Читать книгу The Insider - Ava McCarthy - Страница 6

3

‘Good afternoon, Sheridan Bank –’

‘– it isn’t showing up in your transactions, Mr Cooke. Would you like me to try another account for you?’

The drone of about thirty different conversations buzzed through the air. The voices were mostly female, filling the room like polite bumblebees. Harry moved between the desks, each one screened by blue padded partitions, and half-listened to the girls on the phones. She had an account with Sheridan herself. Maybe after this, she’d need to switch banks.

There were plenty of empty desks, but Harry wanted one at the back. She reached the end of the room and snagged an empty desk in the corner. She dumped her bag on the chair and waited for the round-faced girl at the next workstation to finish her call.

‘Apologies again about that, Mrs Hayes. Bye now.’ The girl typed something on her keyboard and winked at Harry. ‘Another unsatisfied customer.’

Harry smiled. ‘Is there any other kind?’

‘Not around here.’

Harry stuck out a hand. ‘I’m Catalina. I start work here this afternoon.’

‘Oh, great. I’m Nadia.’ She grasped Harry’s hand. Her nails were long and crimson, and she wore a silver ring on every plump finger, including her thumb.

Harry gestured to the empty desk. ‘Okay if I sit here?’

‘Sure, no one’s using it.’

Harry sat down and switched on the PC. ‘I don’t think I’ve been set up on the system yet. Any chance you could log me in?’

Nadia hesitated. ‘I’m not really supposed to do that.’

Keep it casual. ‘Oh, right. I just wanted another peek at the helpdesk system before Mrs Nagle gets back from lunch.’

Nadia chewed her bottom lip, and then smiled. ‘Why not? Don’t want her to catch you out on your first day, do we?’

She pulled off her headset and walked over, leaning across to type in her username and password. Harry could smell a mixture of Calvin Klein and peppermints.

‘There you go,’ Nadia said.

‘Thanks, I owe you one.’

Harry waited until Nadia was back at her desk, busy with another call. She adjusted the angle of her screen so that no one could see what she was doing, and went to work.

With a few keystrokes, she broke out of the helpdesk application into the computer’s operating system. Harry shook her head and almost tutted. It should have been better protected.

She poked around inside the PC, dipping into its files and directories, but it was a standard desktop and had no secrets to tell. She clicked her mouse and soon had a view of all her network connections:

F: \\Jupiter\shared

G: \\Pluto\users

H: \\Mars\system

L: \\Mercury\backup

S: \\Saturn\admin

This was more like it. This was her way into the bank’s central computers.

Harry stepped through the list of networked machines, trying to gain access. Some she could drop right into and view their files, but most of them blocked her at the first keystroke. She dug a little more, searching for something she could use. And then she found it: the system password file. Stored inside were the usernames and passwords of everyone on the network. It was her key into the system. She double-clicked with her mouse and tried to open the file. Locked.

Harry frowned and checked the time. Her heartbeat cranked up a notch. She’d been here twenty minutes already, and still had a lot of ground to cover. She discarded the password file and began ransacking the network, burrowing deep into its file system and sniffing every corner. She knew what she was looking for, and it had to be here somewhere. And sure enough, there it was, tucked away on a shared drive available for anyone to read: the unprotected backup copy of the password file.

The back of Harry’s neck tingled. It was always the same whenever she hacked into a system that was supposed to be secure. She wanted to beat a drum roll on the desk, but there was a time and a place for everything.

She opened the backup file and scanned its contents. The usernames were in clear text, but the passwords were all encrypted. Harry glanced over her shoulder. Nadia was chatting with a customer on the phone, her nails clacking on the keyboard.

Harry slipped a hand into her jacket pocket and drew out a CD which she slotted into the computer. It contained a password-cracker program, and she fed the backup file into it. She hunched over a computer manual and pretended to leaf through it as she waited for the cracker to do its job.

It could take a while. Dictionary attacks often did. The program was stepping through the entire dictionary, encrypting each word and trying to match it against the encrypted passwords in the file. After that, it would try letter and number combinations. By the end of it, she’d have all the passwords she needed.

Harry peeked at her watch again. Gooseflesh broke out on the back of her neck and she massaged it with her fingers. She had maybe ten minutes before the supervisor got back, and the cracker could take fifteen. It was going to be tight. But then, breaking and entering always was. That was what made it so irresistible.

Her father had always said she’d end up a burglar, ever since the day she’d hurled a brick through the kitchen window and climbed inside. She’d got locked out after school, but all she could think about was the port scan she’d launched from her computer that morning and what it might have found. She tried to explain this to her father later, as he crunched about in the broken glass, his face incredulous. She was sure he’d confiscate her PC, but instead, he upgraded its processor and presented her with her own set of house keys. To eleven-year-old Harry, he’d acquired some serious kudos that day.

And she had acquired a new name, because that was when her father had first started calling her Harry. There were times when she longed for an exotic Spanish name, like the one her sister had been given. Amaranta was tall with ash-blonde hair. She’d been born while Harry’s mother was still infatuated with her husband’s half-Irish, half-Spanish charm. But by the time Harry was born, her father’s financial disasters had forced them out of their mansion to a cramped terraced house, and her mother’s taste in names had dulled. Harry was the one who inherited her father’s sooty Spanish eyes and blue-black curls, but her mother had been unimpressed. Rejecting anything faintly Spanish, she had christened her daughter Henrietta after her own mother, a prim woman from the north of England.

‘But whoever heard of a burglar called Henrietta?’ her father had declared after the incident with the window, and had insisted on calling her Harry ever since. Now she never answered to anything else.

Harry checked the cracker program. It was almost finished. She scanned the list of passwords broken into clear text so far. There was Nadia’s. Username ‘nadiamc’, password ‘diamonds’. And Sandra Nagle’s: ‘sandran’, password ‘fortitude’. She shook her head. No good. She needed a heavy-hitter account, one with privileged access.

And there it was, at the bottom of the list. The network administrator’s password: asteroid27. Her toes wriggled inside her shoes. Now she was like a security guard with the master key to the building: she could go anywhere. She owned the network.

She logged in under her new privileged status, and immediately disabled the network’s auditing program. Now her activities couldn’t be recorded in the audit logs. She was invisible.

Harry prowled the servers and plunged into any file that looked interesting. Her eyes widened at some of the data she could access: customer credit ratings, bank revenues, employee salaries. She could view everyone’s emails, including those belonging to the chairman of the bank.

She hopped into another database and tried to make sense of the numbers in front of her. Her fingers froze on the mouse when she realized that she was looking at some of the bank’s most confidential customer information: account numbers, PIN codes, credit-card details, usernames and passwords. The stuff of hackers’ dreams, and most of it wasn’t even encrypted.

Harry scrolled through the data. It would be so easy to lift money out of these accounts. No one would even know it had happened. She was a ghost on the system, and left no footprints.

‘She’s back early.’

Harry looked across at Nadia, who was nodding towards the other end of the room. Sandra Nagle was standing by the double doors, consulting a clipboard.

Shit. Time to move.

Harry’s fingers jitterbugged over the keys. She copied the list of cracked passwords on to her CD, and dumped some customer account data and security PINs on to it for good measure.

The copy was slow to execute, and she looked up to check on Sandra Nagle. She was working her way down the room, stopping every few paces to check in with a helpdesk operator.

Harry knew she should wrap it up, knew she was taking a risk, but she still had one thing left to do. Manipulating the mouse, she disguised one of her own files and stashed it in a corner of the network. She always liked to leave a calling card.

The woman strolled in her direction, making notes on her clipboard. She stopped to interrogate a girl sitting a few feet away from Harry.

Harry cleared the system event logs to obliterate any possibility that she could be traced. She re-enabled the auditing facility and then glanced up.

Sandra Nagle was looking right at her.

Moisture trickled from Harry’s armpits. She heard the swish of nylon mashing against nylon as the woman marched towards her. She closed down her access to the network and flipped the helpdesk application back into view just as Sandra Nagle reached her desk.

The woman was breathing hard. She was so close that Harry could see the pale hairs on her upper lip.

‘Just who are you, and what do you think you’re doing?’

‘Are you Sandra Nagle?’ Harry stood up and flung her bag across her shoulder, snatching out the CD and slipping it back into her pocket. ‘I’ve been waiting for you.’

‘What –’

Harry brushed past her and marched towards the doors, trying to ignore the trembling in her knees.

‘I’ve been sent in by IT to check the health of your systems,’ she said. ‘You’ve got serious virus problems here.’

Sandra Nagle was close behind her. ‘How –’

‘You don’t need to cease operations right away, but I hope for your own sake you’ve been following the bank’s anti-virus procedures.’

The woman’s step faltered. Harry looked back over her shoulder.

‘I see. No doubt you’ll be hearing from IT in due course.’

She pushed against one of the double doors, but it wouldn’t open. She tried the other one. Locked.

‘Hang on, who did you say you were?’ Sandra Nagle was stomping after her.

Fuck it.

Harry spotted the door-release button on the wall. She pressed it and heard a click. She shoved open the doors and raced across the reception area. Melanie stared at her, her mouth wide open.

Harry burst through the glass doors into the sunlight and raced down the street.

Electrified by adrenaline, Harry sprinted alongside the canal, her shoes smacking against the pavement and the blood drumming through her body. When she was sure no one was following her, she slowed to a walk and then perched on the canal wall to cool down.

Water hissed through the tall rushes by the banks and a light breeze buffeted her face. When the thumping in her chest had eased off, she fished her phone out of her bag and dialled.

‘Hi, Ian? Harry Martinez here, from Lúbra Security. I’ve just finished the penetration test on your systems.’

‘Already?’

‘Yeah, I hacked in and got all I needed.’

‘Jesus. Hey, lads, have we had any IDS alarms?’

Harry could hear some commotion in the background. ‘Relax, Ian, your Intrusion Detection System is fine. I didn’t come through from the outside.’

‘You didn’t? But we were expecting a perimeter attack.’

‘Yeah, I know you were.’ Harry winced. ‘Sorry.’

‘Ah Jesus, Harry.’

‘Listen, a huge number of hacker exploits are inside jobs. You need to protect yourselves.’

‘No kidding.’

‘So I came in through the bank’s own network, and got admin access –’

‘You what?’

‘– and found the customer bank accounts and PIN numbers.’

‘Ah fuck it.’

‘Let’s just say your internal security doesn’t look too good. But a few simple precautions should sort it out. I’ll make some recommendations in the report.’

‘But how the hell did you get in?’

‘A bit of social engineering, and some hard neck. If it makes you feel any better, I nearly got caught.’

‘It doesn’t. What a mess.’

‘Sorry, Ian. Just thought I’d give you some warning before your management gets wind of it.’

‘Well, thanks, I appreciate that. But I’m still dog meat.’

‘It’s not as bad as it sounds.’ Harry’s phone beeped. ‘I left a stash of hacker tools behind, just to test your anti-virus software. But we can go through that later when we do a clean-up.’ Her phone beeped again. ‘Sorry, Ian, got to go. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.’

She took the incoming call.

‘Hey there, Harry, how’s the break-in going?’

Harry smiled. It was Imogen Brady, a support engineer from the Lúbra Security office. She pictured her friend sitting at her desk, her feet not quite reaching the floor. Imogen looked like a Chihuahua, with huge eyes in a gamine face. She was one of the best hackers Harry had ever worked with.

‘I’m just finished,’ Harry said. ‘What’s going on back there?’

‘Mister Loads-a-dosh is looking for you.’

She was referring to their boss, Dillon Fitzroy. Rumour had it that he’d become a multi-millionaire at the age of twenty-eight during the dot.com boom. That was nine years ago. He’d founded Lúbra Security shortly afterwards, expanding it by merging with other software companies until it was now one of the biggest in the business.

‘What does he want?’ Harry said.

‘Who knows? Maybe a date?’

Harry rolled her eyes. Imogen may have looked as though a breeze could blow her away, but when it came to digging for gossip she was a terrier.

‘Why don’t you just put me through to him?’ Harry said.

‘Okey-dokey.’

A few seconds later, Dillon’s voice came on the line.

‘Harry? You finished over at Sheridan?’

Judging from the background acoustics, he was yelling into a conference phone from several feet away.

‘I’m done,’ Harry said. ‘Except for the paperwork.’

‘Ditch it. I’ve another job for you.’

‘Right now?’ She was starving and could smell the coffee and bacon rolls from the sandwich bars in Baggot Street. She stood up and strolled towards the canal bridge.

‘Yeah, right now. Send me on the Sheridan details, I’ll get Imogen to compile the report. I want you on another vulnerability assessment.’

Harry could hear the click of his keyboard in the background. Trust Dillon not to waste an opportunity to multi-task. His left hand was probably flexed across his laptop like a pianist’s, while his right hand made notes on a pad.

‘So where to this time?’ Harry said.

‘The IFSC, and the client has asked especially for you. I told them you’re the best.’

‘Thanks, Dillon, you’re a gent.’ Now she was glad of the kitten heels. The International Financial Services Centre was definitely upmarket.

‘Call me when you’ve finished,’ Dillon said. ‘We’ll grab some dinner and you can fill me in.’

She felt her eyes widen. Doubly glad of the kitten heels. ‘Okay.’ Before she could let herself wonder what dinner might mean, she said, ‘So tell me more about the IFSC job. Do we know what kind of systems they have?’

‘Nope, you’ll find all that out when you meet them …’ Dillon paused. ‘If you ask me, I think they want to look you over first.’

Harry stopped in the middle of the pavement. ‘Why would they want to do that?’

Dillon hesitated for just a second too long. ‘Look, maybe this isn’t such a good idea after all. Maybe I’ll put Imogen on to it.’

Harry stuck a hand over her ear to block out the din of traffic. ‘Okay, what’s going on here? Who’s the client?’

She heard him suck in air through his teeth as he thought about his answer.

‘All right, it was a stupid idea,’ he said. ‘It’s KWC.’

The adrenaline shot out of Harry’s system like water from a burst main. She stumbled over to the canal wall and sank back on to the cold stone.

KWC. Klein, Webberly and Caulfield, one of the most prestigious investment banks in the city, servicing some of the wealthiest individuals and corporations in Europe. It was headquartered in New York, with offices in London, Frankfurt and Tokyo, as well as here in Dublin.

It was also the company her father had worked for before they sent him to prison.