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 over the neighbor's house on the other side of the street.
"Rusty Ellison."
"Hi Rusty. I'm Joy, and 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 I was careful, spread the scan out so I wouldn't DOS anyone, and focused on the common ports."
"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 parsers trigger 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, Mom."
"Pretty tight. There are local black hat groups. It would be real easy to get owned."
"But you guessed it was me?"
"Uhmm, the thought did cross my mind. Mentioned you to my dad, but I said I was just joking. I thought I was joking."
"Your dad?"
"We're your ISP. The newspaper contracts the technical part of their news site with us and we operate the local SNS together. Dad confirmed your IP address while I tracked your probes."
I leaned forward to look at his face. He was smiling lopsidedly.
"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."
He laughed. "Okay, next time I'll have Dad run down to the courthouse for a court order."
"That's a lot of work to go to."
He lost his smile. "I suppose this isn't really my job. But I wanted to be sure the black hats had not already owned your modem."
"As if."
He thought for a moment. "You need to understand that this town is not a place to play carelessly on the 'net."
Now 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 our 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, Mom, I promise."
"Thank you, Cheryl's mom." He jumped up. "Gotta go. Good night." He picked up his bike and stopped, then laid it back down. Coming back the porch, he handed me a slip of paper. Then he nodded and left.
"Mmmm?" Mom looked over my shoulder again.
"His IRC nick and usual chatroom, his mail address, and his public key. I guess I could start a local web of trust with this. But --"
"But?"
"A key exchange is usually an exchange. Why didn't he ask for mine?"
Mom didn't have an answer for that.
We 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 swim 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."
Mom's hunches are eerie sometimes.
It was time for bed, but I got the laptop back out and did some web searches for my name. I wanted a guess at out how much superpaperboy might have found out.
Mom and Dad and I don't post much to SNS. But I had told him my first name, and he might have found out our last name is Sugita from the ISP customer database. And he might have been able to find out where we moved from.
He might have found me on the high school swimming team roster.
Or maybe the invitation to go swimming was just coincidence.
Swimming team. My teammates in South Dakota would just now be finding out I wouldn't be there this year. I really should have said something. If only.
Mom and Dad were still chatting via encrypted IRC when I went to bed.
Ch. 4: Swimmingly
Backup at https://joel-rees-economics.blogspot.com/2017/10/bk-phr-03-invitation.html.
No comments:
Post a Comment