Page 156 of The Daddy P.I. Casefiles: The Second Collection
Lindy laces his fingers together and flexes his palms until his joints pop. “Lucky or good?”
“Lucky, and if you have nothing to do, you can get a botnet going and attack Lumpstone’s homepage.”
“Why? It won’t affect their intranet.”
“Best case, they host their own and it overloads their servers. Worst case, it just gives their IT staff a collective migraine so they’re less likely to notice what I’m doing.”
Yes, a sudden surge of traffic can also tip off those self-same IT staff that they’re under hack, but generally, it keeps them so busy just trying to keep their server online, they don’t have any capacity to counter a hack.
“Eh,” Lindy grumbles. “High school hacking.”
Despite his grumbling, he gets on with it. I show him Project Pistachio and let him loose on the amateurs still buzzing around in the invitational framework. Whether he uses their systems to create the bot or sets up some sort of click-bait front, I don’t know and don’t care. What I know is that when my brute-force attack finally cracks the server, lag time goes through the roof because the company servers are creaking under the weight of the traffic to Lumpstone’s site.
“I’m in,” I tell Lindy.
“I’m out,” he says, picking up his empty water bottle and waving it at De Leon.
With a grumbled, “brat,” De Leon hauls himself out of his chair and heads into the kitchenette.
I try to suppress a smile.
Lumpstone is running an older version of WEDGE, one I’m very familiar with from the Navy. I’m in in less than ten minutes. I turn off everything but the emergency lighting, although they’re probably not in a windowless cinderblock the way I am, but sometimes labs don’t have outside light. I disable all electronic locks; they do have electronic locks on the animalcages, so those go off, too. Finally, I turn off the CCTV inside and outside before installing a super-password on the systems I’ve disabled. Twenty-character, randomly generated password. Chew on that for a while, you animal-torturing assholes.
Lindy’s struggling with his version of WEDGE, which has been patched. Under the combined assault of our crackers, it falls in less than an hour. I let Lindy do the honors with the lights, locks, CCTV, and super-password.
Finally, he pushes back from his laptop and holds his palm out to me. Rolling my eyes, I high-five him.
“Four hours, fifteen minutes, door to door, Maxie.”
I nod and sit back in my chair. “Good hack. Log out of Snarlzilla so I stop paying by the minute.”
I’m not, but he doesn’t know that.
Lindy nods and taps his keyboard. “I’ll let Sasha and Jo know.”
A message box pops up on my screen.
CenturyGirl: I got it. He has the camera on his laptop blocked, but I got clear footage of him from yours. I can edit you out, don’t worry.
DM4XX: Thanks for everything.
I delete all the programs I’ve uploaded, log out, and close my laptop.
Lindy stretches and tucks his hands behind his head. “Tell me.”
“Tell you what?”
“How you’ve burned me. I know you have. I knew it as soon as you insisted on providing the hosting. I didn’t fight any of it, Max. I let him put the hood on me. I went where you told me to. I used your dark web server. I didn’t call for help. I’m not pushing back. I just want to know what to expect.”
I blow out a long breath. “If this is truly where it ends, nothing.”
“And if this isn’t where it truly ends?” Lindy asks.
“You don’t want to go there,” De Leon growls.
Lindy slants him a glance. “Hypothetically.”
“Hypothetically,” I say. “If this wasn’t the end and you tried to pull me in again, I’d release the recording of the hack.”
