For Mayhem or Madness
7
Hunting for What Isn’t There
THE NEXT STOP on our journey, after a long day of travel, was San Francisco. By this time, it must have come to the attention of Jordan’s watchdogs that I was emptying the cash cards. I’d been withdrawing a thousand or fifteen hundred dollars a day, but I collected receipts for my expenses and itemized everything I spent in a little log book. Paper. Before long, my digital trail would evaporate. I wanted a record of my journey should I ever be called upon to prove my location. I even snapped a photo of everyplace Maizie and I had stopped. Yes, there was even a photo of Monique holding her in her arms. Maizie was becoming quite the photo hound and happily posed for the pictures.
The Act III Motel had been pet-friendly but in California, it seemed the entire town was pet-friendly. Especially to small dogs. We walked several blocks from our hotel to a Chinese restaurant but Maizie wanted to be carried back like all the other small dogs she saw. She’s only eighteen pounds. I carried her.
Our day was filled with moving from WiFi hotspot to hotspot around the city. I was probing the defenses of some of the companies I suspected he might have worked for. And how did I decide that? I looked for a company I might want to work for.
It hadn’t escaped me that Hacker X and I were similar. His attack against Carlisle had been particularly vicious but the list of attacks he’d launched were not limited to religious institutions. I wondered, in fact, if I had merely beaten him to the punch when it came to Philanthropolis. His attacks on corporate entities seemed more surgical. A bank president, a chief financial officer, a doctor, and a lawyer had all been reduced to bankruptcy, but none had been completely erased. And they were scattered across the country, nothing that would help me pinpoint his physical location. Cyberspace doesn’t recognize state lines or national frontiers.
It was thinking about how similar we were and how I felt about executives in general that led me to a breakthrough.
It surprised me that Hacker X had never launched an attack on a business or a person in Silicon Valley. The area is rich with potential targets, but also with the highest concentration of top-notch programmers in the world. One characteristic of hackers is that they want to pit themselves against the best in order to show that they are supreme. The cliché is a theme in the James Bond movie GoldenEye when Boris Grishenko constantly repeats ‘I am invincible.’ That’s what every hacker wants to believe and the only way to prove it is to take down every other hacker.
I’d delved into the dark web on many occasions. Andi used to say I went to Nowhere Land. Here, hackers communicate, illegal merchandise is sold, and secrets are hidden. I was searching forum archives for signs of missing hackers. Who was here two years ago that isn’t here now?
Of course, it wasn’t just people who showed up on this kind of search, it was also companies. Thirty percent of new businesses fail within the first two years. Fifty percent in five years. Only one in four ever see their fifteenth anniversary. It’s a bit worse in the high-tech sector. And the ones that get the most attention are those that venture capitalists have sunk a lot of money into without adequate management.
And that was where I discovered Xebar Research. The total lifespan of the business was seven years. Two years ago, its assets had been acquired by a holding company and the doors were closed. All fifty employees were locked out. No final paychecks. No vacation accrual. No company stock value in 401ks. Evaporated.
I wondered first if this had been the first attack of Hacker X. The company and all its employees had been dismantled. But as I dug deeper, it became obvious that investors in the company had carefully planned its demise. The company had shown some great potential in combating malicious websites with its software, but there didn’t seem to be a market for taking apart phishing sites in China. The typical shortsightedness of corporate decision-makers wants a defense against attack, not an attack on potential enemies. The company was sinking into debt and the investors pulled the plug.
The investors. A venture capital firm that included a bank in New York, a capital consortium in Florida, and a legal firm in Washington. A banker, a chief financial officer, and a lawyer.
After two days in San Jose, Maizie and I moved south again, but this time my nightly searches had a different intent. I’d located the link between the bankrupt investors, but I couldn’t figure out how either the doctor or the preacher fit into the group. What I needed now was to get into the records of the former company and find out who was employed there.
It didn’t take long. By the time I was walking the beach at Malibu with Maizie, I’d found all the corporate records. If you acquire the assets of a technology company, you need to have the technology. The entire Xebar computer network had been re-established inside the holding company behind a so-called impervious firewall that took me half an hour to breach. I didn’t waste time looking into all the protected research. I grabbed all the company’s human resources files.
Ego plays a part in everyone’s life. Without it, we’d have no sense of self-worth. My bet was that Hacker X would gladly destroy all trace of himself, but he wouldn’t touch the tech he was proud of. I loaded the HR files onto my remote server and began running my analytics on the records. I woke up after my nap to find there was no employee number thirty-one.
Dates of employment for employees thirty and thirty-two were sequential, showing the same start dates. But the blank spot at slot thirty-one declared to me that there had once been another employee who started that day.
It should be easy to just call the other two guys and ask them who else started work that week, but there was no way I could do that without exposing myself to them. If these guys were as smart as I suspected they were, they’d get suspicious of that type of inquiry immediately. I needed the name.
Next stop, the U.S. Patent Office.
Both of the other employees were listed as research engineers, so I had to assume they worked with my missing engineer. I started looking up patents with their names on them, issued since their employment date. Patents are part of the intellectual property of the corporation and are owned by the corporation. But the patent office doesn’t recognize the corporation as an inventor. People invent. The patent application will always list the people who are credited with the invention.
I cross-referenced the names on all the patents with the names of employees at Xebar. One name appeared on the front page images of the patents that didn’t appear in the employee lists.
Terrance Whiteman.
There were all kinds of explanations for a name on the patent not being in the employee list. It didn’t necessarily mean Terrance Whiteman was employee number thirty-one at Xebar Research. But it was evidence enough for me pursue it. The question was how to get confirmation and find out where he was located now.
It didn’t take long to compile a complete employment profile on the five engineers whose names appeared on patents with Terrance most frequently. From names, I had full resumes and work history in a matter of minutes. For everyone except Terrance. No one even remotely fitting his profile showed up on my searches. It was almost like he didn’t exist. I needed to contact one of the engineers.
“Ron, this is Jason Sanborn at Sanborn and Jefferson Resource Locators,” I said over the phone. “Yes, that means I’m a headhunter. I’m wondering if you could spare a few minutes to talk about a possible new opportunity.”
“I’m employed,” Ron Dorsey said.
“Well, of course you are,” I laughed. “That is one of the reasons we’re interested in you. It shows that you have a strong marketable talent that is in high demand. And it shows your stability and quickness to adapt to new circumstances.”
“What do you mean?”
“We’re aware of the sudden closure of Xebar Research, sir, but the date of employment you list on LinkedIn is only five weeks after that catastrophe. Congratulations on landing such a fine position. Computer security, as you know, is an area of high concern in our financial community, especially with the rumors of increased attacks on our systems from abroad.”
“They aren’t rumors.”
“You see? Your intimate knowledge of what is happening in that arena is exactly what we are looking for.”
“I don’t think I’m interested at the moment, thank you. You should have been recruiting us days after Xebar, not years.”
“I certainly understand that. We’re rather new in the field. Are there any references to others you might give us? Especially others who might have worked with you like David Jakes or Terrance Whiteman? Do you think they might be interested?”
“Dave was always a climber. He moved up to Washington State and went to work at Google. He’s a good manager. Not exactly what you’d want if you were really looking for an engineer, though.”
“What about Terrance?”
“Too late. Terry passed away not long after Xebar closed.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. You were close?”
“Yeah. We started there the same day. He and Leslie moved out to Vegas or Henderson to take a casino security job and he got hit with an aggressive cancer that took him out in about three months. Too bad, really,” Ron said. “They were good people.”
“What a loss. I guess I’ll scratch that one off my list. Let me give you my number in case you reconsider your options, Ron. It just doesn’t seem your talents should be buried so deeply in protecting someone else’s checkbook. I’d like to find you a position that uses your skills more aggressively. Have a good day,” I said. I hung up without leaving the number. In a week, this phone would be non-existent anyway.
I loaded Maizie in the car and we hit I-15 out of San Diego and headed north to Las Vegas.
The world keeps changing. People can’t deal emotionally with all the threats to their safety in an era of cyberterrorism and high-profile attacks. We’ve got kids afraid to go to school for fear of guns in the hands of local bullies. We have police who shoot first and then don’t bother with questions. We have ‘challenged young men’ setting off bombs and mentally unstable old men spraying bullets into crowds. We are constantly warned about identity theft online, reminded to change passwords, and we’re alarmed that social websites are spying on us.
Digital natives, who have never lived a day without being connected, are safer online than their parents and grandparents who had to adapt to technology. Most can recognize a phishing scheme where a popular meme is used to collect personal information under the guise of fun games like ‘What is your Hobbit name?’ or ‘Let us guess how old you are.’ Some don’t care. It’s just part of the world they live in. Others avoid disclosing information, unaware that their profiles have been raided for even more information.
But with our focus on the digital world and feeling that is where we are most vulnerable, direct contact phishing is ignored or not even recognized. Like my recruitment call with Ron Dorsey. I’m certain that an online contact with him would have been ignored, deleted, or even shuffled off to a spam folder where it was never seen by him. But a targeted phone call that played on his ego revealed that Dave Jakes had moved to the Seattle area and that Terry Whiteman was reported dead in Nevada where his wife Leslie now lived as a widow, presumably in Las Vegas or Henderson.
No matter how willing Terry was to commit digital suicide, I somehow didn’t think that the man Ron described as ‘good people’ would kill off his wife as well. I didn’t think he was still operating out of Nevada. FBI files indicated they suspected he was hiding in a foreign country that had little or no Internet control. But I had something the FBI didn’t.
I had a name for Hacker X. It had only taken me three-and-a-half weeks.
The six-hour drive to Henderson, Nevada took Maizie and me eight-and-a-half hours. She’s a little girl and has a little bladder. And frankly, I hadn’t been sleeping much lately. Taking frequent breaks helped with road fatigue. I stopped at every national coffee shop chain store between San Diego and Las Vegas. And a few truck stop diners.
That chain of coffee shops is not where I get great coffee. Compared to, say Tovoni’s, or even the Daybreak, in Seattle, it didn’t register on the ‘great coffee’ scale. I kind of consider their product to be the lowest common denominator of what it takes to be considered coffee. There are a lot of them and with California’s infrequent rest areas all closed for repairs, their clean restrooms were also appreciated. The hundred and twenty-mile stretch from Barstow to Primm was the longest we had to endure without a rest. Maizie scowled at me but settled in her bed when I gave her a treat and a little cold coffee in her bowl.
We pulled into a cheap motel south of McCarran airport about nine that night and both collapsed into sleep.
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