How to Kill Your Family(64)
I asked her who was doing this kind of hacking and she looked around the café quickly, as though we might be surrounded by people eager to know where to start. In actual fact, we were sitting between an elderly woman in a floral coat eating blueberry cake on one side, a Japanese couple who were busy taking selfies on the other, and a young guy with dark hair and a well-cut coat engrossed in a book sitting three tables in front of us.
‘The big stuff is done by nation states – China, Russia, the US – though they deny it. Second-tier hacking tends to be groups focused on extortion – using webcams to blackmail LGBT people in the Middle East, for example. Then you’ve got isolated teens in their bedrooms who are totally self-taught and do it for laughs, because they’re bored, who knows? They have time to mess with someone’s head by interfering with their doorbell or turning off their heating, and then boast about it on Reddit or 4Chan or Babel …’
After a few more questions and a promise to get in touch when the article was done, I made my exit, careful to avoid the couple still determined to get that perfect selfie, and headed back to work. I walked briskly through the back streets behind Oxford Street, mulling over whether I could risk recruiting an accomplice to help me hack Janine’s house or not. I’d been loath to outsource any part of my plan from the outset, unwilling to add any obvious tripwires when there would be so many already. But I was sure that I couldn’t do it alone – my understanding of technology began and ended when I had to update my phone software – and I was already completely enamoured with the idea of Janine’s own home turning on her. Could I find someone I trusted enough to help me do it?
*
That weekend, I spent twenty-eight hours online, rubbing at my eyes every five minutes and alternating between coffee and wine depending on my energy levels. I looked at the sites Kiran had mentioned, reading thousands of posts by amateur hackers who boasted of their successes, crowing about infiltrating clouds, hubs, phones, and cameras in language that was almost completely alien to me. Was it lazy to imagine they were all scrawny 16-year-olds who’d not seen daylight for weeks? Perhaps, but I have no doubt it was accurate nonetheless. There were many posts from people asking hackers to help them, mainly to spy on partners suspected of cheating. ‘Girl (22) needs help to prove BF (28) is carrying on with co-worker. Help!’ was typical of such a plea. Normally the replies offered to take the conversation private, so I didn’t get to see what the result was, and whether a helpful hacker stepped up to the job.
But I was exhausted and tanked up on caffeine, so I posted a message. It didn’t matter if it failed to attract anyone, but it was worth a shot. It was vague and short, explaining that I was female (16, I figured that might appeal to some white-knight nerd), and wanted help to mess with my horrible stepmother. I won’t go into the details of some of the messages I received in the days that followed. Suffice to say, my plea was like honey to a bee. If the honey was a young vulnerable girl and the bee was a fucking swarm of old gross blokes. I replied to the least disgusting messages and blocked everyone else. I spent the next week drip-feeding further details to three users, seeing how they’d react, what they knew about hacking and what they’d want in return. The one I held out least hope for was ColdStoner17, who seemed not to be able to use proper words and replied at the most random times of day, often with gifs which I didn’t understand. I was about to cut him loose when he messaged me at 7 a.m. one day as I was getting ready for work.
Yo, he typed, when we freaking out the old lady then? I fucking hate my stepmom too. This can be like the therapy my dad won’t pay for. The language was basic but the full sentences were a start. I discovered that he was 17 (hence the username), lived in Iowa with his dad and the aforementioned evil stepmother, and spent a lot of time messing around on the internet when he should be doing his school work. I told him bluntly that it seemed unlikely he’d be a superstar hacker, but apparently I didn’t understand 17-year-olds very well at all. He spent the entire morning bombarding me with all the ways he could infiltrate laptop cameras, mess with baby monitors, and turn off people’s heating. It was mild stuff, but it still sounded more impressive than anything I could attempt, and so instead of binning him off, I engaged with him.
We talked a lot into the night on an encrypted instant messenger, as he told me how lonely he was and I told him fabricated stories about how much I hated my parents. The more we spoke, the more he relaxed and used proper spelling. He told me how much he loved reading, and we bonded over a love of Jack Kerouac (I have never read any Kerouac but Google kept me just about up to speed). I deliberately held off on any proper details about my plan, happy to form a relationship with him first, albeit one based on lies and sexist fairy-tale stepmother tropes.
This went on for a few weeks, as I attempted to act like the fictitious 16-year-old he thought I was, while also giving him a confidence boost that I reckoned would help him feel indebted to me. He confided in me about being bullied when he was younger because his parents had got a divorce (I guess Iowa wasn’t the most progressive of places) and he told me about his fears that he’d never get a girlfriend. Despite my attempts to keep it entirely chaste, sometimes I’d wake up to voice notes where he’d sing me little songs about how much I cheered him up, and I’d bat them away with smiley emojis. He was becoming infatuated. I’d forgotten how easy it was to manipulate teenage boys, but it came back to me pretty fast. I felt like I was on the right track with Pete (he told me his real name on day four, I told him that my name was Eve) and decided to press ahead and tell him a little bit more about what I wanted to do to Janine, my terrible stepmother.