The Messiah Secret - James Becker [10]
But Jesse McLeod wasn’t just any old hacker. He’d narrowly avoided a prison term at the age of fifteen when he’d wormed his way past three separate firewalls and numerous intruder detection systems to get inside a network at the Pentagon. He’d gained administrator access there, given himself a username and password, and used that network as a gateway that had allowed him to jump straight into another network based in Pennsylvania Avenue and operated by the White House. The reason he wasn’t prosecuted was probably largely due to embarrassment that a kid of his age had managed to outwit the best security consultants and computer experts in the American government and military.
He had been ordered to show these experts exactly how he’d managed to effect his intrusion, however, so that those loopholes could be closed, and he’d also been instructed to test all the Pentagon’s and the White House’s access points – under close supervision – to see if he could defeat those as well. He had, twice, which had resulted in four civilian administrators and three senior military officers losing their jobs within the next three weeks.
In the ten years since then, the FBI had watched Jesse McLeod very closely, but the threat of prison had frightened him, and after that episode he had become what was known as a ‘white hat hacker’. That meant he still trawled the internet, and still probed the sites he found, but if he worked his way into a system he announced the fact to the network administrator and suggested ways of closing the loopholes he’d exploited. He never copied data or did any damage inside the networks he cracked, and a handful of times he’d even been paid ‘consultancy fees’ by the target companies for his efforts.
At least, that was what the FBI believed. But like a lot of things the FBI believed, they were wrong. Jesse McLeod was constitutionally incapable of obeying the law, and that was one of the reasons why NoJoGen paid him such a large salary. The company needed access to the kind of data that was unavailable in the public domain – a less mealy-mouthed description of this activity would be industrial espionage – and relied on him to hack his way into whatever system held it, and then retrieve it.
But these days he was a lot more careful, and a lot more secretive. He had set up dozens of fake identities in China and Pakistan and the new states that had emerged following the break-up of the Soviet Union, places where he knew that American law enforcement would find it difficult, or even impossible, to track him, and used those as the apparent origin – the technical term was a ‘zombie server’ – for his probes. He’d even set up an account that purported to be located in North Korea – a country that offered no internet access at all to its population – just to see what the Fibbies would do about it. They hadn’t noticed.
And so, every night, while he slept peacefully in his penthouse, the sound of waves breaking on the shore below him, his untraceable electronic proxies trawled the web, probing systems and networks and looking for any references to whatever subjects the founder and majority shareholder of NoJoGen, John Johnson Donovan – known simply as ‘JJ’ – had asked him to locate.
His proxies never left any evidence of their intrusion, and merely copied whatever data they could find that related to the search string McLeod had loaded into their programs. When they’d completed their mission, each proxy automatically accessed one of several web-based email accounts and pasted the results into email messages. But these messages would never be sent, because all emails leave an electronic trail across the internet. Instead, all the messages were left on the servers as drafts, and McLeod was then able to access each email account, copy the contents of the draft