Ch. 2: UDP Packets
Ch. 3: Invitation
Just as he said, he gave me ten minutes. Mom and I were waiting on the porch when he rode up on his bike. He laid the bike on the grass and came up and sat down on the other side of Mom. I had sat on one end of the step, and Mom, at first, had sat on the other. But I made Mom scoot over before he arrived, so there was no room for him to sit next to me.
We all looked out at the sunset.
"Rusty Ellison."
"Hi Rusty. I'm Joy, and the Cute Geek is Cheryl."
"I guess I was a little abrupt."
"Understood." Mom just smiled.
Superpaperboy nodded with a grin.
Mom understood, and I did, too, really, but I had to defend myself. "A port scan shouldn't be a problem, should it?"
"Well, unannounced, it is a little bit uhm, disconcerting to a sysadmin, don't you think?"
"Maybe."
"But it wasn't the port scan. Or the other parts of the standard vulnerability tests. Those were professionally done. Who taught you?"
"Dad. I picked up a lot on my own, too. But he made me learn how to do it the way a business would want it done."
"What came after was not professional."
"Maybe I went too far. But most servers, nobody pays attention."
"I take recurring parses of my logs."
"When you sent the UDP packets, I thought you must have been watching for me or something."
"No, I didn't really take you that serious when you said you were a geek. But the parser triggers a notification to my phone, so I was watching by the time you started directly fuzzing the customer database server."
"Cheryl?" Mom raised her eyebrows.
"Well, I wondered how tight he keeps things."
"Pretty tight. There are local black hat groups. It would be real easy to get owned."
"You guessed it was me?"
"Uhmm, the thought did cross my mind. But I didn't really think so. I also run the local access for your ISP, and I can look up an IP addresses. "
I leaned forward to look at his face. "You're a little scary, you know."
Mom was just laughing at us.
"Okay, okay. But it's not like an ISP doing their job wouldn't have looked up the address."
"But usually there's a little division of responsibility."
True. I suppose this isn't really my job." He thought for a moment. "But you need to understand that this town is not a place to play carelessly on the 'net."
Mom lost her smile. "Is that a threat?"
"No, Ma'am. I'm relatively harmless, but there are people here who aren't."
Mom and I both waited, but he wasn't volunteering more than that.
After a minute, he broke the silence. "Say, Cute Geek, we can talk shop anytime, but a bunch of my friends are trying to finish up the summer in the pool. Ya interested?"
"Are you going to keep calling me Cute Geek?"
He laughed. "No, not in front of my friends. That wouldn't be fair."
I wondered how he might have known I like swimming. But I decided to indulge my paranoia later. "Where is this famous pool?"
"It's in a park named after a mythical European forest."
"Gwydyr Park? I think I saw that on the map. About a mile from here?"
"That's it. Mile and a half, really. The pool is on the northeast corner. We meet there at ten in the morning so we can swim for a couple of hours without getting sunburned."
"Close enough to walk. How many?"
"Eight to twelve, sometimes more. About half and half guys and girls."
"Parents?" Mom asked.
"Somebody's mom usually comes. Kelly was saying something about his mom coming tomorrow. Karen's, too."
"And I could come, too?"
"Mom, ..."
"Sure."
Now he leaned forward to look at me.
"I'll think about it," I said before he could ask.
"Listen. I'm okay if you attack my servers, just let me know when you do, so I can tell the real owners you're running tests for me."
"Maybe I'm not interested any more."
"Promise me something else. Don't test any other nodes or hosts without permission."
"Permission from you?"
"From the legal owners."
"It's dangerous."
"Very."
"Cheryl, ..."
"Okay I, promise."
"Thank you, Cheryl's mom." He jumped up. "Gotta go. Good night." He picked up his bike and stopped, then set it back down. Coming back the porch, he handed me a slip of paper. Then he nodded and left.
"Mmmm?"
"His IRC nick and usual chatroom, mail address, and public key. I guess I could start a local web of trust with this."
Mom and I went back inside and explored the news and SNS services for a boring half hour, going through the front door this time.
Well, I was bored. Mom found out lots of things about the town and neighbors. I captured the data stream for later analysis.
"You should check your suit." Mom said as I shut down my laptop.
"I wore it two weeks ago at home. Uhm, our old home."
"Miss the place, huh?"
"Yeah. Anything from Dad?" I went into my room and dug my swimming stuff out of a box.
"He says he's trying to find a certified electrician to come sign your work off." Mom came into my room behind me. "Hasn't that bikini grown too small for you?"
"Small is fashionable." I was checking it for stretch holes. Yeah, it really was too small.
"I have a hunch you'll be more comfortable in one of your one-piece team suits."
"No way, Mom!"
My team suits are actually pretty cool. But somehow I thought I'd be starting off on the wrong foot if I weren't in a bikini.
"Well, if you go with the bikini, be sure you take shorts and a tee you'll be comfortable swimming in."
It was time for bed, but I got the laptop back out and did some web searches for my name. I wanted to figure out how much Superpaperboy might have found out.
He might have found me on the swimming team roster. But how would he know my first name before I told him? How would he know what school to look at?
Swimming team. My teammates in South Dakota would just now be finding out I wouldn't be there this year.
We don't post much to national SNS. Even given that he had our ISP records and knew our last name was Sugita, how could he have connected me to Mom, except by guessing?
Was the swimming just guessing? Just a coincidence?
Ch. 4: Swimmingly
Backup at https://joel-rees-economics.blogspot.com/2017/10/bk-phr-03-invitation.html.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Keep it on topic, and be patient with the moderator. I have other things to do, too, you know.