Cyberstrike James Barrington (book recommendations for teens TXT) 📖

car and a van along the Metro’s route to pick him up again when he disembarked. It wasn’t the most secure surveillance tactic because it depended on the level of traffic and the speed the vehicles could maintain, but Grant Rogers, as the man running the surveillance operation, had decided he would rather risk losing sight of Ganem than risk the target realising he was being watched.

And in the event, it had worked.

When the target had walked out of Greensboro Station, the car and van were already in position, close enough to positively identify Ganem as he had emerged. Once they were sure of his destination, the men in the van – which was signwritten with the name of a general building company but with a phone number that would be answered by another team member at the J. Edgar Hoover Building on Pennsylvania Avenue should anyone wish to have some construction work done – had swiftly grabbed tool boxes, pulled on white overalls and made their way into the shopping mall.

A very brief discussion with the mall manager, which had mainly involved Grant Rogers telling the bemused man what was about to happen and why he should keep his mouth shut about it, had been followed by the team being given access to the flat roof of the building. They’d made their way up a set of service stairs and across the roof to a position about thirty feet from the coffee shop where Ganem had taken a seat at an outside table and had begun ‘inspecting’ one of the air-conditioning units mounted on the roof. The mall was only single-storey and an appearance of work was important as they could be seen from the adjacent car park.

One of the pieces of equipment they deployed was a long black tube about the thickness of a broom handle that they mounted near the edge of the roof so that the end of it was pointed at the table occupied by Ganem and the other three men who had appeared at about the same time as the target. This directional microphone, commonly known as a shotgun mic, was intended to record what the four men said and was attached to a small battery-powered digital recorder. Accurate positioning was vital, and one of the agents connected an earpiece to the recorder and minutely adjusted the position of the device until he could hear their voices. Then he had left the mic in place and stepped away from it.

Some seventy yards away in the parking lot opposite, two other FBI agents had stopped their car to use an almost identical mic and recorder, aiming it at their target. The number of pedestrians moving around between them and the coffee shop made it unlikely that they would record much useful conversation, but a belt and braces approach was usually advised in such circumstances. The other thing one of these agents did was to use a Nikon digital camera fitted with variable-power telephoto lens to obtain clear pictures of each of the four men at the table. They needed decent photographs to identify them.

While all this was going on, orders were issued by Rogers for three men to follow each of the unknown contacts when the meeting broke up. He didn’t want to risk using larger teams than that because it was important to make sure the targets didn’t know they were under surveillance. In the meantime, the images obtained by the agent, known as ‘probe photos’ because they had been obtained during a current and open FBI investigation, were emailed direct from the surveillance vehicle to FBI headquarters and then forwarded for analysis by FACE.

FACE is the Facial Analysis, Comparison and Evaluation Services Unit, based in the Criminal Justice Information Services Division at Clarksburg, West Virginia, and uses facial recognition technology and software to try to match such surveillance-derived images with pictures already on file with the FBI and with state and other federal databases.

When the meeting broke up it was late morning and both foot and vehicular traffic had increased and, perhaps not surprisingly, all three of the surveillance teams, forced by their orders to keep some distance from and behind their targets, had eventually lost contact with the unidentified men in the crowds albeit, in one case, under slightly peculiar circumstances.

But Grant Rogers still considered the operation a success. They now had photographs of three more of the people within Karim Ganem’s circle of acquaintances – or possibly conspirators – and with any luck the recordings of the conversation might produce names for the new faces as well as shed more light on what they were up to.

Because at that moment, the FBI still had no idea why Ganem was in America or what he was trying to do. They only knew that he was a person of interest, and that had been enough to spark the surveillance.

Chapter 30

Washington D.C., United States of America

Hacking is in many ways more of an art than a science, as each company or organisation that is the subject of an attack will offer different challenges. Of course, there are pieces of software that will allow the attacker to do things like check for open ports or run brute force attacks to try to crack passwords, but very often it’s the hacker’s intuition that leads to the discovery of a chink in the electronic armour, a chink that can then be levered wide open.

But it is also a fact that only in about five per cent of attacks do the successful hackers manage to breach the security systems of a website from the outside solely using different kinds of attack and hacking tools. In the other roughly ninety-five per cent they have help through inadvertent human error, most commonly by people simply not obeying the rules. For example, by users not changing their passwords regularly, by not having strong enough passwords in the first place or by using the same password on different sites, or through