Home > Attack Surface (Little Brother #3)

Attack Surface (Little Brother #3)
Author: Cory Doctorow

 


CHAPTER 1


That was why I loved technology: if you use it right, it gives you power—and takes away other peoples’ privacy. I was on my sixteenth straight hour at the main telcoms data-center for Bltz, the capital of Slovstakia. Those are both aliases, obviously. Unlike certain persons I could name, I keep my secrets.

Sixteen hours, for what my boss had assured the client—the Slovstakian Interior Ministry—would be a three-hour job. You don’t get as high as she did in the Stasi without knowing how to be a tactical asshole when the situation demands it.

I just wish she’d let me recon the data-center before she handed down the work estimate. The thing is, the communications infrastructure of Slovstakia was built long before the Berlin Wall fell, and it consisted of copper wires wrapped in newspaper and dipped in gutta-percha. After the Wall came down, responsibility for the telcoms had been transferred to the loving hands of Anton Tkachi, who had once been a top spook in Soviet Slovstakia. There are a lot of decades in which it would suck to have your telcoms run by an incompetent, greedy kleptocrat, but the 1990s represented a particularly poorly chosen decade to have sat out the normal cycle of telcoms upgrades. Because internet.

After Tkachi was purged—imprisoned 2005, hospitalized with “mental illness” in 2006, dead in 2007—the Slovstakian Ministry of Communications cycled through a succession of contract operators—Swisscom, T-Mob, Vodaphone, Orange (God help us all)—each of which billed the country for some of the jankiest telcoms gear you’ve ever seen, the thrice-brewed teabags of the telecommunications world, stuff that had been in war zones, leaving each layer of gear half-configured, half-secured, and half-documented.

The internet in Slovstakia sucked monkey shit.

Anyway, my boss, Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS, promised the Interior Ministry that I would only need three hours, and the Interior Ministry had called up the telcoms ministry and given them orders to be nice to the Americanski lady who was coming over to do top-secret work for them, and give her everything she needed. I can tell that they laid it on thick, because when I first arrived at the country’s main data-center, a big old brutalist pile that I had to stop and take a picture of for my collection of Soviet Brutalist Buildings That They Used to Shoot You for Taking Pictures Of—hashtags are for losers who voluntarily submit to 280-character straitjackets (and sentences can too a preposition end with)—the guy on the desk sent me straight to the director of telcoms security.

His name was Litvinchuk and he was tightly wound. You could tell because he had his own force of telcoms cops dressed like RoboCop standing guard outside his door with guns longer than their legs, reeking of garlic sausage and the sweat of a thousand layers of Kevlar. Litvinchuk welcomed me cordially, gave me a long-ass speech about how excited he was to have some fresh foreign contractors in his data-center (again) and especially ones from a company as expensive as Xoth Intelligence.

“Wait, that’s not right word,” he said, in a broad Yakov Smirnoff accent (he had a master’s from the London School of Economics and I’d watched him do a TEDx talk where he sounded like a BBC World Service newsreader). “Exclusive? Illustrious?” He looked to me—specifically, to my tits, which was where every Slovstakian official I’d met addressed his remarks. I didn’t cross my arms.

“Infamous,” I said.

He smirked. “I’m sure. Miss Maximow”—he pronounced the w as a v, as they always did as soon as I got east of France—“we are all very excited to have you at our premises. However, I’m sure you understand that we must be careful to keep records of which contractors work on our sensitive systems.” He slid a paperclipped form across his desk to me. I counted to seven—more efficient and just as effective as ten—and picked it up. Nine pages, smudgily photocopied, full of questions like “List all NGOs and charitable organizations to which you have contributed, directly or indirectly.”

“No,” I said.

He gave me his best fish-face, which I’m sure was super-effective against the farm boys cosplaying Judge Dredd in the hallway. But I’d been glared at by Ilsa, She-Wolf of the etc., etc., and had been inured to even the hairiest of eyeballs.

“I must insist,” he said.

“I don’t fill in this kind of form,” I said. “Company policy. Xoth has negotiated blanket permission to access your premises from the Interior Ministry for all its personnel.” This was true. I hated paperwork, and this kind of paperwork the most—the kind that asked you questions you could never fully or honestly answer, so that there’d always be an official crime to pin on you if you stepped on the wrong toes. Lucky for me, Xoth had a no-exceptions policy that techs were not allowed to fill in any official documentation at client sites. I’d take notes on my own work, but they’d go up the chain to my boss—Ilsa, She-Wolf etc.—who’d sanitize them and pass them back to the Interior Ministry for their own logs, omitting key details so that we would be able to bill them for any future maintenance.

I did my best to look bored—not hard, I was so bored my eyeballs ached—and stared at this post-Soviet phone commissar.

“I will fill it out for you,” he said.

I shrugged.

He worked quickly, pen dancing over the paper. Not his first paper-pushing rodeo. He passed it back to me. “Sign.” He smiled. It wasn’t a nice smile.

I looked down. It was all in Cyrillic.

“Nope,” I said.

He switched off the smile. “Madam.” He made it sound like missy. I could tell we weren’t going to get along. “You will not get into my data-center until we have gathered basic information. That is our protocol.”

He stared at me, fish-face plus plus, clearly waiting for me to lose my cool. Long before Ilsa began her regime of hard-core stoicism training, I had mastered situations like this. You don’t get far in the DHS if you don’t know how to bureaucracy. I turned boredom up by a notch. I tried to project the sense that I had more time to burn than he did.

He held out his hand. I’d assumed he’d be a short-fingered vulgarian, but he had pianist’s fingers, and a hell of a manicure, the kind of thing that made me feel self-conscious about my lack of girly cred. “ID.”

Xoth gives us fancy ID cards to wear on client sites, with RFIDs and sapphire-coated smart chips and holograms, props for impressing rubes. I could knock one up in an afternoon. I unclipped mine from my lanyard and handed it over.

The pen danced again at the bottom of the form, and he turned the paper to show me. He’d added “signed, per, Masha Maximow” to the signature line. Good for you, Boris. You made a funny. What an asshole.

“We done?”

He carefully made a xerox on a desktop printer/scanner/copier—one that I knew five different exploits for, and could use to take over his whole network, if I wanted to—and handed it to me. “For your records.”

I folded it into quarters and stuck it in my back pocket. “Which way?”

He said something in Russki and one of the Stormtroopers struggled in under the weight of his body armor and escorted me to the data-center. I took one look at the racks and racks of hardware, zipped up my fleece against the icy wind of the chillers, and got to work. It was going to be a long three hours.

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