him that being busy made getting through to morning without nodding off a breeze.

Cortez also knew from years of experience that he should have got some shut-eye earlier, before coming to work. But that would have meant missing Daniela’s swimming trials. And thank God in Heaven that he’d gone. He had been so proud to witness his dedicated eight-year daughter win her two hundred-yard breaststroke race by a clear three body lengths. If she continued to improve at this rate, Cortez was convinced she would go far in the sport; perhaps even make it into the USA Olympic team in time for Tokyo 2020. But for that to even have a chance of happening, he needed to keep his daughter in her expensive private school. And that meant he would have to keep working as many shifts as he could. Without the overtime and the extra thirty per cent shift allowance, Daniela had no hope.

Sheesh, it was
too
quiet tonight. 

He glanced at the large central display screen just to make sure everything really was okay. The traffic light icons were green across the board. No customers queuing for support. No network links down. No servers down. No backlog of cases from the day shift. Yup; it was going to be a slow night. 

Only twice in his three years as a help desk support engineer had he gone through the night shift with zero customer issues to occupy him. Maybe tonight would be the third. Although the majority of its clientele were in the States and Canada, necessitating a full ten-man day-team, HomeWebCam also had thousands of clients all around the globe, hence the minimal overnight cover of one engineer, which Cortez and two other multi-lingual engineers took turns to handle.

Cortez loved talking to people from other countries. The English with their wonderful accents straight off the television were his favourites, although he found the broad accents of their Scottish and Irish neighbours almost impossible to comprehend. Occasionally he got to speak Spanish and French, the languages gifted to him by his Mexican mother and his French-Canadian father, and one of the main reasons he had got this job. In the last three years, he’d also used the downtime to master German and was now making an attempt at Mandarin. Maybe one day he’d even visit some of these exotic locations. But with every spare cent going towards Daniela’s schooling . . . 

The phone rang. 

Thank God in Heaven for that.

He sat back down at his desk and donned the headphone and mic. He saw from the display that the call was coming from a blocked number.

“Hi. You’re through to the HomeWebCam customer support line. This is Manuel Cortez, how may I help you?”

Although the official script required him to immediately ask for name and customer account details before allowing them to describe their problem, Cortez felt that offering a more open and confident introduction usually helped diffuse the customer’s frustration with whatever technical problem they needed help with. And anyway, on the night shift, there was no one else around to stop him applying his own personal style.

“Cortez, you say?” The accent was Texan, spoken loudly and deeply. “This here is Ken Toomey. Does that name mean anything to ya?”

He sat bolt upright in his chair. Toomey was the CEO of HomeWebCam. He felt a rush of adrenalin course through him. 

“Yes Mr Toomey. How can I help you, sir?”

Cortez had never spoken to Ken Toomey before. The nearest he’d come was standing at the back of the hall watching him present to the workforce at the annual all-hands meeting. Although charming in public, Toomey’s propensity to fly off the handle was often the subject of gossip around the water cooler. There were legendary stories of people being fired for the most minor of things. Apparently, he’d gone through at least six secretaries in the last two years.

“How many people on shift tonight, Cortez?”

“Just me sir.”

“Uh, okay. Well, how busy are you, son?”

Cortez had no idea how to answer. Telling the truth was a risk. But before he could offer an answer, Toomey continued.

“You see, I got me this problem with my work laptop, Cortez. Now I know you’re supposed to be there helping all our customers but I say what use is a help desk if it can’t help its own employees as well, never mind its CEO. Do you see what I mean, son?”

“Uh, yes, I see, sir.” At least he thought he did. The company did have a two-man internal IT team that normally dealt with employee issues, although they were strictly nine to five.

“Good, ’cause I’ve got to present to the damn board tomorrow and I’m still up putting the final touches to this damn presentation and the damn computer has just frozen completely. If I power the damn thing off I’ll damn well lose hours of work and I sure as hell don’t even want to think about that.”

“What’s the problem, sir?”

“I told you, it’s frozen! There’s a strange message on the screen. Damned if I know what it means.”

“What does it say, sir?”

“I’ve taken a photo of it with my phone. Let me email it over to you. What’s your email address, son?”

Cortez told him and waited for the email to arrive. He was pretty good at fixing webcam issues for customers over the phone, after all that’s what he’d been trained to do, but when it came to general computer issues, he was probably no better than the next guy. He hoped it was something obvious.

“You got it yet, son?”

“No, I — there it is.” Cortez quickly opened the email. There was no text, just an attached JPG. He double-clicked the picture file. It took a few seconds more than normal, but then finally displayed an image. In the picture, Cortez could see a laptop screen, but it was hard to make out the details. He tried enlarging it, but the picture’s focus was off. He couldn’t make out any details. He felt beads of sweat forming on his forehead. His hand shook as he moved the mouse.

“Uh, Mr Toomey. Would it be possible to take the picture again? The one you sent is —“

“Well that was quick! You’re a miracle worker; it’s started working now. Thanks, son. What was your name again?”

Cortez hadn’t done a thing, but if Toomey wanted to infer that he had, that was okay with him. “Cortez, sir. Manuel Cortez.”

“Well Manuel Cortez, you’re an absolute credit to the company. While I’m at the board meeting tomorrow, I’m going to put you forward for a special bonus. Thanks, son.”

The line clicked dead.

Cortez removed the headset and leaned right back in his chair, taking deep breaths to calm himself down. After a few minutes, he started to think more clearly.

A bonus? He couldn’t believe it. He wondered how much it would be. Perhaps it would be enough to fund Daniela’s next semester. What luck.

He decided he deserved a coffee break. Using his security pass, he let himself out of the control room and wandered down the corridor to the staff kitchen, whistling to himself. At the vending machine, he purchased a sweet black coffee. After a moment’s hesitation, he treated himself to a Hershey bar. 

He seated himself at the one of the many tables and slowly savoured the coffee and chocolate, absently staring through the large window across the lake at the other glass fronted office blocks, each one proudly displaying the logo of a well-known IT company. He wondered how many of them had twenty-four-hour help desks. Maybe one day he might move on from HomeWebCam; join a company with a larger help-desk; one with a night shift of more than one lonely soul. 

He felt his eyelids droop again and quickly pulled himself together. It was time to return to the control centre.

Glancing at the main display screen, Cortez froze. It was no longer all green. In fact, the network traffic lights were all flashing red.

He ran to his computer, wondering what the hell was going on.

Just as he fired up the network monitoring application, his phone rang.

“Yes?” He was so panicked that he forgot his personalised introduction, never mind the one on the script. He was about to add some clarification when a voice spoke.

“Is that the HomeWebCam service desk?” The voice was demanding but rushed.

“Uh yes, who’s this?”

“This is Mike Baker. I’m the Service Desk Manager over at Agincourt, here in Boston. Who’s this?”

Cortez knew Agincourt was HomeWebCam’s parent company, but he’d never talked to anyone from there before.

“This is Manuel Cortez.”

“Manuel, are you seeing any network problems?”

“Uh, yes. I was just starting to diagnose what’s going on.” It was only a slight fib.

“Damn.” Then the phone was muffled as Baker spoke to someone else, presumably putting his hand over the microphone. But Cortez could still make out what Baker was saying. “HWC’s being attacked, as well. They’re every-fucking-where.” And then the muffling was gone and Baker was talking to him again. “Manuel, let me explain. We’ve got to move double-quick. The whole of Agincourt is under a coordinated DDOS cyberattack. I’ve just had Homeland Security on the phone. It’s some kind of Al Qaeda hacking cell pissed off with us for our security work in Afghanistan supporting the Army. How are your firewalls holding up?”

Cortez clicked into his network map. Both firewalls were red, but nothing on the inside of the network was compromised. At least, not yet. The firewalls were doing their job. Beads of sweat appeared on his forehead again, and he felt faint. Too much sugar in the coffee and chocolate. 

“Yeah, I think the firewalls are handling it okay.”

“That’s good. We’ve had breaches over here. Our website’s down. Our CRM system is down. Our ERP system is down. We’re in bad shape. Are you sure your firewalls are okay? How can you tell?”

“I’m looking at the network monitor. They’re red, but they’re still up.”

“You can’t rely on that, Manuel. That’s just SNMP traps; they’re never going to give you the full story. I need you to log into the firewalls manually and check the logs.”

Cortez did as he was told. He hadn’t been anywhere near the firewalls for months, but he vaguely remembered how to do it. After a couple of missteps, which he quietly kept to himself, he was in. The administrator password was the same as the other systems he was more used to managing.

He scanned the logs. There were thousands of alerts.

“They’re okay. They’re handling it okay. They’ve recognised it’s an attack and are blocking it okay.” Cortez couldn’t help but keep the pride out of his voice. Perhaps HomeWebCam’s systems were stronger than those of its parent company. “We’re using an intrusion deception system combined with deep packet inspection firewalls, what about you?”

“Nah, nothing so glamorous here. I’ve been saying for ages that we need to upgrade our defences with DPI and IPS. I bet they’ll fucking listen now.” And then Baker’s voice was muffled again as he talked to someone else. “What do you mean, stopped? Show me?” There was a long pause.

And then in front of Cortez’s eyes, the network monitor icons turned from red to amber and then to green. Even the main display returned to green.

Baker was back. “The attack seems to have stopped over here. What about you, Manuel?”

“Yeah, it’s stopped.” Cortez was smiling from ear to ear, pleased as punch that his defences had held up better than Agincourt’s. After getting the credit from Toomey a few minutes earlier, the last thing he needed was to have to phone around saying all their systems were compromised. Where would his bonus be then?

“Well, you’re lucky Manuel. Listen, we’ve got a load of clean-up and recovery work ahead of us. I’ll leave you to it. But when we come up for air, I’ll give you another ring. Looks like we need to get hold of whatever firewalls you’ve got. Good work.”

The line clicked dead.

Cortez leaned back in his chair again and allowed his body to calm down. What a strange night. But he’d survived his fiery CEO and a terrorist attack. Not a bad night’s work, even if he did say so himself.