Forwarded From: "Noonan, Michael D" <michael.d.noonanat_private> At 4:20 PM on Friday, the Secrets for Big Shots Co., Inc., on the thirty-second floor of a Park Avenue high rise in New York, is celebrating the boss's birthday. Everyone is looking forward to the weekend. The elevator bell rings, the door opens, and into the reception area walks a telephone company man. He's dressed in jeans, a Nynex workshirt, a white and blue telephone company hardhat, and his belt full of tools and phone gear. In his hand is yet another mysterious-looking piece of electronic gear. He says to the receptionist, "Jeeeez, what a day," as he wipes his sweaty forehead. The receptionist barely glances at him, more interested in the revelry behind the glass doors where the cake is being cut. "Yeah, Thank God it's Friday," she agrees. "I really hate these last minute emergancies. I was on my way out to the shore for the weekend. . . ." "What's wrong" the receptionist asks. If the phone goes down, it makes her look bad. The phone man smiles. "Nothing for you to worry about. Simplex Corp. on the seventeenth floor lost half of their lines and I've got to fix them before I can get out of here. Where's the phone room?" "Oh, yeah. Sure." She hands him the keys. "It's over there. And do me a favor?" "Sure," the phone man responds. "Whatever." "If I'm gone when you're through, put the keys back in the top drawer? I'm kind of new and . . ." she hesitates. "No problem. Most bosses are jerks anyway, and don't know what real work is all about." "Gee, thanks," she says, smiling a big appreciative smile. The "phone man" opens the closet, located next to elevators where it was easy to install long wires up and down the height of the building. But, in this phone closet, the Secrets for Big Shots Co., Inc. also put a lot of its network controls. It's a lot easier to run the phone and network wires at the same time and thus put the control gear in the same place. He walks into the small phone closet, turns on the lights and, just as he expected, a dissying maze of wires, boxes, power cords, blinking lights, and racks full of equipment fill the room. He smiles. This is perfect. He takes a small donut-shaped piece of metal from his belt, opens it, snaps it tightly around one of the wires. He then plugs a small wire from the metal clamp to the box he carried, and then plugs it into the wall. Power on. Lights on. Good, everything seems to work. He moves a few wires and proceeds to hide the box and the clamp behind a large rack that contains a seemingly endless array of electronic gear. He brings out a walkie-talkie. "Well?" he asks. The reciever cracles. "We got it. Not much traffic, but enough to show it works." "Ten four." The phone man slaps the walkie-talkie back in his belt, opens the door, turns out the light, and hands the keys back to the receptionist. "Done already?" she asks. "Yeah. I was lucky. It was just a dirty connection. Looks like I might beat the traffic yet! Have a great weekend." "Thanks. You too." Obviously this wasn't the case of a phone man fixing a faulty line. It was the Information Warrior installing a passive network sniffer which also contained a small radio transmitter. The radio broadcasts all of the data and passwords that the network processes to a remote reciever. Invisible. Passive. Insidious. -o- Subscribe: mail majordomoat_private with "subscribe isn". Today's ISN Sponsor: Hacker News Network [www.hackernews.com]
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Apr 13 2001 - 13:22:53 PDT