Zero Day_ A Novel - Mark Russinovich [100]
51
MANHATTAN, NEW YORK
HOTEL LUXOR
EAST THIRTIETH STREET
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 2
12:59 A.M.
There had been a moment when Jeff and Daryl left the law firm, as they’d walked those few blocks to the Hotel Luxor, when Daryl knew she should have taken a taxi to her own hotel. She’d waited for him to say something, to thank her for her help, to arrange to meet the next day, but instead he’d walked to his hotel talking the entire time about what he’d just learned. She’d meant to say good-night, but for the first time since they’d met, she sensed, on some emotional level, he needed her to stay.
“Now we know Sue was ‘Dragon Lady,’” Jeff said as they stepped onto the street relieved at last to have some concrete information. “I traced her back two weeks to her first posting with it. She’d put up more than a dozen since the first, listing an e-mail address for Superphreak to contact her at.”
“What came of it?” Daryl asked.
“Nothing, from what I can see. There were a lot of crackpot replies but only a handful read as if the writer had had dealings with this Superphreak guy.”
“What did they say?” she asked, hoping this was good news.
“He’s supposed to be some kind of hacker legend. A few years ago he found two vulnerabilities in Windows Vista shortly after it was released. He posted the details before Microsoft learned of them, so it was months before they released the patches.”
“That’s not protocol. He was supposed to advise Microsoft.”
Jeff snorted. “Sure, but by publishing earlier he gained credibility with the cracker community as someone who doesn’t go totally by the rules. Since then, though, he’s become pretty reclusive.”
Despite herself, Daryl found herself intrigued by the hacker’s obvious brilliance. Why can’t people like that use their brains for the common good? she thought. “What do the hackers say about him?”
“He’s Russian, so we had that right. And he’s a genius in writing certain viruses.”
Daryl grimaced. “That’s no surprise.”
“Lately his specialty has been rootkits.” Since Jeff had first confirmed Sue had made indirect contact with Superphreak, he’d had an idea and decided now was the time to approach Daryl with it. “You know, it’s occurred to me that if we could talk to him and convince him, by hook or by crook, to give us all the rootkits and variants he’s written, we’d be weeks, even months, ahead of this. The vendors could do a rush job on signatures and patches.”
“Then I’ve got good news for you. We’ve got a name.” Daryl was grinning.
“How?”
“My team has been hard at work tracing the usage of the word Superphreak. We didn’t have much luck in an open search but got lucky in the NSA’s archives of closed hacker forums and chat rooms. We found a key post from several years ago when a hacker was chatting with Superphreak and called him Vlad. Then we searched for a Vlad and came up with over a dozen, but only one of them with a post related to the same technical data discussed in Superphreak chats. His last name was in the e-mail address in the forum posting: vkoskov@zhtskky.ru. There was only one hacker forum posting using this account, but our search found it, which is why they say that everything you ever did is somewhere on the Net. After that it was simple.”
“I would think he’d have been more careful,” Jeff said.
“This was several years ago. I don’t think he was giving security much thought then. His name appears to be Vladimir Koskov, and I have an address for him in Moscow.”
“Do you think it’s valid?” Jeff wanted to believe this was their first real break, but it seemed too easy, too simple.
“Probably.” Daryl nodded. “Or at least I think it’s where he was living when he registered that first e-mail account.”
Jeff paused a moment. “Someone should pay him a visit.”
“I’ve already made the request, but it will be weeks before I get a response through channels, and even then it might not be a positive one. They have to go through the embassy in Moscow, and I’ll be told they have better things to