As if on cue, at least a dozen voices could be heard around the room.
“What the hell?” I heard someone exclaim.
“Why is therepooon my computer?” I heard Carl demand from his cubicle beside me.
Kyle practically squealed in excitement. I glanced at Carl’s computer and saw that his screen too was taken over by cute-faced excrement.
“They’re all like that! Or at least anyone stupid enough to open that email. Social engineering, baby!” Kyle laughed and then covered his mouth with his hand. I rolled my eyes and, with a few clicks of my mouse, disabled his low-level hack.
I leaned over Carl’s desk, hesitating before taking his mouse. “May I?”
Carl startled at my having addressed him directly. He blinked rapidly, staring at my hand, poised to take his mouse.
“Uh. Yeah. Um, s-sure,” he stuttered.
With a few clicks, I cleared his computer, the emojis vanishing as if they were never there. “How did you do that?” he asked.
“You’re welcome,” I said, not bothering to answer him.
“Uh, thanks, uh…” He pushed his glasses up his nose and flushed in embarrassment. I knew he was struggling to remember my name.
I didn’t help him out, our brief interaction now officially over. I rolled back over to my own desk and opened my email again.
“Aw, Han, you’re no fun,” Kyle complained as I scrolled through my legitimate messages.
I flicked Kyle’s arm and pursed my lips. “Really? You couldn’t think of anything better to do with your time than shit-blasting everyone when they opened an email?”
“Come on, it was pretty funny.” He smirked, though his enthusiasm was dampened by my lack of praise.
“Yeah, if you’re five.” Kyle’s face dropped and I started to feel bad. Reprimanding him was like kicking a puppy: no fun unless you were an outright sadist.
“But I guess it was sort of funny,” I conceded, and I couldn’t help but smile. Kyle’s hacker tricks, while obnoxious in a teenage-boy-hanging-out-in-his-mom’s-basement kind of way, still amused me. Mostly because he thought he was so badass about it. I wasn’t sure what was particularly edgy about having googly-eyed graphics bounce around a screen.
“You’d better watch yourself, though. You could get fired for this shit,” I reminded him and paused. Kyle’s lips started to twitch. I struggled to keep a straight face. Then we both burst out laughing at my unintended pun.
People looked at us, clearly wondering what we found so funny, so I quickly suppressed my amusement and swatted his arm again.
“Seriously, though, Kyle. Watch yourself. It would be easy to trace that email to you.”
Kyle’s smirk faded a bit before he rolled his eyes with forced nonchalance.
“I used a VPN and an onion router to set up an anonymous email account. I doubt anyone could trace it to me. Even you.” Kyle grinned, obviously feeling a bit more confident.
I snorted, not wanting to burst his bubble. I knew how to find what I needed. Even on the supposedly anonymous Tor network. But Kyle didn’t need to know how deep I could dig.
“Besides,” Kyle went on, “it’s not like Chuck could log in to his email without someone helping him. There’s no way he’ll figure out it’s me.”
On that front he was right. Our boss, Chuck Bennett, couldn’t navigate his way out of a paper bag, let alone a computer, making his position as director of operations at an IT company a big fat joke. But Chuck the ignoramus wasn’t the one Kyle had to worry about.
“It’s not Chuck who does the looking; remember that. Not everyone is as stupid as you like to think they are,” I said, giving him a sideways glance.
He didn’t have anything to say to that, because he knew I was right.
This wasn’t the first trick my geek buddy had pulled in the office. They were minute annoyances that I took little notice of, but they drove Chuck crazy. He had gone on a total witch hunt last month after Kyle had performed a basic DDoS attack on our company website, replacing the Holt IT Solutions logo with a picture of a dog licking its ass.
Chuck had ordered my department to poke into emails and personal files on all workstations looking for the culprit.
Kyle was lucky that I had been the one tasked with sweeping his laptop. He hadn’t been particularly smart in covering his tracks, and I had gotten rid of at least a dozen scripts he had cobbled together for his kiddie hacker crimes.
