Best Not to Ask

In the movies and so much cyberpunk literature, computer hacking is dynamic and active. Fingers fly across keyboards, people speak to each other in esoteric slang, and everything must be completed before some impactful, life-changing deadline. Like so many things, the reality could never live up to its fiction. Instead, it was just him, sitting alone in this room, late into the night, watching line after line of error messages fill his screen as he hoped desperately that he might get lucky.

Finding the unguarded entrance had been the result of good fortune. That was the main advantage of targeting these smaller organisations; they were much more likely to leave something undefended, to expose an endpoint that should have been secured. He’d found the software he needed for the task in a quiet corner of the internet. Who had created it? It was best not to ask. He searched every possible path and combination that might have been left available by an uncaring or unskilled administrator. After several days he found it; the locked door, left unprotected. Now he just had to pick the lock.

He sat waiting, his own machine sending request after request, trying every possible solution. Starting with the most common passwords, his laptop inserted key after key and he sat, hoping that the good fortune that led to him finding this way in would last long enough discover the key. None of the attempts were sent directly by him but were instead bounced off machines around the globe. Servers running in Kazakhstan or Chile or Indonesia and accepted payment cryptocurrency. Who ran these systems? It was best not to ask. Instead of a thousand requests from one source, the traffic would be broken down, a few attempts coming from one location, a few from another, simulating a real user perhaps struggling to remember a password, less likely to trigger an alarm, less likely to alert a guard.

Hour after hour, he sat in that dark room biting his nails, his body knotted in a ball of tension, crammed into a cheap office chair. Simultaneously, incredibly stressed and incredibly bored with nothing to do but wait and hope.

And then, just as hope was fading, success! His software guessed correctly, the lock clicked open and the bolts slid back in place. He almost leapt out of his chair and urgently began searching the system, trying to locate the information he'd been sent to discover.

Much like the security it was clear this database had been prepared by an amateur. With an organization of this size, it may even have been the same person. But after a few false starts and some more dumb luck, there it was laid out in front of him, every book, every customer, sale date, price, a complete record of who this antiquarian book dealer had sold to and when. Why was his client willing to pay and risk criminal penalties to steal this information? It was best not to ask questions.