Five-minute Mysteries 2. Ken Weber

he discovers?

       Click here for the solution

      4

      Closing In on the Hacker

      The argument around the table was turning hot. The majority of the ICS team was confident they had identified the hacker, and wanted to arrest him, but Tara Kiniski was holding out. That mattered, because Tara headed up the team. Technically, hers was only a temporary appointment, for the simple reason that the team itself was temporary. The International Computer Security group had been put together by the RCMP two years before, when the World Trade Organization and the Canadian government announced that the next WTO conference would be held in Quebec.

      As its title suggested, the team was in charge of computer security for the conference, and almost right away there was more work than they could handle.

      Even before Tara had gathered all the code-slingers and chip-jocks and various geeks (from day one they’d been called the Geek Squad) she felt she needed – in fact, even before there was really any useful information to hack into – their own system had been penetrated. Nobody on the team, even the non-computer types, was surprised when it happened. Devoted hackers spend ten to twelve hours a day and more, seven days a week, trying to score in this way, so it made sense that someone might get in at the early stages. But at least the penetration convinced Tara’s superiors that the off-the-shelf software set up to communicate across thirty-seven different countries came with firewalls that were next to useless, and that better defensive resources were necessary. It also made the ICS team more cautious, so when a tip came from the U.S. Secret Service some time later, they treated it seriously.

      Because the American president would be attending the conference for two days, the Secret Service had immediately begun investigating every possible political opponent of the WTO. Almost as a reflex, the first one it looked at was “Randy Andy,” Randalar Singh Anderjit, for he headed up an anti-free trade group that was regularly blamed, sometimes legitimately, for disrupting international conferences. Everyone involved with the WTO expected interference from Randy Andy, but what had caught the interest of both the Secret Service and the ICS team was an unknown face, a long-haired, twenty-something male who showed up in photographs alongside Anderjit right after the Quebec conference was announced. A search of police records revealed that he was on the FBI’s list of known hackers. A quick dig into some archived files identified him as an ex-student, first of McGill University in Montreal, where Randy Andy had studied, and then of Berkeley in California, expelled from both schools for allegedly hacking into their records and altering reams of data.

      But for a bit of coincidence, this tip would not have merited more than the normal precautions from the ICS team, even though the subject, or at least, someone who was a dead ringer for him, was discovered to be renting a room in Quebec’s Old Town area. However, on the very same day the advice came, Tara discovered that their system had been cracked yet again – not the original, weakly defended commercial system, but their new, super-secure one. Someone had managed to insert what she and her fellow geeks described as a “demon,” a software program that operated on its own within their system. With this demon, and working through an anonymous server – probably in Bulgaria, Tara suspected, for that country was notorious in the cyberworld for such service – some hacker somewhere was now able to get into WTO files with an ordinary laptop.

      Still, the news was not all bad, for Tara had a few shots of her own to take. Using a piece of hyper-trace software that she cobbled together herself, and with the help of the telephone company, she and the team discovered in less than twenty-four hours where that offending laptop was being used: the room in Old Town that the tip subject was renting! At that point, the “civilians” – the non-geeks – on the ICS team had swung into action. Within another twenty-four hours, they had a set of perfect fingerprints – “They’re so good you’d think we’d taken him into a station and printed him!” Sergeant Proulx had said – and a full-time stakeout had been established in a house across the street.

      But now there was a conflict. After a week of careful watching, the team, especially the civilians, wanted to have done with it and make an arrest.

      “Look, we got him cold!” Sergeant Proulx insisted. “He’s got to be the hacker ’cause your trace ... er ... er ... trace thing or whatever, placed him. And the stakeouts, they’re all saying he pounds away on the keyboard for hours and hours. This is the guy! Let’s take him out! Then all you have to do is clean out that demon or whatever it is and we’re in the clear! What are we waiting for? He’s got to be the one!”

      That sentiment echoed around the table emphatically enough to make Tara get to her feet when she replied.

      “No. We just keep watching. I don’t believe this guy is Randy Andy’s buddy. Or even a hacker at all for that matter. I think he’s a plant, set up to direct us away from the real one. If you re-examine the evidence and think about it for a minute, you’ll agree.”

      ?

      Why does Tara Kiniski believe this is not the hacker the ICS team must catch?

       Click here for the solution

      5

      A Safe Shelter?

      The man lying on his stomach at the top of the ridge was named Tyl. In his village he had been known as Tyl the Miller, but his mill was gone now. So was his entire village. The Burgundians had burned it weeks before, just as they had razed every other village in their path as they marched through Flanders to the sea.

      Tyl raised himself just enough to get a better look at the ruined building in the distance. He’d been watching it for hours, and his muscles protested the move. The Burgundians had been through here, too, he could see. What had once been a mill just like his was now part of a long, charred slash on the landscape. The mill was not completely destroyed, however, and that’s what made it worth the long watch. It just might provide shelter for a while. Provided there were no Burgundians there – or worse, one of the roving gangs of bandits that followed in their wake. Even another wanderer like Tyl could be dangerous if he were bigger and stronger.

      Tyl moved to his left, keeping behind the sparse brush that grew along the ridge. The new angle gave him a better view of the flock of pigeons that had made their home in the mill, and allowed him to look inside through a missing wall. The other walls still stood strongly enough to hold up the damaged roof, where the pigeons strutted so importantly. It was a wind-powered mill like most in Flanders and, while the vanes had been torn down, the tower was intact. There was enough of the building left, Tyl could see, to keep out wind and rain. The only problem: was anybody else there?

      He sighed deeply and lowered his body to the ground again. He was weak, desperately weak, but his wife and their one surviving child hidden behind him in the trunk of a hollow tree were even worse off. Tyl was in his prime, if it could be called that, and had withstood the effects of starvation better than they.

      The year was 1384, but Tyl didn’t know that. It wouldn’t have mattered to him if he had. For generations that year would be known throughout Flanders simply as “the time the Burgundians came.” The previous year had been an even scarier marker. It was known as “the time with no summer” for, following a beautiful, promising spring, the rains had come and never left. The whole of Flanders, low-lying and flat to begin with, had turned into a sea of soggy mud. Creeks and canals had overflowed, crops had rotted in the fields, and people soon knew that famine was inevitable. By late fall they had begun to cast a reluctant, hungry eye at their animals. By mid-winter all the animals were gone. There was no hay or grain