Fatal System Error Read Online Free Page B

parties. Barrett found that being in college was much more interesting than being in class. He drank his share of beer and failed every class but history. After a year, he got his wish to work. Barrett started at a local Internet service provider, then joined a friend at a small security firm, Network Presence. The company specialized in keeping corporate customers safe from hackers.

    Barrett often got to work on the “outside team,” authorized sight unseen by a customer to test its defenses by trying to break in. He soon showed an unusual flair for thinking like the enemy. A big assignment was to crack into one of the country’s largest insurance companies, one that prided itself on security. Barrett set up shop in a hotel room filled with whiteboards a block from the company’s headquarters. After running some probes to map what the company’s network looked like, Barrett wrote a fake two-paragraph letter from the company to Qwest, persuading the Internet service provider to turn over control of one of the target firm’s blocks of Internet addresses. Once inside the company’s trusted electronic space, Barrett sent what appeared to be internal emails inviting a dozen key technical employees to sign in to a new internal portal. As they logged in, Barrett captured their user names and passwords before connecting the employees to the old company portal. Those credentials gave Barrett access to the entire network, right down to the desktop of the chief executive.

    But Barrett wasn’t through. The company was an early adopter of RFID (radio-frequency identification) badges for employees. The badges included photos and coded authentication that the staff swiped through automated card readers at office entrances. Barrett bought an RFID reader and went to a TGI Friday’s favored as an after-work hangout, where he surreptitiously swiped employees’ badges. Then he bought blank RFID cards, used a picture of himself, and made his own corporate ID. After Barrett’s full report to the customer, one of the target company’s senior technology executives was so impressed that he visited Barrett at his parents’ house, just to see what environment could have produced him.

    After maturing on the job, Barrett decided to give college another chance. He enrolled at Cal State Sacramento, put his computers away in a closet, and eliminated the beer issue by signing up for crew, which started practice each weekday at 5:30 A.M. Barrett signed up for a general introduction to philosophy, intending to fulfill a distribution requirement. Even though the course forced him to concentrate on written words, Barrett loved working through the ideas.

    Barrett developed a special fondness for the philosophy of ethics and often tried to translate the arguments into the world of computers. In one paper, Barrett used Kant’s categorical imperatives—known in rough translation as “do unto others as you would have them do unto you”—to make the case that denial-of-service attacks couldn’t be justified, no matter how offensive the targeted content. In his spare time, Barrett worked on photography, a hobby that turned into a post as photo editor at the college paper, where he made assignments and gave grades to students taking a photojournalism class. Rachelle Sterling was a few years younger than Barrett when she showed up at the newspaper office and introduced herself. He suggested she stop by his condo to pick up a camera, and they started dating almost immediately.

    Barrett moved on from rowing to cycling, but those endeavors ended when an eighteen-year-old girl ran a stop sign and hit Barrett on his bike, smashing his leg. While laid up, he returned to computers. It was around then that he was chatting with friends about someone else’s attempt to map the paths data take on the Internet. Barrett said that the map was nice to look at but that it took too long to generate and was excessively mysterious about how it worked. Barrett