DarkMarket_ Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You - Misha Glenny [12]
Darryl shrugged his shoulders. He wasn’t unduly surprised by the engineer’s reply, because security systems are sensitive devices and, by his own admission, he was running various scanning tools, which look like hacking devices to his own anti-malware software. In any event, Darryl figured, even if the engineer was running the program, he was probably just chatting to his mates in company time. Now at least he would realise that it was the wrong thing to do and that, if he did use it again, Darryl would be watching. So he just forgot about it.
Two weeks later, however, the same thing happened. This time, Darryl decided, he would wake the mighty VNC beast. Diving into the engineer’s computer, he started to search for the communications program – which he quickly identified as Miranda Instant Messaging. Many people now use instant messaging, which enables them to talk in real time to friends by sending a few words or sentences in little text boxes. In most cases Windows Instant Messenger (IM) can only talk to someone else who has the same software. Miranda’s advantage lies in the fact that you can communicate with a variety of different IM programs. It is especially beloved of some obsessional computer users.
Before unleashing the VNC, Darryl checked the engineer’s hard drive to see if he could spot anything peculiar, but the search proved fruitless. It was about 12.15, lunchtime. Just the time, Darryl thought, to run a little VNC session on his machine to ascertain once and for all whether this unauthorised program really was running on the engineer’s computer.
Miranda IM was as nothing compared to what Darryl saw when the VNC began to explore the secrets of the employee’s computer. The engineer had opened ten text documents at the same time and was scrolling through them at unnatural speed. Darryl was open-mouthed. Never had he come across anyone able to work with documents so quickly. All he could see as he watched the engineer’s screen was a blur of numbers, symbols and words. Slowly he realised that the engineer was copying parts of the document and then pasting them into a separate wordpad file.
He could not yet grasp what was happening, or from where all these documents were coming, but as far as he could establish, this did not resemble anything like company work. The name of the file into which he was pasting the text was confusing. It was called ‘Sierra Leone’. The engineer was indeed working on an oil-refinery project in Sierra Leone. Darryl breathed a sigh of relief – perhaps it was legitimate business after all. It was later on that it dawned on Darryl why the engineer had chosen this name. If anyone walked past his computer, he would just minimise the file and all they would see on the task bar was a tab named ‘Sierra Leone’: the very project he was working on.
It would have fooled Darryl, too, had the VNC not then spotted an unregistered drive – F: – which indicated that the engineer was using a portable disk of some type. Darryl sent the VNC into the mystery drive and ordered it to copy the tens of thousands of documents that he found there.
Still unsure how to proceed, and not yet in a position to establish what on earth was going on, Darryl ordered his faithful VNC to explore the innards of the suspect computer one more time. He programmed it to start taking screenshots of the engineer’s PC every thirty seconds. Looking at the computer in real time was baffling. It was impossible to identify what the data actually represented. But when he saw the screenshots – frozen images of the engineer’s activity – he gleaned a pretty good idea of what was going on: these were hundreds upon hundreds of credit-card numbers, bank accounts, personal details, PIN numbers and email addresses. This had absolutely nothing to do with the development of Sierra Leone’s nascent oil-refining capacity.
Darryl then printed one particularly dense page from Bank of America Online, and took it to his MD, Mike Smith. Within minutes Smith had picked up the phone and called the