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.25 communications protocols.The sub-prefixes for the Citibankportion of the network were 223 and 224.Par pestered Force some more for the rest of the numbers, but the Australian had dug hisheels in.Force was too careful a player, too fastidious a hacker, to allow himself to get mixedup in the things Par might get up to.OK, thought the seventeen-year-old Par, I can do this without you.Par estimated there were20000 possible addresses on that network, any one of which might be the home of the mysterymachine.But he assumed the machine would be in the low end of the network, since the lowernumbers were usually used first and the higher numbers were generally saved for other, specialnetwork functions.His assumptions narrowed the likely search field to about 2000 possibleaddresses.Par began hand-scanning on the Citibank Global Telecommunications Network (GTN) lookingfor the mystery machine.Using his knowledge of the X.25 network, he picked a number to startwith.He typed 22301, 22302, 22303.On and on, heading toward 22310000.Hour after hour,slowly, laboriously, working his way through all the options, Par scanned out a piece, or arange, within the network.When he got bored with the 223 prefix, he tried out the 224 one fora bit of variety.Bleary-eyed and exhausted after a long night at the computer, Par felt like calling it quits.The sun had splashed through the windows of his Salinas, California, apartment hours ago.Hisliving room was a mess, with empty, upturned beer cans circling his Apple IIe.Par gave up fora while, caught some shut-eye.He had gone through the entire list of possible addresses,knocking at all the doors, and nothing had happened.But over the next few days he returnedto scanning the network again.He decided to be more methodical about it and do the wholething from scratch a second time.He was part way through the second scan when it happened.Par's computer connected tosomething.He sat up and peered toward the screen.What was going on? He checked theaddress.He was sure he had tried this one before and nothing had answered.Things weredefinitely getting strange.He stared at his computer.The screen was blank, with the cursor blinking silently at the top.Now what? What had Forcedone to get the computer to sing its song?Par tried pressing the control key and a few different letters.Nothing.Maybe this wasn't theright address after all.He disconnected from the machine and carefully wrote down theaddress, determined to try it again later.On his third attempt, he connected again but found the same irritating blank screen.Thistime he went through the entire alphabet with the control key.Control L.That was the magic keystroke.The one that made CitiSaudi give up its mysterious cache.The one that gave Par an adrenalin rush, along with thousands and thousands of cards.Instantcash, flooding his screen.He turned on the screen capture so he could collect all theinformation flowing past and analyse it later.Par had to keep feeding his little Apple IIe moredisks to store all the data coming in through his 1200 baud modem.It was magnificent.Par savoured the moment, thinking about how much he was going toenjoy telling Force.It was going to be sweet.Hey, Aussie, you aren't the only show in town.See ya in Citibank.An hour or so later, when the CitiSaudi data dump had finally finished, Par was stunned atwhat he found in his capture.These weren't just any old cards.These were debit cards, andthey were held by very rich Arabs.These people just plopped a few million in a bank accountand linked a small, rectangular piece of plastic to that account.Every charge came directly outof the bank balance.One guy listed in the data dump bought a $330,000 Mercedes Benz inIstanbul--on his card.Par couldn't imagine being able to throw down a bit of plastic for that [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]