Log:Zhu Yan and the Console Cowboys of Coruscant!
Haxxors Unite!
OOC Date: March 9, 2022
Location: Coruscant
Participants: Fshmaw, Merek, Nerys Greystorm, Sela Modonric, Zhu Yan as Self/GM
[ Zhu Yan (Yan)]
CORUSCANT. The shining beacon of CIVILIZATION in this giant pancake of stars we call a GALAXY, an INFINITESIMALLY SMALL dot on another INFINITESIMALLY SMALL dot on another INFINITESIMALLY SMALL dot of the universe which is INFINITE in size so therefore do we even exist if we are just molecules on the tapestry of something gigantic okay I'm going to stop it's giving me a headache.
Deep in a DINGY ROOM somewhere that was ALMOST, but NOT QUITE, very far away from the undercity were enough terminals to host a thrilling evening of TOTALLY REAL TOURNAMENT. That was of course not why we are here. Instead it was Zhu Yan sitting on a chair in front of one of the older terminals, which had the mandatory #00FF00 text on a #000000 background that the situation called for. "Alright so the Cowboys have hooked into the rom ports of an old CyberWerks Droid Constructor and are using it to syphon bitrate out of the nearby grand exchange."
Were these real words?
"I need you all to jack in so we can bust through their central firewall and start... I dunno, downloading dirty photos or something, whatever, either way I want these guys out of commission by sundown." It's 11:53PM on the dot. "So let's get to it!"
[ Merek (Black)]
Merek arrives with his dark attire on, the face mask of the helmet which he wears along his features that tells the story that this guy is cool and totally not edgy. He keeps with him a deck he uses for hacking, and he takes a look to Zhu. "Does this mean that all the stock I put into cryptocurrency is going away?" he asks. The man finds a terminal and takes the time to settle into it. He takes out a stick of spice to put in his mouth, "Alright, let's get to it, I'm prepared to jack in!"
[ Fshmaw (Fsh)]
Fshmaw, back in his turtleneck and fur-trimmed dark ensemble, eases himself into the VR couch. As S3-P0Y checks vitals and tightens straps, Fsh reminds him: "Remember, if this goes south, the MTD gets everything in the will. For tax purposes, it's... complicated." Can robots sigh? This one might. "Of course, Master Fshmaw. Do be careful in there?"
[ Nerys Greystorm (Nerys)]
Nerys had arrived. The small woman's void armor was distinctive. Also, heavily loaded, hence why she came in looking like a bounty hunter about to cash in on a mark. Hold on? Wasn't there a bounty out for one Yan, family name Zhu? Alright, it could wait. Nerys moved to find an open terminal settling in, "I'm as ready as I'm going to be. let's get this done. There's a dumpling place I want to check out before we leave." She glanced towards Fsh. "They're so good even the Sith wouldn't think to blow them up."
[ Sela Modonric (Sela)]
Sela Modonric arrives in primo LAN party style. Her portable computer, weighing as much as her leg and with enough fans on the bottom to propel a moderately-scaled trireme without aid of oars, hanging from its smart canvas bag, worn cross her chest in a doomed attempt to keep her from tilting adorably over to one side. She's got sunglasses on, and her regular glasses folded up in the chest pocket of her checked red-and-white short-sleeved durablouse behind the pocket protector, and a cigarra puffing between her lips as if by itself, and the obligatory scowl of the professional slicer up for a difficult job to be essayed only by experts.
She plucks the cigarra out between her middle and ring fingers, takes off the sunglasses, puts on the regular glasses, and gives her fellow IT specialist an impersonal "'sup," that falls from her pretty lips with all the grace of a lead ball on a glass table. Then she puts the cigarra in, slaps her bag on a desk, and begins the neverending process of finding a power outlet in the dark.
"You think there'll be any photos of Relies Seedeen in there?" she asks, naming the trendy vidstarlet of the moment. "I really liked the last ones."
[ Zhu Yan (Yan)]
"I dunno. I mean, hopefully. I don't think anyone knew she had a tattoo /right there/." A very committed answer from a man in a /very/ committed relationship. No one tell Zhu Yan's beau that he was open to the idea of downloading lewds. That could only end in tears.
His tears, to be precise.
"To be fair we're jacking into a slicer network. They'll likely have all sorts of goodies. Confidential data, bank logins, whatever. We want to bring this place down but we can absolutely loot it on the way, so get your file transfer stuff ready."
How does one define cyberspace? To the uneducated, it is zeroes and ones. To those who know better, it's still zeroes and ones, but creating a pattern of data flow that can be followed much like a river towards its inexorable end. Of course, some rivers were dammed by pretty aggressive lothbeavers. Yes that's all well and good but how does it look? Well, depends on your rendering software. Some might see a river. Some might see a wireframe map. Or a cake. If you see a cake don't tell Yan. But, either way, the sight of a firewall is distinctive in its presence, whether it be a simple 'true' flag, a wall, or a big gout of flames. It needed to be circumvented. "Okay, when you're ready, patch in to daedalus://515.21.689.3. Scan for ports and punch a hole where you can. But do it discretely. Last thing we need is to set off a bunch of ICE."
[ Fshmaw (Fsh)]
Fshmaw, in a trenchcoat and (from no one-quite-knows-where) mirrored sunshades, loosens his gait and begins a series of choreographed moves. Sometimes walking normally, a bump here, a stumble there; precisely-timed and every maneuver calculated to evade "detection via countermeasure," whether in this weirdly-desaturated world that's a bored security guard or a camera on a timer...
[ Merek (Black)]
Merek looks then to Sela and to Zhu, "I suppose," he offers, then he begins to hack in with assistance from that woman already managing to get by the security. He jacks the deck in and begins to run the codes while he takes the time to take a drag from the cigar with him, "I am going to use a backdoor to enter through the port. I am thinking if we do that I can phish a few passwords."
[ Nerys Greystorm (Nerys)]
Nerys, moving, digitally into the system, ran straight into the firewall, managing to bounce back just in time to avoid getting some really bad neural feedback. Thankfully, she had her helmet on, so nobody heard the stream of binary cursing that came from the humanish woman. Instead, Nerys turned to more physical systems, "I'm going to see if I can get myself a hardline connection to the system, in case we need to take a hammer to the thing in the real world." As opposed to the virtual one. A lead was removed from her armor and she was soon at work. "Don't worry, I'll catch up."
[ Sela Modonric (Sela)]
The hardest part for Sela is finding a plug for her fusion-powered battlestation. After that it's seconds to log into her unfashionable operating system, seconds more to stub out her cigarra on the table, to light another one, and to tippity-tap on her keyboard. No need to open the console when you don't have a GUI! Don't slice harder, slice smarter.
In this spirit Sela whistles away, moshing into the mainframe. "Oh, this firewall's running OS/3 Hyperdrive!" she says, in surprise. "Don't see that much outside the Outer Rim anymore.'
Spoiler alert: Sela grew up on the Outer Rim. Cracking this out-of-support system is just peas and carrots to her.
She pecks away on tbe keyboard, smoke dramatically illuminated by the backlight. Tippidy-tappety, let's get hackety.
"We're in," Sela says. But because she grew up on a backwater world with few hacker vids she says it cheerfully, and with obvious pride.
[ Zhu Yan (Yan)]
Now, to Yan's limited mind, a firewall works best when it's burning things. Since three of them were not being burned from either squeezing themselves through a veritable mouse-hole or literally dancing through the fire, the intrusion was as quiet as a mouse. There was one minor squeak, however. Across Nerys's screen, the words 'ACCESS DENIED: ATTEMPT LOGGED' appeared when she bounced. But no ICE came ringing. A good sign. Mostly.
"Alright, so, we want to bring this system down but to do that, probably need root access. Ferret your way through and see if you can scrounge up a login. Or force a password reset or inject a user. I dunno, do slice-y stuff." This was Zhu Yan, Mission Control, being as diplomatic and taciturn as he could be.
For those in VR, across the wireframe landscape of what appeared to be groups of endless office cubicles flitted coloured wireframe T-pose people, users moving between parts of the system, hooking rides on the thin highways of LAN cables and faint streams of wifi connectivity, all hiding under a dome labeled RedguardVPN. Most of the cubicles were blue for all access. Some were yellow, and others were barely visible inside a faint haze of red. Inside that dome in the sky hung a giant white orb flanked by pointed triangles. Standard white-ICE security, essentially serving as patrolling 'guards' of a sort with metaphorical (and possibly literal) eyes pointing at the yellow and red areas. To the terminal jockeys, much the same would be visible from sys-scans.
CRACK!
Oh no don't worry! Yan had just gotten up from his terminal and opened a window, ostensibly to let the air in but mainly because all the cigarra smoke was starting to form a haze.
[ Fshmaw (Fsh)]
Fshmaw's attempt to blend in as "permissible" to the security around the mainframe is quick, and dirty, and-- although it doesn't work, he skillfully walks back his try and blends in with passing programs *juuuust* enough. He might try again, but more importantly his cover and the mission are not (yet) blown wide!
[ Merek (Black)]
Merek accesses that virtual space with the deck, and will take the time to program into the deck to create a new root password. "I am trying to access the TPC, but I can't figure out if he's using Lothalscript or Basic!" The man takes the time to check on the deck, "The Black ICE are coming in at some point, you all need to be careful about feedback!"
[ Nerys Greystorm (Nerys)]
Nerys, frowning behind her mask, ponders, first to herself and then to the group. "It might be useful to set up a wild goose chase. I've got a couple of codes here, I could see what I can do about creating a diversionary incursion, get the security programs moving in my direction and away from where you all are going." This was cyberspace, it could be anything they wanted. Even real. For some value of real.
[ Sela Modonric (Sela)]
Sela sits at the firewall she's broken into, and considers. This is when the veteran computer user uses psychology. Computer use (skill) is more than just typing rapidly and saying 'we're in'. It's understanding systems at an intuitive level. Knowing how computers think. Knowing how the programmers who programmed the computers think.
Brute-forcing a root password of course is the easiest way to get the people running around the virtual space biffed in the head she can think of. So Sela closes her eyes. Puts herself in the mindset of somebody who would be running OS/3 Hyperdrive in the year of our Lord whatever year it is in Star Wars.
Such a person would never set the password to 'password'.
She tries 'default.'
After due consideration, she adds a number... two.
And a credits sign.
"I don't get paid enough for how good I am at this," she says. No need to make a fuss, just shut things down. Not the things that stop people from getting biffed on the head by HTML colour codes, that's not in her job description.
[ Zhu Yan (Yan)]
>root user connected
>root user connected
>root user connected
A trio of root users connecting at the same time raised a counter to >2, which triggered a message to the #ops-info channel in LothSlack which was generally ignored by most people because it was full of noise. However, this noise in particular, without any special ops of a sort going on, prompted a different kind of response.
ELSEWHERE:
"We've just had three root logins over the past minute."
"How close together?"
"...about a minute."
Pause.
"Okay probably shorter, stop looking at me like that. I need to get seconds from the logs."
"You do that. We're not planning any raids today?"
"Who knows? They don't tell me anything."
"Alright, well, let me jump in and see who these users are."
>user connected
>elevated privileges granted to user ALidcombe
In the VR officescape, across one of the lightbridges, a red T-posing skeletal wireframe person appeared. An sysadmin. The figure made a bolt straight for the red blurry cubicles in which clearly IMPORTANT USER GROUP STUFF was hiding!
"Uh guys I just got a warning that another user is in there with you. Either hide your tracks or shut him down!" This was Yan, who approached this hacking mission the same way he approached every mission, with the intention of killing everyone who saw him.
[ Merek (Black)]
Merek will begin to use the code which he has to hide his tracks, then he nods a bit, before he begins to check on his deck, "I think we are able to get what we need. It's probably best we put up a bit of STEAM that we made." He will try to do all of that. The man begins to code to create things that looks like weird creatures that came from Galaxy.
[ Fshmaw (Fsh)]
Fshmaw's immediate solution to the notion of "security" is to lift his hand in such a way as to summon cunning duplicate-images. The party reproduced, whether in miniature or tagged invisibly in Binary, are each whispered to in the dulcet tones of tender Aqualis-- jus' kiddin, no such thing. The walrus 'hee-YAWS,' gibbering instructions at each in a spray of flourescent neon spittle, *screaming* and _trilling_ until each duplicate has a suitably confusing path to run! FLY, MY MINIONS.
[ Nerys Greystorm (Nerys)]
On receiving an interrupt, decrement the counter to zero.
"Looks like we have company." As if it wasn't obvious, what with the big red alerts, figuratively, or perhaps literally, popping up in everyone's system. As the band of virtual Aqualish began to rampage, Nerys got to work, "I'm going to start working on locking the other users out of the system. that way the sysadmin has no backup. But we need to bring down the system as quickly as we can." Sadly, Nerys player was nowhere near as cool as Nerys-PC. Pretend that came out much cooler than it actually did.
[ Sela Modonric (Sela)]
"That's a good idea," says Sela to Nerys, looking up from behind her enormous laptop with a smile. The cigarra hangs happily from her lips. She's in a tremendous mood. Sure, they're detected, and it's not a matter of putting landmines in the field and rendering it unfarmable for decades, but that's fine! It's not their field! -And- it's just a metaphor! Actually nobody is being killed at all, with the possible exception of their victim's head systems administrator tomorrow morning.
Taking a happy puff, and slamming the butt of her expended cigarra into the much-abused table-top next to the first one, Sela idly follows Nerys's lead, goes into the passwd file, changes things to random strings (it's much easier to set a secure password when you don't have to remember it). The distributed work is light and easy and she's even able to light up another cigarra with one hand, fishing it out of the pack, then fishing out her lighter, then sparking up while typing lefthanded; this guy's password is going to be something like dgrwafqwqe123123123 but that's as good as anything else.
[ Zhu Yan (Yan)]
ELSEWHERE:
"Yeah looks like we've got a bit of a flutter in the cleanup cron."
"Yeah, funny log activity. Garbage collector isn't doing its job."
"Get it sorted, will you? I'm gonna go get some caf."
"I'll come with you."
>ALidcombe disconnected
The repeated outputs of Password changed! :D across the terminals was not only a cheerful message, but an assurance that, aside from the White ICE looming overhead, there were no sysadmins left that could come in and cause aflutter. Zhu Yan, sitting at his terminal simply watching the progress, slouched and sighed in relief. "Hokay. Good. Alright. If you see anything in there you like, download it, but I need you guys to get into the root system and crash it so hard it's never coming back up," he instructed, turning to look at his terminal just sitting there with C:> ready to go. Yeah you're a real champ.
[ Merek (Black)]
Merek will take the time to make his STEAM begin to look and download anything it finds, then he tries to bring them to take down everything that they can find, while he watches. The man nods a bit, "I think that will do."
[ Fshmaw (Fsh)]
Fshmaw, meanwhile, has whipped out his discus. The glowing frisbee containing his dataprint is used as a bludgeon, if Mjolnir were rotoscoped and hand-painted with glowing lines frame-by-frame. Whatever's going on, it sounds expensive! He repeatedly swings the auto-returning disc at a nearby server.
[ Nerys Greystorm (Nerys)]
Nerys, quite likely, was missing a grand opportunity. So much passwords, so lots bank accounts, and yet, she plowed through the scene like a bull in a china shop, smashing and stomping, wall breaking and file shattering. It might even be possible to hear her go 'Oh yeah!' (each time a little avatar of a guy in long, lanky brown hair and a tie around his head chewing on a meat stick popping up) as she smash smashed her way through the system.
[ Sela Modonric (Sela)]
Having gotten into the system, safe and sound, Sela is not the first to learn that possessing is not always as pleasant as wanting. She smokes her latest cigarra, halfway down intwo drags. Thinking. Meditating on the blinking cursor of her screen which tells her that entire databases, entire storage arrays, entire server clusters are at her disposal.
It's hard to decide what to do with it.
At length, with tentative, cigarra-clinging figures, she types in a grep for relies_seedeen*jpg. Nothing.
Disappointed, she rm -rfs a bunch of things that have six-month old offsite backups nobody's ever tried to restore and logs off. Then sits back and smokes, content in a job well done.
[ Zhu Yan (Yan)]
Segmentation fault: core dumped.
C:>
Terminals all hooked into the Console Cowboys central systems all flatlined with the above output as their servers promptly started outputting a garbage core dump into RAM, bricking it. The operating system, free from the tyranny of group policy and safeguards, performed akin to a blender in a fishtank, grinding up the remainder of the NugreSQL DB into a pulpy series of dropped tables and tears. There was nothing recoverable on the network, the server wouldn't come up again even from an external boot device, and all of the patches and codes that the Cowboys were using to turn the undercity into their personal playground was GONE.
All in all, a great job. "Noodles? Noodles?" asked the ever-hungry Zhu Yan, who had far, far bigger priorities now.
