The Samurai Strategy Part 44

"Then I have some disquieting information to impart. I saw somebody come in here one day after shopping at Tower Records, and a CD he'd bought tripped the metal detector out there in Yamada's anteroom like he was wearing sleigh bells. Down inside this s.h.i.+ny plastic must be aluminum or something. We can't take it out." I turned it in my hand.

"And besides, what would we do with it anyway? Stick it in a Walkman and listen to all the little digits spin by? In hi-fi?"

"I've got a reader at home . . . but wait, there's a better way." She lifted it from my grasp and headed out onto the floor. "Ever hear of computer crime?"

"In pa.s.sing."

"Good. Then what you're about to witness won't shock you."

I watched as she kicked on one of the NEC desk stations and loaded in a program. Next she walked over, flipped a switch on a little box, and a drawer glided out. In went Mori's s.h.i.+ny disk. Another b.u.t.ton was pushed, the drawer receded, and the disk was spinning silently.

Well, I thought. You want peaches, you shake the tree, right? Maybe she's about to kick h.e.l.l out of the orchard.

"I'm going to dump this into the memory of the mother s.h.i.+p downstairs."

She did some fiddling, then typed in her pa.s.sword to sign on the mainframe on eleven. "Beam us down, Scottie." In moments she and all those silicon cells below us were beeping away at each other. She didn't look up, just kept typing away, the hollow click-clack that's become the signature sound of our computer age. Finally she leaned back and breathed. "Okay, it's reading the disk. After it's in memory down there, we can pull up the contents here on the screen and see what we've got."

I don't know how long it took to read the thing. Probably no more than a minute or so, though it seemed forever. Finally something flashed on the screen and told us the disk had been dumped. Tam took it out of its little player and pa.s.sed it to me.

"Here, put this back in her case. While I start pulling up the file."

I'd just finished snapping it shut when I heard an expletive from out on the floor that would not be judged suitable for family audiences.

"Watch your language."

She was sitting there staring at the screen. Finally she turned and looked at me. "So close, yet so far. It's encrypted'."

"It's what?"

"Come and look."

I did. On the screen was a ma.s.s of numeric garbage. What was this all about?

"Matt, when this disk was written, whatever went on it was scrambled using some key, probably the DES system, the 'data-encryption standard.' It keeps unauthorized intruders like us from snooping."

"How does anybody read it?"

"A decrypting key must be in the hardware down on eleven. But we can't get through to that level of the machine without an 'access code.'

Which we don't have."

"Very smart. The electronic keys to the kingdom." I watched, wondering all the while what Yamada was doing out there. Should I blunder out and chat him up with my Berlitz j.a.panese, just to keep him occupied? The clock above the door was ticking away.

"Tam, why not just try activating the key using your own pa.s.sword as the access code? Maybe it'll get you into that level on the mainframe."

She gave it a go, without much enthusiasm. Predictably the message came back, 'ACCESS CODE NOT RECOGNIZED.'

"Well, try some others." I was grasping. "Hit it with 'NODA' or 'MORI.'"

She did, but after both were rejected the workstation suddenly signed off. Click, out of the system.

"What's happened now?"

"More bad news. I forgot the mainframe is programmed so that you get three tries at a protected code and then it breaks the connection.

That's to keep crackers like us from sitting here all day and running pa.s.swords at random. Another security precaution."

"Three chances to guess the secret word and then you're

out. Sounds like a game show." I just stood there and scratched my head. Seemed we were, to be blunt, s.h.i.+t out of luck. "What now, Professor? I a.s.sume there are about a hundred million alphanumeric combinations they could use."

"Close." She was clicking away at the keyboard. "So let's think a minute." She glanced back at me. "Why don't we a.s.sume for a minute that this is a MITI disk."

"Safe bet."

"So the decryptor key in the machine here would be from MITI, right, since Mori obviously brought the disk to be read?"

"Sounds good."

"You know, I was in Ken's office once, and I recall watching some of his staff playing around with the information on one of these disks.

Don't know why I still remember this, but the pa.s.sword they used was ... I think MX something, three letters, followed by six digits. The digits were always changing, but the prefix was the same."

"So if your wild guess about this being a MITI disk is right, and the first two letters of the three-letter alpha part are still MX, that means there are exactly, what--twenty-six letters in the alphabet times a million numbers--twenty-six million combinations. We're looking for one number in twenty-six million? So if it takes, say, five seconds to type one in and try it, we're talking roughly a hundred and thirty million seconds to go the course." I glanced again at the door.

"Besides which, we get kicked off after every third try. Working around the clock, we ought to have it sometime about, what, 2001?"

She glanced back at the screen, then suddenly whirled around, a funny look on her face. "What do you have in your office?"

"What do you mean?"

"Don't you have a PC downtown?"

"Just a little IBM AT, 512K. And also a Mac, a toy I use to draw cutsey-poo pictures now and then and do covers for reports."

"How about a telephone modem?"

"Built in. How else could I handle all that trading?"

"And it's up?"

"The IBM? Never turn it off. Little twitch left over from playing the Hong Kong exchanges. Habits die hard."

"Okay, I'm going to try and use it to crack the code in DNI's mainframe."

Honestly, for a second there I thought my hearing had gone. "My little IBM against that monster? How, forchrissake? There're twenty-six million--"

"We'll have to do something not very nice. Since the j.a.panese aren't used to hackers, those bearded malcontents in firms who screw up business computers for spite, these workstations aren't buffered off sensitive parts of the system. We are now going to exploit that trust in j.a.panese culture. We're going to organize these terminals, hook them to your computer, and then direct that network against the mainframe downstairs. Something no j.a.panese would ever dream of doing." She got up and went down the row clicking on machines. "There's a list of names in my office, there by the phone. Can you bring it?"

"Coming up." I fetched it. It was a temporary "phone book" of the staff on the floor. She took the list and went back down the line of stations, typing something on each keyboard.

"What are you doing, Tam? This is crazy."

"It'll just take a second. Everybody here has a pa.s.sword to sign on to the mainframe, but it's just the name of the person." She came back to the first workstation. "Now the mainframe thinks ten people just signed on to the system. We'll use these terminals to try access codes on the main computer. Your PC will control them so that each terminal hits it with two codes and then the next one goes on line. That way we'll never get kicked off. It should get around the 'three times and you're out'