The questions had been forgotten when I kissed her. Maybe that was stupid, but I couldn’t let my innate paranoia ruin what was building with Hannah.
I had wanted only a distraction.
Hannah was proving to be more than that.
I just wasn’t entirely sure what yet.
“I’d say this weekend, but that probably makes me sound a little too eager,” she answered lightly, and I grinned.
“Maybe a little,” I teased.
My email pinged and I noticed a new message from Agent Garson in cyberforensics. He had been compiling a list of IPs to try to find the source of the botnet attack on Ryan Law. We knew it could take weeks to filter through the thousands of routers used in the attack.
I anticipated another run-of-the-mill email letting me know that he was getting nowhere fast.
But when I clicked on the email, I felt a pang of excitement.
From: Garson, Timothy
Subject: IRC monitoring
Date: March 7, 2016 09:45
To: Kohler, Mason
The IP source is untraceable due to the use of hijacked IP addresses. However, monitoring of IRC chats has yielded possible clues to origins of attack.
Multiple chat windows were utilized during the hours prior to the attack. Proxies were used and chat rooms involved a layer of encryption we haven’t seen before.
I’ve attached the list of chat rooms, highlighting the repeated uses of a name we both recognize.
At least we now know what to look for.
Regards,
Tim
I opened the attachment and saw the list of IRC chat rooms. Most run-of-the-mill.
But for one.
**bike for sale**—2 chatting.
It was time-stamped the night of the Ryan Law DDoS attack at 21:00.
It could be a coincidence. But something told me it wasn’t. The cyber team spent their days filtering through Internet traffic. They perused IRC chat rooms, looking for a digital footprint.
This could be it.
There was a pattern here that Tim had picked up on. It could mean nothing.
Or it could mean a break in the case. Finally.
My stomach clenched. I scrolled through the rest of the attachments and found this same chat room coinciding with a previous brute-force attack on Smacktown, a sketchy online porn operation that had also delved into more criminal ventures, including possible murder. Authorities had never been able to pin anything on it, no matter how much they had tried. Smacktown had been hacked. Its database destroyed.
**bike for sale**
What did it mean?
