Wizard’s Keep, but hooking into the other world’s phone system was really
Danny’s area of expertise. Wiz wasn’t sure he could establish a voice
connection and still keep his location hidden
On the other hand, he thought, I can do something almost as good.
Computer chatting would give a much more immediate connection and he knew a way to make that secure. What’s more, he knew where he could find what he needed to do it.
He spun back to his workstation and started connecting to the Internet.
Danny was bored. As often happened when he got bored he was surfing the Internet, hanging out on his favorite talk channel. As usual it was barely controlled chaos, with perhaps a half dozen conversations going on at once, like a printout of a cocktail party.
FREEKER: Anyone got any good codez?
DRAINO: So he says ‘first assume a spherical chicken’
PILGRIM: The P-153 is a piece of shit. Use a canopener.
RINGO: Does anyone have the DTMF codes to do that?
DEATHMASTER: Hahaha
A.NONY.MOUS: Look in the last issue of 26OO.
WIZ: Hey Danny how are things at the Keep?
The message scrolled by so quickly he almost missed it. Then he called up the buffer, read it again and goggled.
“DRAINO: Wiz,” Danny typed, “is that you? Where are you? Are you all right?”
“Fine,” the answer traced out on Danny’s screen. “Maybe we’d better go to a private channel.”
“Jerry, Moira come here!” Danny yelled over his shoulder. “It’s Wiz.”
“Well, they’ve had a problem all right,” Special Agent Marty Conklin told the FBI director. In the corner Conklin’s boss nodded approvingly. “They’ve got their butts in a sling so they want us to pull a rabbit out of the hat to save their bacon.”
The director winced at the mixed metaphors. She wasn’t sure she approved of Conklin either. He was obviously pushing the Bureau’s weight restrictions hard and the director had a strong suspicion he couldn’t pass the annual physical training test either.
But in Conklin’s case the title “special agent” was especially appropriate. He was the FBI’s brightest, if arguably weirdest, specialist on computer and telecommunications crime. His boss had managed to make him look halfway presentable in a rumpled gray suit, but he had still come along just in case his prize charge got too far out of hand.
The director lit another cigarette and blew smoke out her nose. I’ve got to quit these-as soon as this business is settled, she thought. “What exactly happened?”
“They left a back door ajar at a black site and now they’ve got newts in the firewall.”
“Can you put that in English?”
Conklin paused to do a mental translation. “Okay, they have a site that’s physically highly secure. Everything’s guarded and under lock and key. For some reason they need Internet access from the site, but obviously they don’t want the next net newt who comes along to take the system home with him.”
“Don’t want a what?”
“A net newt-slimy little uglies that you find under rocks.”
The director nodded. “Oh, you mean hackers.”
“No, I mean system breakers, computer criminals.” Conklin was about to launch into his canned lecture on how most hackers are not criminals, but his boss cleared his throat meaningfully.
“Well, anyway, what you do in a case like that is set up a firewall. That’s a computer that connects to the net on one side and to your secure system on the other. All it does is pass messages back and forth. It acts as a barrier to keep out the net . . . uh, the bad guys.
“Now normally a firewall doesn’t have any user accounts on it. It is strictly there as a gateway to the main system. But in this case someone did something real dumb.”
Conklin smiled broadly at having caught the nation’s top communications security agency in an error. “When a computer comes from the factory there’s a standard password installed, something like ‘password’ or ‘administrator,’ something the field engineers can use to set the system up. Anyone using that password has superuser privileges on the system-they can do anything, because you need that kind of access to get the system up and running. Of course, since the password is the same on all machines of that kind it’s a major security hole and you’re supposed to erase it as soon as the system’s set up.”