Page 29 of Her Unflinching Warrior (Omega Sky)
6
It wasnine o’clock in the evening in Portland Oregon. They’d gained hours on the flight. Ryker was driving so that Gideon could do research, but Ryker had taken the first opportunity to pull their rented full-sized SUV over at a closed Costco parking lot. The lot was almost two acres and he parked them in the back corner where they could unpack their hard case suitcases and pull the ammo out of one suitcase, and the guns and rifles out of the other.
“Two rifles?” Ryker asked.
“You never know,” Gideon shrugged. “Just be happy.” Actually, he had wondered if he was going to need to tap Kostya from Northern California, and if he did, he wanted to make sure they each had weapons.
Ryker and Gideon made sure that each M4A1 Carbine was locked and loaded, then they were back on the road, which gave Gideon a chance to study things on his tablet.
“Whatcha got?” Ryker asked after they’d been on Hwy 26 for thirty minutes.
“I’m in Jada’s cloud account.”
“I thought those were locked tight?” Ryker said. He sounded amazed.
“Yeah,” Gideon said, not looking up. “They’re password protected; if you have a lead on the password, then they’re not bulletproof.”
“I thought you said she was good. Wouldn’t she use one of those password generators?”
Gideon looked over at Ryker. “You’re kidding me, right? Thousands of hackers are working to infiltrate those companies every single minute of every single day. Whoever figures out a zero-day for one of those companies, will be bigger than the MVP of the Super Bowl game.”
Ryker looked away from the road and scowled at Gideon. “There you go again, talking all tech. What in the hell is a zero-day?”
“It’s basically a system vulnerability that the company doesn’t know they have. That vulnerability would allow someone to install malware, or download their data.”
“Why call it a zero-day?”
“Because the company has zero days to stop this from happening. Now the hacker who finds this will be able to name their price on the black market.”
“How will he or she know who to sell it to?”
“Trust me, they’ll know. There is a big underground marketplace on the dark web. Hell for something like that, if the hacker is savvy enough he or she could do an auction….but.”
“But what?”
“It’s called zero-day for a reason. At any time, the company could plug that vulnerability, and then your zero-day isn’t worth a dime, so sitting around trying to haggle over a price isn’t always smart.”
Ryker started tapping the steering wheel with his ring finger.
“What?” Gideon asked Ryker, the man was obviously thinking about something.
“Were you ever involved in hacking? It sounds like you know a lot about it.”
“When I was a kid, yeah,” Gideon answered uneasily. He didn’t really like thinking about his time with Kendall Douglas. He did not like thinking about all of the things that he was forced to do with that fucking sword hanging over his head. Even though he’d eventually gotten out from under Kendall, that time had left a stain that he still hadn’t totally scrubbed off his conscience.
Ryker caught onto how Gideon had answered the question because he went back to his original line of questioning. “So, how did you crack Jada’s password?”
“She screwed up. She allowed four of her regular passwords on clothing store sites to be captured on her computer’s memory. When I went in and found those, I figured out her password naming convention. It’s complicated, and unless you were her, you wouldn’t know it. Or unless you had four other passwords to figure out the pattern.”
“So basically you could get into my computer if you wanted to?” Ryker asked.
“Who’s to say I haven’t already?” Gideon grinned over at his teammate.
“No wonder Kostya loves having you as his second-in-command. You’re scary.”
“And don’t you forget it.”
“So, have you figured out where Jada is?”
