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Krispy Kreme and picked up half a dozen donuts along with two coffees. “What did the paper call him?
    The Carpet Killer? It must have been rough.”
    Chris fi gured just about everybody had heard about that terrible time with the Carpet Killer. The press had gone on a feeding frenzy with Chris and the newly outed David at center stage for way too long. The whole mess had nearly derailed David’s career. The police brass had not taken kindly to one of their homicide detectives forming a relationship with a man who had been a murder suspect at one time. Their wedding in Canada eighteen months ago had only solidifi ed his news value.
    Oddly enough, it had all provided a much-needed boost to Chris’s new business. When he’d quit DataTEK, and gone solo, he’d worried about building his new client base. All the publicity had actually brought in new business. He fi gured it was a Hollywood thing—any publicity was good as long as they spelled your name right.
    “It had its moments,” Chris said. “Look, I know you’ve got a good system here. But this is a lot more malicious than I originally thought,” Chris said. “We need to take a look at all the patient records to see if they show signs of tampering.”
    Terry was pale but stoic. They discussed what they were looking for and soon the two of them were seated in front of glowing monitors scanning through directories, looking for what didn’t belong.
    “Watch for odd timestamps,” Chris said. “We’ll have to look at everything that was altered within the last forty-eight hours, 14 P.A. Brown
    compare any suspicious ones against your backups.” David’s fi le had been changed roughly sixteen hours ago. “You realize we’re going to have to let management know what’s going on? You have to comply with the data breach laws. Those with legitimate access to those fi les are going to have to go through them, too.”
    Pain crossed Terry’s face. Disclosure was mandated by law.
    “This is bullshit. How the hell did he get in?”
    Chris hated what he had to say next. “On foot.”
    “You mean he just walked in and hacked my system?”
    “Not quite that simple, but here, look...”
    Chris had been pleased to fi nd Terry had employed a passive protocol analyzer, which operated at the lowest levels of network operation, and was extremely diffi cult to evade. There was no obvious way to transmit packets on a monitored network without it being detected. It still took a trained eye to spot the bad packets from the good ones. At fi rst glance the activity logs seemed innocuous. Terry scrubbed stiff fi ngers through his short hair.
    “I don’t see anything.”
    Chris was looking for tunneling activity or some other TCP/
    IP exploit, since it was the one type of traffi c that couldn’t be blocked without blocking Internet access. Once inside, any savvy cracker could access the rest of the network. Chris often used something similar to run penetration tests of networks he was charged with protecting.
    “It’s probably some damn script kiddy,” Terry muttered. “You know as well as I do that most of these guys are kids, barely out of diapers. Makes you feel old. Doesn’t it?”
    “I try not to think about it.” Truth was, Chris did feel old sometimes, trying to keep up with teenagers with no morals, and minds like quicksilver. It was all fair game to them, and it never did any good telling them it was wrong to hack a stranger’s computer. They made heroes out of the ones who got caught.
    Famous crackers and phreaks like Riddle and Mitnick were vilifi ed by the mainstream media, but lived on as cyber-legends, L.A. BYTES 15
    in chat rooms and newsgroups, all over the world. Role models to a disenfranchised generation.
    “How did it happen? I can’t believe you’re saying he just strolled in off the street.”
    “Not quite that simple, but yeah, he did it from inside.” He tried to soften his words. “Face it, would anyone notice a stranger wearing scrubs?