Forwarded From: "Noonan, Michael D" <michael.d.noonan@intel.com>
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 majordomo@repsec.com with "subscribe isn".
Today's ISN Sponsor: Hacker News Network [www.hackernews.com]
Received on Fri Apr 30 21:54:57 1999