The Florentine Deception (2 page)

“Yeah … I'll do it this afternoon.”

“Thanks, I really appreciate it.” My father cleared his throat. “So, any new projects? Promising startup ideas?”

“No. Nothing new to report.” I knew he meant well, but the nagging was starting to get to me. Truth be told, I was bored out of my mind. I just couldn't find anything to do that excited me. Other than climbing.

“So where'd you get the PC from?” I asked, changing the subject. “Garage sale?”

“Nope. An estate sale,” he said, taking my diversion in stride. “Got it in a box-lot for twenty bucks.”

Since Dad's retirement, he'd become quite the do-gooder. Computers, toasters, portable gas stoves, anything he could rummage from a friend's attic or find at a local garage sale, he'd buy, fix up, and offer to a needy family sponsored by the church.

Which led me to my exciting afternoon chore: delousing an old PC for his adopted family. It's a routine familiar to all “computer people.” Everyone from third cousins to old high school teachers expect that since you're a computer guy, you can fix virtually any problem with their PC. Parents were the worst offenders: “I'm sure Alex can fix that problem. I'll have him drop everything and give you a call.”

In any case, this was one favor I'd agreed to do.

I said goodbye and trudged up the stairs and into the shower. After a few seconds fidgeting with the temperature, I turned on my shower radio.

“… heat wave, SoCal Edison says there's a five percent chance of rolling blackouts today. So pitch in and reduce your electricity usage during peak hours,” it crackled. “In other news, one of our own local Angelenos may soon shoot the moon! After forty years of fruitless treasure hunting, a feisty octogenarian from Chatsworth believes she's finally located the burial site of the Wellingsworth fortune. Ruth Lindley stumbled upon Wellingworth's diary at a local garage sale in 1966 and has been hunting for the millionaire's treasure ever since. Until now.”

Interesting. I wondered if she'd finally found it. I'd been infatuated with buried loot, treasure maps, and one-eyed pirates since devouring
Treasure Island
in the eighth grade, and had even done some poking around Wellingsworth Canyon myself as a teen. I didn't find any treasure but did pick up a nasty case of poison oak.

I upped the volume.

“Want to hear more about Ruth's most recent find, and the sordid history behind the treasure? Tune in to
ABC 7 Local News
tonight at eleven.”

Of course, just a teaser. I made a mental note to google later for the details.

I finished showering, toweled off, and looked in the mirror. Just one day without shaving and I was already getting scraggly. No good. I might be a slacker, but I sure as hell wasn't going to look like one. I grabbed my Braun and went to work, then finished off the stragglers with a disposable razor. I'd gel my hair later, just before the party.

All right, what to wear? For computer cleanup detail? Grunge. I threw on a pair of comfortable blue jeans and a passable “
No, I will not fix your computer
” t-shirt from the hamper.

Reluctantly, I dragged the still-sealed cardboard box from my closet. A brief inspection revealed a chassis, grimy keyboard, small LCD monitor, standard three-button mouse, and a rat's nest of cables. I disentangled the wiring, laid each neatly on the carpet, and then began connecting components. It took just a few minutes, but this was the easy part.

I planted my thumb firmly on the power button and stared expectantly at the monitor. After what seemed like an hour-long boot-up, Windows decided to make an appearance.

The login screen greeted me with a single account name:
Richard
.

Holding my breath expectantly, I prayed to the computer gods that Richard's account had no password. That would make things so much easier. With an exhale, I clicked on his login picture.

Windows prompted me for a password.

What was I expecting, anyway? All right, I'd turn it into a challenge—could I hack in within fifteen minutes or less?

No problem.

I'd start with the low-hanging fruit; I began guessing passwords.

“password” didn't do it. Neither did “Richard” or “richard.” Nine out of ten people use easy-to-guess passwords.

“qwerty”? Denied. A few more failed guesses and it was time for the nuclear option.

“123456”? Definitely top five. Rejected.

“12345678”? No.

“abc123”? Fail.

“letmein”? Nope. “111111”? No.

Enough guessing—time was running out. I rummaged through my nightstand and snagged an old thumb drive, then grabbed my laptop and booted it up. It took a few seconds to find a website hosting the latest version of OphCrack—it had been the top password-cracker when I was at ViruTrax. Assuming Richard hadn't encrypted his hard drive or picked a super-long password—and most people didn't—this'd get me in within five minutes.

I downloaded and installed the password-cracking program onto the thumb drive, then inserted it into an empty USB slot on the front of Richard's computer and rebooted with the “boot-from-USB” option. After about ninety seconds and a whirlwind of scrolling text, the OphCrack program popped up.

“Please wait.…” it said. Following a few moments of analysis, OphCrack indicated that Richard's hard drive wasn't encrypted and that a password-crack was possible. Things were looking up.

I selected Richard's account name—the only one on the list—and clicked “Go.” A little hourglass appeared as the program began generating and validating hundreds of millions of passwords until it found the one that matched Richard's. I visualized the process—“aaaaaa,” “aaaaab,” “aaaaac,” … “aaaaba,” “aaaabb,” “aaaabc”—hundreds of thousands of guesses … and failures … every second.

The hourglass turned over and over. One minute. Two. Three. The guy must have picked a long password. Four minutes. Five.

I began sweating. If this didn't work, I'd have to go in, locate the proper system password files by hand, and reset Richard's account. A year ago I wouldn't have blinked at the prospect. But that was a year ago. Not to mention I'd blow my fifteen-minute goal.

Finally, after seven minutes of brute-force guessing, OphCrack issued a ding. The password “r1ch4rd” appeared on the screen. I issued a sigh of relief.

“Take
that
, Anonymous.”

The PC had all of the must-have apps: a word processor, spreadsheet, Minesweeper, and more than likely a venereal buffet of computer viruses. Minus the viruses, whoever was to receive this computer should be happy. The background picture on the desktop showed a beautiful Impressionist painting, maybe a Van Gogh, I thought. I'd leave it for the new owner.

A few clicks revealed antivirus software last updated during the last presidential election—this machine was going to need some serious detox. Twenty minutes later, I had a freeware antivirus+firewall package installed and scanning away. It was a smorgasbord all right; the scanner unearthed and removed two dozen infections.

Step 1: Completed.

Step 2: Remove all personal information from the machine. Financial records, documents, pictures (
all
types of pictures), music files, and home movies—such private information, and yet so often forgotten. It never ceased to amaze me how often people forget to remove personal data before discarding a computer. I'd started by searching the hard drive for JPEG picture files when my bedroom door creaked open.

“What's up, slacker?”

“Who…?” I spun around.

“Gotcha!”

“Jesus! You scared the crap out of me!” I growled. “How the hell did you get in?”

“I used my old key.” Steven shoved aside a pile of glossy open-house flyers and plopped onto my futon. His otherwise-uniform helmet of curly brown hair had been marred by a razor-shaped trough above the left ear.

“Hillary give you a haircut?”

“Look good?” Steven adjusted his glasses and shot me a sultry look.

“Go look in the mirror.” I grinned.

“Dammit,” he groused, showing no desire to verify for himself. “She was watching some new-age vegan show while she was buzzing away. Whatever. Hey what's this?” he asked, picking up the top sheet from the stack of flyers. “Whoa, four-point-five mil!”

“Nice huh? Twenty-foot-high walls of glass overlooking the Pacific. It's in the Santa Monica Canyon.”

“That is one serious chick magnet!” He winked suggestively. “Are you going to buy it?”

I shook my head. “I haven't decided yet. It's got some layout problems. But it's on my top-five list right now.”

Steven dropped the flyer back onto the pile and leaned back against the wall, perching his hands on an increasingly prominent belly.

“So what's the latest?” he asked.

“Not much. I'm stuck cleaning up a donated PC for Dad's adopted family.” I pointed at the dusty computer.

“Man, that family lives better than I do.” Steven wiped his forehead with his arm. “Hey, got anything cold to drink? It's like an oven outside.”

“One second.” I socked him in the arm, then traipsed downstairs to check the fridge. Steven was my best friend, actually more like a brother. We'd lived together since our freshman year at UCLA, until he got hitched.

“Here,” I said when I returned, handing him a bottle. Steven had already managed to click up a tasteless picture from Richard's hard drive.

“Wow, this computer cleanup thing isn't nearly as bad as I thought. It has some real perks.” He grinned.

I rolled my eyes. “Glad to hear it. Then you can do the rest of it.”

“So what are you up to later?” he continued, ignoring me. “Want to catch
Dead Alive II
? Hillary's doing girls' night tonight, so I'm a bachelor.” Steven took a gulp and clicked on another picture.

“Sure. When's it playing? I need to head over to Tom and Gennady's place around six.” I took a swig.

“I was thinking of going at seven, but I'll bet there's an afternoon matinee.”

Steven clicked on the Internet Explorer icon and pulled up Google. A few keystrokes later he consulted his watch and said, “It's playing at the Winnetka 21 in … thirty-seven minutes.” A (temporarily jobless) rocket scientist, Steven was habitually precise.

“Okay. Let me finish this and we can go.” I'd reached for the mouse when the newly installed firewall software popped an alert onto the screen:

Firewall Alert:
Unknown program WINCALC.EXE is attempting to send an email to address: OXOTHИ[email protected].

It offered two buttons: “Block” or “Allow,” about as meaningful as a poorly translated fortune cookie. Only unlike a fortune cookie, this type of prompt encouraged people to call their computer-expert-sons for help. WinCalc, huh? Since when did Windows calculator programs send emails to strange Russian email addresses?

“What's that alert mean?” asked Steven.

“Not sure. The firewall software I installed is grousing about some calculator program on the computer trying to send email over the Internet.”

“Calculators sending email? That makes no sense.”

“Agreed. My guess is it's a spyware program, maybe an email virus. The antivirus scan I ran totally missed it.”

“Think it's an entirely new virus?” he asked.

“Wouldn't surprise me,” I said. “The last year I was at ViruTrax we discovered something like thirty million new strains.”

“Jesus.” Steven's jaw dropped. “So can you figure out what it does?”

“I'm a bit out of practice but it probably wouldn't be too hard.”

“Why don't you take it apart, Mr. Virus Expert?” he chided.

“Skip the movie?”

“Why not? I've always wanted to see how a virus ticks.”

“All right. Let's do it.”

Chapter 3

My buddies in the lab at ViruTrax could dissect a new computer virus in ten or fifteen minutes, determine how it spawned, what data it tried to steal (most likely your credit card number), and how to exterminate it. During your first few dissections, the process was utterly confusing, like reading Shakespeare for the first time. After a dozen, you started recognizing idioms, familiar techniques. After a few hundred, you began recognizing familial relationships between different strains, much like historians can identify the artist of an unknown painting based on its brush strokes, composition, and structure.

My eight months of retirement had made me a bit rusty, but what the hell. I inserted a second thumb drive into Richard's computer and, after a bit of hunting, located and copied the enigmatic WINCALC.EXE file over to my laptop.

“Just bear with me, I haven't done this in a while.”

“No worries. So how do you figure out what it does?”

“I'm going to run it through a disassembler,” I said.

“A disassembler?”

“It's a tool that produces a human-readable listing of the program's computer instructions, its underlying logic. Then we get to slog through them all to see what they do. That's the tricky part. It's like reading a mystery novel and fitting all the clues together until you see the bigger picture. Give me about an hour and I should be able to give you the CliffsNotes overview.”

By five, we had most of the particulars nailed. Richard's computer was home to a species of garden-variety spyware. This particular organism recorded and archived every keystroke typed by the user into a hidden file. Once every day, it emailed the latest transcripts to its master, owner of the mysterious Russian email address.

“So it records everything you type?” asked Steven.

“It looks like it. Had it not been for that firewall alert, our Russian friend would know what movies you were looking up at the Winnetka 21.”

“Scary,” he said with unusual sincerity.