Bullseye Breach: Anatomy of an Electronic Break-in by Scott Greg

Author:Scott, Greg [Scott, Greg]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Beaver's Pond Press
Published: 2015-04-18T16:00:00+00:00

Jerry Barkley

Friday, December 6th was another crazy Friday for Jerry Barkley. His phone started ringing at 7:30 that morning and didn’t seem to stop all day. “Why does it always ring too early the morning after a late night?” he thought to himself for about the ten-thousandth time. But that was the way his solo IT consulting business worked. Feast or famine.

By 4:00 he was done with his last meeting of the day, so barring another emergency from somebody else, his day would end early. Jerry found himself driving home, summarizing in his head the invoices he would send Monday morning and action items coming up the next week. As he drove near a Bullseye store, he remembered he needed cereal and water—breakfast in the car on the way to customers with Monday morning emergencies. As he pulled into the parking lot, he was amazed to see it so crowded. “Great,” he thought. “I get to wait in line behind everyone doing their Christmas shopping so I can eat next week.”

The line wasn’t too bad after all. In and out in twenty minutes. He paid with his Visa credit card because the issuing bank offered a cash-back reward. As he unlocked his car, his cell phone rang. Another customer with a standard Friday afternoon emergency. A typical day in Jerry Barkley’s life. The details of that Friday would blur over the next week as customer mini-crises came and went.

Monday afternoon, December 9th, the phone rang again. A sales rep with a telephone system reseller needed help with a server upgrade for one of her customers, because the server needed a new version of its operating system to work properly with the new phone system she sold them. Oh, and could he do it tomorrow morning? Because the phone system was scheduled to be installed the following afternoon, and the server needed more memory and disk space to accommodate the new system.

“Do you believe in miracles?” Jerry asked.

“I know you can work them,” she said.

“Let me see what I can do.”

Jerry knew the local hardware suppliers and quickly found somebody who had the necessary parts at the proper price. “Deal. Let’s do this. I’ll pick them up in the morning.”

Jerry gave them his credit-card number and security code. And then he waited… longer than usual.

“Sorry, Jerry, it was declined.”

Jerry felt that familiar tension in his gut. “I’m sure I paid that bill. What’s going on? I need this like a hole in the head.”

He bought the parts he needed with a different credit card, and then called the issuer, Uncle Sam Bank. After punching in his credit-card number, the last four digits of his Social Security number, and his zip code, the automated answering system at the bank said it would transfer him to the fraud department. “This might be good,” he said to himself.

“I’m sorry, I do not understand that request. Do you want to speak to a representative?”

“Aw, nuts. Yes. Representative,” he yelled.

“Please speak or use your telephone keypad to enter your sixteen-digit credit-card number.

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