Conspiracy Game (GhostWalkers, #4)(35)

Ian McGillicuddy, a tall Irishman, raised his hand. “I’m not very good on a computer, Lily.”

She smiled at him. “Actually, Ian, don’t feel alone. I use them on a daily basis, and it was Arly, our security expert, and eventually Flame who tracked this down. Flame? You want to explain to everyone what’s going on? You’re the one who finally figured it all out.”

Flame made a face and touched the cap on her head to make certain it was in place. Raoul Fontenot leaned over to bite her ear and whisper something that made her blush. She smacked him hard. “You’re such a perv, Raoul.”

“Don’t call me Raoul, Mrs. Fontenot,” he whispered overly loud. “I told you, Gator. They have to call me Gator.”

“Don’t you call me Mrs. Fontenot,” she hissed between her teeth, the color creeping up her neck.

“You married him,” Ian pointed out with a wide grin.

“I was tricked.” Flame shoved at Gator to move him away from her, but he didn’t appear to notice, not budging an inch.

“The computers,” Ryland reminded them.

“Sorry,” Flame muttered. “There’s a single Internet line coming into the house, a high-speed cable modem. The cable line hooks up to the cable modem. The modem, in turn, hooks to a router, which then distributes the cable signal to all computers. In this case, Dr. Whitney used a high-end snazzy, heavy-duty router because he has so many computers. We presumed Whitney,” she glanced at Lily, “or someone who knew about his work, tried to get access to his computers via the Internet connection, through the router. The router has a built-in firewall, as do each of the individual computers. We used the firewall software to monitor any attempted intrusions. There were random attempts here and there that you can expect to find on any computer these days. The attempts were easily rejected by the firewall and didn’t have the kind of systematic pattern I would have expected to see if someone was trying to get in.”

“Arly and Flame monitored the computers for several days with no luck at all of spotting evidence of my father attempting to break in,” Lily explained.

Flame nodded. “We kept daily logs on each computer.” She took the notebook Lily slid to her and opened it to a random page. “Here’s the event log for the last week. There were several random attacks from different IPs on UDP port 25601, like this one on Thursday at 10:39:17 A.M. from IP address 152.105.92.65. Or this one on Friday at 5:23:58 A.M. from IP address 59.68.234.64. They were all caught and stopped by the firewall and were all probably SeriousSam gamers looking for playmates—you can tell the game by the port they were trying to enter through.”

Ian scratched his head. “Sheesh, Flame, and I thought Lily couldn’t speak English.”

She smirked at him. “And you thought I was just a pretty face.”

“I thought you were a pain in the ass,” he said. “Now I know you are. You’re going to be holding this over my head, aren’t you?”

“Darn straight.” Flame tossed the log on the table. “At a certain point we realized someone was reading the key files on Lily’s computers. We found that out by noticing that the last accessed date on several files was very recent.”

“Wait.” Ian held up his hand. “I’m really trying to follow this. How can you know when someone accessed a file?”

“Every Windows file has three associated time stamps. Creation date, last modified date, and last accessed date. You can access or read a file without modifying it, hence the distinction between last accessed and last modified.”

“Okay, that makes sense,” Ian said. “Did you catch him?”

“I wish. We ramped up our monitoring of the firewalls, but we couldn’t link any of the random attempts to the reading of the files. We looked in all the usual places someone could insert a back door into the Windows operating system, but couldn’t find any evidence of any such back door. We were completely stumped.”

Lily laughed softly. “Arly and I were stumped. Flame suddenly jumped up and yelled, ‘Hardware back door.’ I had no idea what that meant, Ian, if that’s any consolation.”

Flame shrugged. “It was so obvious. We forgot the most obvious advantage Dr. Whitney had over other hackers. These are his computers. He could do anything he wanted with them. Unlike the usual hacker, he doesn’t have to sneak a virus, worm, or Trojan through the firewalls. Unlike software manufacturers, he doesn’t have to sell someone software with a back door in it. No, he has complete control over his own computers. He could literally drill a hole in the side of his computer and run a cable into it creating a private tap. All that time we wasted looking for a software back door when it had to be a hardware back door.”

“Then she went a little crazy,” Lily explained.

“A lot crazy. I just knew I was right, and for once we were going to have the opportunity to the turn the tables on Whitney,” Flame admitted.

“She was crawling around all the computers in the laboratory, picking up wires and following the network of cables from one computer to another. Then she held up the router and started yelling, ‘Look at this, look at this.’ I had no idea what I was supposed to be looking at.”

Flame grinned at her. “It had one too many wires coming out of the box. I knew we had him by the—” She broke off. “I knew we had him. The file protection system on these computers is set up on the local area network, or LAN, to be able to access the files on any other computer—and why not? They’re all the doctor’s computers—it would only be the doctor working on one computer and accessing another. We’d been looking for an intrusion from outside via the Internet. All the firewalls are protecting us from outside intrusions. Dr. Whitney is getting in by masquerading as an insider, as another computer on his own LAN. One of the lines was bogus, and I knew it would take us to the doctor. I traced the line straight to a wall.”