Dayne Wallingham sunk into the comfortable cushions covering the bench seating and leant back against the acid-etched concrete wall, he pulled his baseball cap down low to cover his eyes and began caressing the keys of his Dell laptop positioned on the polished wooden table in front of him.
Picking up on the portly solicitor’s morning routine took no time at all. Each day, like clockwork, he ordered a large flat white from the Six Degrees Café on St Kilda Road, just a block from his office.
Dayne whispered as Garth ordered eggs on toast to go with his coffee.
For this assignment, he chose a simple tried and true hacking method; the waterhole attack. All he needed was for Garth to access a website on his mobile phone while in the café. Dayne finished establishing a limited range fake WAP – wireless application protector – which would capture the web pages accessed by all devices, then sat back and waited.
Garth took a seat by the front window looking out over the tree-lined boulevard. As he sipped his coffee and waited for his order, he slipped his mobile from the breast pocket of his jacket.
Seeing the mobile in Garth’s hand, Dayne quickly made his way to the counter situated behind Garth and retrieved a few extra packets of sugar. As he passed, he glanced over Garth’s shoulder to view the screen.
***
It was still a week until the start of the new football season, but for Garth, it couldn’t come soon enough. After an interminable six months of waiting, the protracted build-up to the first round of games was driving him insane. The team he supported, North Melbourne, had been on a lean streak since their last premiership in 1999, but all signs pointed to a strong 2016.
As he perused the team’s website, he remembered back to when he was a young child and his dad taking him to games at the venerable old Arden Street ground. He lived for those Saturdays standing on the outer terraces with his father. Unfortunately, successful seasons for the ’Roos were few and far between.
Garth paused his reading to allow the waitress to place his breakfast plate before him. After adding copious amounts of salt and pepper to his eggs, he attacked them voraciously.
He could still vividly recall their first two premierships in 1975 and 1977. He was in his early twenties, a recent graduate from Melbourne University, and working as an intern for his father while waiting on acceptance into law school.
Then nothing to crow about for his beloved Kangaroos until almost 20 years later when two more titles in 1996 and 1999 materialised. As he stared out of the front window of the café and watched the morning commuters pass by, Garth thought it strangely funny his team’s ultimate successes only seemed to arrive in bunches. And then only after long barren stretches of looking forward in hopeful anticipation – much like waiting for a Melbourne bus.
***
Dayne stole a quick glance and immediately recognised the Kangaroo emblem against the blue and white backdrop, he hurried back to his seat and captured the desired website.
Within minutes he’d implanted the required line of code thereby poisoning the webpage on Garth’s mobile with a JavaScript redirect. The command implanting malware gave Dayne the ability to access any workstation Garth used when he next visited the same site.
He watched the pudgy solicitor wipe the corners of his mouth with a serviette, toss it onto the empty plate and rise from his chair.
Now all there was to do was sit, wait, and hope Garth accessed the same website on his work computer.