Unleashed: An Andy Carpenter Mystery by David Rosenfelt

Author:David Rosenfelt [Rosenfelt, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery, Humour
ISBN: 9781250024725
Google: PjnK7UNYAykC
Amazon: B00BCG1MLM
Goodreads: 16045105
Publisher: Minotaur Books
Published: 2013-07-23T05:00:00+00:00

“He went to places I couldn’t get near,” Sam says. “I mean, I knew he was good, better than me, but I didn’t see how he could be that good.”

“What kind of places are we talking about?”

“Online. He was breaking into sites that I couldn’t get into. That I doubted anyone could get into.”

“How did he do it?” I ask.

“He got the passwords.”

“How did he do that?”

“He had a password-crashing program with 25 AMD Radeon GPUs.”

“I always wanted one of those,” I say, “but my parents bought me a G.I. Joe instead.”

“Let me explain,” he says, and though I know I won’t understand it, he seems so excited that I let him continue.

“Passwords are starting to become obsolete,” he says.

“Really? I hardly use my computer, and I must have twenty passwords.”

He nods. “Right, and they’ve got to be a certain number of characters, and some of them make you include cap letters and numbers and even symbols.”

“Yup.”

“Well, each letter, or whatever, is called a hash. So let’s say your password has fifteen hashes, of all types, okay? This program can figure it out in less than ten minutes. And it doesn’t have to know your dog’s name or birthday or anything like that.”

“How does it do it?”

“It bombards the target with combinations. This program can try a hundred billion hashes per second, and there are programs faster than that. Eventually it hits on the password, sooner rather than later.”

“So it keeps getting them wrong until it gets them right?”

“Exactly,” he says. “You should see how this thing works. Hilda and Morris are like kids in a candy store with it.”

“I don’t understand. If I type my password wrong twice on one of my sites, they lock the account and make me spend the next twelve hours on the phone with customer service telling them my mother’s maiden name.”

“But Barry wasn’t breaking into individual accounts. He wasn’t technically even breaking into the sites. He was breaking into the place where they store the passwords. Once he did that, he had free rein to go wherever he wanted.”

“So where did he go?” I ask.

“We don’t know yet. But we will.”

“So if passwords are obsolete, what’s going to replace them?”

“Nobody’s figured that out yet.”

I ask Sam to devote as much time as he can to tracing Barry Price’s cyber steps, and he promises that he will. Then I head home to Laurie and Tara.

Any potential witnesses that I don’t have time to interview I turn over to Laurie. Any competent person can get the information from them about what they’re going to say and why they’re going to say it. But Laurie has the ability to tell me more about each of them, to know what makes them tick, and to figure out their strengths and weaknesses.

Hike is a great lawyer, but when he interviews a witness, I ask him to give me a written report about it. That’s because all I’m going to get from him are the facts; talking to Laurie supplies the nuance.

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