No prob. House is yours, my sister texted when I asked her about stopping by. I didn’t mention using her laptop because the response would have been ‘forget it.’ Her laptop was her moneymaker.
I walked into an empty house. Dr. T and Lena had decided to drive down to the Peninsula, visit his parents and show off the baby. Lena’s bedroom with her laptop and three monitors gave the impression of being slightly neater than usual. She’d made the bed. When I stopped to think about it, it was probably Dr. T. Lena wasn’t one for tidying up.
I made myself as comfortable as possible between the piles of dirty baby clothes and then did a search on hacking. More than 850 billion posts popped up. Whoa! Overwhelming. Need to pare it down. I searched for ransomware attacks. A mere 13 billion posts waited for me to click on them. I wondered if cybercriminals had attacked San Francisco. I typed in ransomware attacks, San Francisco. Only 723,000 results popped up, each more fascinating than the next. Who knew the City by the Bay attracted hackers worldwide? The University of San Francisco Medical School servers had the distinction of being the most recent victim. The hospital paid hackers $1.14 million in bitcoin for a decryption tool to unlock the data. There had been cyberattacks on the San Francisco public transit authority, on NPR, one of the country’s largest public media companies, and on an esteemed well-funded art museum. I scrolled through pages and pages of successful attacks. But one in particular stood out because it had brought the city of San Francisco to its knees. Around ten years ago, a disgruntled computer network engineer walked off the job with all the computer codes for the city’s network and wouldn’t give them back. The government had ground to a standstill. No emails, no access to legal documents, no payroll. Nothing. It had cost San Francisco millions in lost revenue. I found enough detailed reading material about the incident to keep me busy for the rest of the day.
From what I could tell, Nicholas Eroe Popolare had been a skilled network engineer and administrator who’d been contracted to build a system for the city. He devoted himself to the project and worked tirelessly, making it as perfect as possible by upgrading the equipment, installing new hardware and adding firewalls. As the protector of his creation, he had secure control of the username, password and special code needed to access the system. When the people in charge realized Popolare had locked everyone else out, they demanded his login information. Eroe Popolare walked off the job and disappeared for a few days. He reappeared via a lawyer who negotiated with the city: a hefty settlement for the code. According to the lawyer, the engineer was concerned that the more people who had access to the workings of the system, the greater the chance they would screw it up. He couldn’t let that happen. He had to safeguard his system, his grand design. The lawyer proposed the following: The city would not prosecute him, and he would hand over the code pieced together with one hundred and forty-nine letters, numbers and symbols. They jumped at the settlement. They soon found out there was a catch. The city would receive the correct numbers, letters, and symbols, but their order was scrambled.
Three days later, the city fathers hadn’t heard back from Popolare or his lawyer. Frantic, they marched in a cadre of Silicon Valley whizz kids to save the day. The complex algorithms they developed didn’t work. Eventually, via his lawyer, Eroe Popolare demanded a million dollars for each digit of the code in the correct sequence. The city would deposit the money in an overseas bank, and he would unscramble the code, one piece at a time. He figured through the process of elimination they would come up with the correct order by the time he had about thirty to forty million dollars; enough to disappear forever.
While the city continued to manipulate multiple numbers, letters, and symbols in search of the answer, Eroe Popolare skipped town. His need for peace and quiet led him to the Ligurian or sunny Italian Riviera near Porto Venere where his family lived. While hundreds of posts detailed this outlandish and successful theft, not much personal information about the computer guru appeared. I only learned that he was in his fifties, walked with a slight limp as the result of a cycling accident, and was small in stature. Surprisingly, there were a limited number of photographs of him as an adult.
I wondered if Popolare ever came back to the United States. He had to be a legend in the hacking world. I bet Uly, as well as the guys in the house over the hill, knew all about him. For sure, Earl knew who he was. I went back and scoured the ransomware attack posts, trying to see if there was anything about a refrigerator being hacked. After hours of reading, taking notes and thinking, I thought I’d figured out the technique used, but got no further. I hated to acknowledge it, but my only real connection to that house pointed to Burk. I would have to see him again.
I closed my sister’s laptop and headed out the door to my car. What normal person would seek out someone who drugged her? How could I possibly make my interest sound authentic? Inside the car, I sat for a moment and wished I could talk it out with Jon. Along with having a fine logical mind, he would never drug me. He cared about me. Maybe I’d been wrong and everyone else had been right. I pulled out my cell and before I could talk myself out of it, texted him.
Hi. I’m sorry. I miss you. Talk?
I started the car and headed back to Earl’s house, thinking about Burk and my next move. But in my mind, all I could see was Jon. I could hear him, “Go to the police.” Well, Jon, I did, and nothing happened. Maybe I shouldn’t have texted him.
“Oooh. This is so confusing,” I groaned to the empty car. Then, I stepped on the accelerator and flew down the street.