Originally published by Chief Monkey on the A Day in the Life of an Information Security Investigator blog (the “Security Monkey” blog) at it.toolbox.com. Mirrored here from the Internet Archive. All rights remain with the original author. See the section intro for full attribution and takedown contact.

Part I · Jun 21, 2005

“So this is what a vacation feels like?” I said to myself as I stretched out in a pool lounger chair, enjoying the abundant sun light and the scenery around the resort’s gigantic pool.

Two years had gone by in a hurry and I was in dire need of rest and relaxation.

“¿Usted desea otra bebida, Señor Chief?” asked my new friend Pepito as he approached my chair, carefully removing my empty glass from my hand.

“Sounds good Pepito. How about another iced coffee?” I asked politely. Pepito smiled and shook his finger at me.

“Señor, that is your third today!” Pepito announced to all that surrounded the pool. Great, now everyone knows I’m a coffee addict.

I slowly drifted off to sleep and listened to the ocean waves smack against the beach, narrowly missing a few ignorant tourists who refused to move out of the way.

RING RING

“You’ve GOT to be kidding me.” I moaned as I reached for my cellphone in my gym bag. I didn’t recognize the number calling, however my gut instinct told me to answer it anyway.

“Chief.” I mumbled.

“Uh, hi! Chief? This is Ronald Krump. I was referred to you as someone that might be able to help me with a problem with my computers?” the caller asked, stunning me with his question.

“Ok. What kind of problem are we talking about? Excel macro not working? Hard drive failure? Screensaver not coming on fast enough?” I said sarcastically. I can’t believe I answered this call.

“Well, no. I’m president and CEO of MMM Gaming, you might have heard of us. We’re one of the largest online gaming service providers in the world?” Ronald said.

COUGH COUGH

I nearly choked on my drink.

“Sure, I know of you. What seems to be the problem?” I asked as the dollar signs rotated around my head. Hey, I had to pay for this vacation somehow.

“Our newest MMORPG, Huge Kingdom, is being broken into almost every day. We can’t figure out who is doing it, what they are doing, or why they are doing it. We do know that they have deleted customers’ characters and have attempted to take over others. We’re game programmers and marketers, not security experts. We need some serious help. I hear you’re more than capable.” Ronald said enthusiastically.

“Well, I think the situation sounds very interesting. You’re in San Diego, right?” I asked.

“Correct. I’ll have my secretary email you travel information. Can we see you tomorrow morning?” Ronald asked as his cell phone started to cut out.

“No problem. I’ll get a flight out tomorrow morning and see you around lunch time.” I responded before the line went dead.

“Señor, will there be anything else today?” Pepito asked as he walked up behind me.

“Hey Pepito, what’s the weather like in San Diego today?” I asked.

Looks like my vacation was about to end abruptly.

92398-060801-841118-63

© 2006 All Rights Reserved.

Source: archived original

Part II · Jun 23, 2005

“I’m sorry Sir, but we’re out of regular coffee. Would you care for some decaf?” the flight attendant asked as she reached for the evil pot of low-octane coffee.

“Nevermind. I think I’ll switch to Coke.” I said as I took the bright red can from her hands. How do you run out of coffee on an airplane? That’s like running out of beer during a hockey game.

The flight into San Diego was uneventful, and before I knew it I was in a rental car headed towards MMM headquarters. The weather was beautiful and traffic wasn’t too bad.

After a quick check-in with the receptionist and security at the MMM headquarters building, I was escorted to a small conference room that was quite possibly colder than parts of Antarctica.

I opened my equipment bag and removed my prized Apple Powerbook. A quick flip of the screen and it woke from sleep instantly. Several seconds later I was logged in and busily creating case file notes.

The conference door opened briefly to reveal the head of a very attractive female with a smile that consumed the entire lower portion of her face.

“Chief? HI! I’m Lola, Mr. Krump’s personal assistant. Mr. Krump will be with you shortly, he’s on an international call that should be wrapping up in a minute or two.”

I couldn’t help but smile back, my eyes partially blinded by the recent glow of teeth bleaching.

“No worries, I have some notes to work on. Can I bother you for some coffee, please?” I begged.

“SURE! No problem!” Lola said with the enthusiasm of a seventeen year-old cheerleader. The door closed and minutes later Lola appeared with a ceramic mug of hot coffee complete with the MMM logo.

“Can I keep this mug? Very cool!” I joked.

“SURE! No problem!” Lola said as she exited the conference room.

I was suddenly under the impression that MMM had developed personal assistant robots. Good grief.

After a few sips of coffee, my brain was awake and processing the information that MMM had sent me via electronic mail.

Item number one was a timeline of events that lead to MMM discovering that their systems were being breached. Item number two was a very nice diagram of the gaming network for Huge Kingdom, and it was quite impressive. Item number three was a one hundred page document describing how Huge Kingdom was designed and implemented. This particular document had “company confidential” stamped on every page in bright red ink.

“Well, at least they have information classification nailed down.” I laughed to myself.

As I read the design document I jotted down a very brief (and incomplete) risk analysis of the system. I was barely halfway through the design document when I realized that I had been sitting in the conference room for nearly an hour.

What was keeping Mr. Krump?

The conference room door opened almost on cue, and in came Ronald Krump with two people that I hadn’t seen before. You couldn’t miss Krump because his picture had been plastered through several trade magazines thanks to the recent success of Huge Kingdom.

“Chief! Hi, I’m Ronald Krump. On my left is our chief architect Steven Hu, and on my right is the project manager for Huge Kingdom, Arlie Brown.” Krump said as we all shook hands.

After the usual introductions and jokes about how poor the weather in San Diego was, we got down to business.

We spent the early part of our discussion on the history of Huge Kingdom and what MMM felt their biggest risks were in the online gaming world. Steven gave an excellent thirty minute overview of the technical architecture of the product, and Arlie filled in the gaps where necessary. I now knew more about what made an online game tick than I ever wanted to.

“Ronald, you mentioned that the product is being abused by an unknown party or parties, and to the best of your knowledge they are simply manipulating things within the game, correct?” I asked.

Ronald began to speak with his hands in an enthusiastic manner. “Yes, yes, that’s it in a nutshell. I have asked Steven to lead a small group of MMM employees to help you with your investigation. If you need anything, just ask.”

“Actually, I do need some help right now.” I responded.

“SURE! What do you need?” Steven asked in an enthusiastic manner that seem to be contagious around the office.

“I need help setting a trap.” I said, crossing my arms.

Source: archived original

Part III · Jun 27, 2005

“Dude, you’re setting a trap? No fair having fun without me.” Scrap said as I heard him take a drag off of his cigarette on the other end of the phone.

“Yep, it’s going to get interesting around here. Look, I may need to bring you into this shortly. Clear your schedule.” I demanded.

“Aw, man! I hate flying!” Scrap whined as he disconnected from our call. There’s just no making that guy happy aside from a carton of cigarettes a week and a new Zippo lighter every Christmas.

I had taken over a small conference room as my work area and was in the process of completing my risk assessment of Huge Kingdom.

“Interesting.” I said to myself as I examined the event timeline that MMM had provided me.

Huge Kingdom had one of the largest MMORPG launches in gaming history recently (in terms of advertising dollars spent) and ironically enough, the server disturbances had started to occur within 48 hours of the game launch. Perhaps someone was finding it too hard to play by the rules?

The game network was amazing. Large mainframe computers were the “brains” of Huge Kingdom handling all computation work, statistics tracking, etc. The HK clients were “dumb” and performed no game-critical calculations except for firing the game image onto the player’s screen and taking keyboard and mouse commands. Communication between the clients and the servers were encrypted with a strange byte-code method that I hadn’t seen before. The encryption technology was called “QuickCrypter” and was a home-grown encryption solution.

I glanced over the server logs regarding every recorded server event and circled some that caught my eye:

_ June 7th - player X took gold from a chest that was 3000 miles away from him

June 8th - player X had an out-of-bounds conversation with a character 5000 miles away from him

June 9th - player Y complains to technical support that his gold inventory went from 500,000 to 0 in a matter of seconds

June 9th - player Z complains that an expensive magical weapon disappeared from his inventory. Player Z was later killed by Player X who was wielding the very same weapon _ Player X always connected from a different IP address.

A few moments later, my eyes widened with disbelief.

Player X had approximately 50 violations a day recorded on the server and played every day.

But why hadn’t MMM employees gone through the logs and looked for this information? The programmers had the foresight to include boundary checking in the game. Perhaps this case wasn’t going to be very challenging after all.

A knock at the conference room door startled me.

“Chief?” a voice said as the door opened. It was one of the MMM employees assigned to help me with the case, Ken Banobi.

“Hey Ken, what’s up?” I asked as I glanced back down at the server logs.

“We’re all ready to go, just waiting on you to join us in the room.” Ken replied.

“Join you? For what?” I replied, still concentrating on the log files before me.

“Your trap is ready.”

Source: archived original

Part IV · Jun 30, 2005

Ken looked as frustrated as a guy sitting in a bar wearing a “Betty Ford Clinic” hat. I had changed my strategy in the last few minutes before his arrival.

“I don’t understand Chief, we’re changing our plans? Please explain.” Ken asked as he sat down in the conference room.Ken Banobi was “Mr Network” at MMM. Steven Hu had selected him to be my liaison at MMM and to provide me with whatever assistance I may need. Ken was in his early thirties, almost bald, and clearly liked a good beer from his medically diagnosed “dunlop’s disease”. His belly had not only “done lopped” over his belt, but it looked like it was trying to escape.

“We’re going to attack this a bit farther out than I had initially planned.” I began. “We’re going to get some traffic capture devices in here so we can replay these attacks over and over again until we figure out the method.”

Ken was silent, his eyes fixated on the ceiling. “Well, that’s fine by me. But I don’t have that kind of gear here. We may need to go buy some stuff.”

“I have that covered, and it’ll be here tomorrow. For now, I want to spend some time with your Human Resources department and do some interviews.” I said as I peered back down at my notes.

“No problem. I’ll set something up with HR right now for you.” Ken said as he exited the room and adjusted his pants. Man, I did not need to see that.

My gut was rumbling, clearly reminding me that I had skipped lunch. I placed all my notes in my travel bag and checked out with the receptionist.

“Oh, sure! You want a Thai place? No problem! Let me write down some directions for you!” said Barbie. Well, I didn’t know her real name, but she sure looked and sounded like flight attendant Barbie.

A few moments later and I was patiently waiting for a plate of Pad Thai to arrive at my table. I placed my trusty Apple Powerbook on the table next to my glass of Thai Tea and started transcribing my pages of written notes.

I flipped through a few more pages of server logs that I hadn’t completed as a result of my dialogue with Ken when I noticed something intriguing.

Approximately ten days after launch, several players were noted to have advanced weapons in the game. These weapons would take a player several months of constant game playing to accumulate. As I flipped through the logs, the number of players and the variety of weapons increased dramatically. It was almost as if a black market of weapons had sprung up inside Huge Kingdom.

But how?

Steven Hu had made it quite clear to me in our earlier discussion that the path to advancement in Huge Kingdom was very linear, and it was almost impossible to cheat. One of the safeguards that the programmers had designed into the game was the death of players and their possessions. The intent of these safeguards was to prevent bands of “gangs” from finding players with advanced levels and possessions and to keep them from being assassinated.

“Here you go, Sir!” the waitress said as she placed the steaming plate of Pad Thai on my table, narrowly missing my Powerbook with a piece of shrimp that had tumbled off of the plate. I was starving, and proceeded to eat like I had fallen off of the TrimSpa truck on it’s way to a bake sale.

I was ten bites into my meal when my cell phone rang. What timing.

“Chief.” I mumbled into the phone as I took a long draw of the Thai tea through a straw.

“Dude, this airport sucks!” Scrap whined into the phone. “I just got here and they lost my damn laptop bag!”

I swallowed a rather large piece of shrimp and cleared my throat. “Did the gear make it here okay?”

“Yeah, yeah. I picked it up about five minutes ago. I checked my laptop bag because I brought the jumbo-sized one and they wouldn’t let me bring it on the plane.”

I chuckled to myself, remembering the gentleman who cleverly stuffed a gym bag the size of a small horse into the overhead compartment on my flight. “I’ll pick you up in about an hour. Go get something to eat and we’ll wander off to the hotel for some drinks and a briefing session.”

“Right on!” Scrap responded. “There’s a smoking section out here by the door! Hey, did you solve this thing yet? I need to be in town next week for another gig.”

“Not yet.” I answered. “But I have a theory.”

Source: archived original

Part V · Jul 1, 2005

“So then I turn to the guy and I’m like ‘yo, man - you’re spitting on me’ and he just sits there looking at me like I’m a moron or something!” Scrap wailed as he climbed into my rental car.

“Do you mean to tell me that every time this guy talked to anybody, he was getting little saliva droplets on you?” I asked in complete astonishment.

“Serious man! And I kept telling him! And we didn’t even get it worked out until the plane was ready to land.” Scrap said, adjusting his seat belt for the long drive.

“Turns out the dude didn’t speak english!”

I instinctively rolled my eyes. I walked right into that one!

“What’s the plan, Chief? Anything besides sitting on an airplane sounds good to me right now.” Scrap asked enthusiastically.

“We’re on our way to MMM HQ. I’m going to meet with the director of the human resources department. You’re going to meet with the network monkey to install some listener boxes and get us some network traffic to look through.” I responded.

“Right on.” Scrap said as rolled his window down a few inches and lit a cigarette.

“Scrap, not in the car.” I said, fanning the smoke away from my eyes. A car was too confined of an area to be smoking in.

“Dude! It’s a rental! Who cares?” Scrap said with a grin as he rolled the window down another few inches, carefully blowing the smoke out on to the freeway.

An hour and half a pack of Newports later, we arrived at MMM HQ. Traffic was unbelievable, but (according to the locals) completely normal for this time of year.

I proceeded to the human resources department, flipping my visitor’s badge to Receptionist Barbie.

“Oh, like hi! Were there any problems finding the restaurant I told you about?” Barbie asked with a flip of her hair.

“No problem! No problem!” I said, playfully waving my head from side to side.

She didn’t get the joke.

I walked down the hall until I saw the door to human resources. Oh good, another Receptionist Barbie.

“Good afternoon! Can I help you?” she asked with a slow blink of her eyes.

“Yeah, I’m Chief - here to see Erik.” I said as I presented her with a business card.

“One moment - have a seat, ok?” she said as she walked down another hall and knocked on Erik’s door.

“Mr. Slinkpips will see you now.” Barbie said with a Vanna White-ish wave of her arm.

Erik & I took a few minutes to get to know each other, and then I walked down my list of prepared questions.

“In the last year, how many employees have left MMM?” I asked as I placed a check-mark next to the question on my notepad.

Erik reviewed several spreadsheets in a folder placed in front of him and responded, “Two software developers were fired several months ago for non-performance issues. We terminated several facilities staff members after finding them asleep in the office in the morning. And we wondered why our trash never got emptied! Oh, and we let a vice president of marketing go after our department ran a late background check on him and discovered that he had been fired from his previous employer for embezzlement.”

My monkey paw was scribbling as fast as it could, dying to catch every word that came out of Erik’s mouth. We had several good leads here.

“Erik, is employee access to the MMM network disabled as soon as the employee is let go?” I queried, turning the page in my notebook.

“Hmmm. That’s a good question Chief. I usually call Ken Banobi on his cell phone and he terminates all access within a minute. I suppose we should be sending emails back and forth to document this process.” Erik said, closing the folder in front of him.

“Probably a good idea.” I said with a grin as I left Erik’s office. I successfully

dodged Receptionist Barbie on a restroom break and snuck back into my make-shift office.

Moments later, the door to the conference room flew open and a wide-eyed Scrap smiled at me.

“Dude! You have to check this out!” Scrap said, motioning for me to join him.

“What? Where? I’m in the middle of something Scrap.” I responded.

“Dude, Ken is IN the game right now and you’ll never guess who he’s following around?” Scrap asked, his eyes growing wider with every syllable.

“Ok, I give up. Who?” I reluctantly replied.

“A very mischievous minotaur.” Scrap said with a grin.

My ears perked with interest.

Source: archived original

Part VI · Jul 7, 2005

“So that’s what they are wearing in Huge Kingdom nowadays.” I joked as I watched Ken maneuver his character around a grassy, mountainous landscape.

Ken was shadowing a character resembling a minotaur, straight out of mythology.

The minotaur was, by definition, a half-human and half-creature character wearing not a single piece of wardrobe.

“We’re in hot pursuit! Guh guh guh!” Scrap joked in his best Rosco P. Coltraine impersonation.

Sometimes I just want to smack Scrap.“We got a hot tip from another player in the game about this minotaur character named ’trotsky’” Ken said as he panned around the area. The minotaur was in the middle of killing several small monster-type characters using some sort of magical flash.

“Lady luck is favoring us today it would seem.” I thought to myself.

“Ken, where exactly did this tip come from, and what did they say?” I asked.

“A player that was killed by trotsky sent an email to our support address and reported him. Apparently trotsky approached him in the game and was trying to arrange some sort of a sale involving level 50 magical powers.” Ken said as he zoomed in on the minotaur. “To make matters even more interesting, trotsky is one of many names this player has used. His first two names ’lightbringer’ and ‘godofdeath’ should ring a bell with you.”

I thought for a moment. “Holy half-price mochas… those are two of the character names that showed up on those exception reports.” I exclaimed. “Is he aware that you’re following him around?”

“I don’t think so. The character I’m playing as is actually a ‘debug’ character that isn’t viewable to other players. We use these players to troubleshoot problems all the time.” Ken informed us. “I’m not sure why I didn’t think of doing this before.”

I watched the screen intently. No matter how many cases I work on, I always learn something new, aside from the many fine Starbucks locations around the country.

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Scrap asked me, his eyes still lit up like the burning cherry of a half-smoked Newport.

“Well, we’re not at a strip club, so I’m going to say yes. Sting operation.” I replied with a grin. “This works well for drug deals, why not cyber-ware deals? Ken, can you ‘un-cloak’ your character at some point and approach trotsky?”

“Hell yeah.” Ken said. “You want me to do it now?”

“Not right now. Let’s treat this as surveillance for a while and take some notes on his behavior.” I said as I flipped the page of my notepad.

An hour and a few slices of pizza later, we caught a break. Trotsky approached another player.

“No need for hidden microphones in this game.” Ken joked as he hit a key on the keyboard. A transparent console scrolled down over the screen. Ken entered a few debug commands and balloons appeared over the players’ heads.

“That is frick’in cool!” Scrap boomed as he moved in for a closer look. I tried to read the balloons and make some notes at the same time.

_ Trotsky: “Have you found the ‘Sword of Summoning’ yet?”

Player: “Hell no, I’m not even through my second quest yet.”

Trotsky: “I have one for sale. Interested?”

Player: “I have only 200 gold pieces.”

Trotsky: “How much cash do you have?”

Player: “???”

Trotsky: “It’s for sale on eBay. My id is ‘hugekingdomwares’.”

Player: “You can do that?”

Trotsky: “Well, I can. I’ll prove it right now.”

Player: “ok” _

Both characters stood motionless.

“Scrap, is the equipment in place?” I asked as I poked Scrap’s arm.

“Huh? Uh, oh it’s plugged in. Crap I didn’t turn capturing on!” Scrap cried as he ran for the operations center.

Balloons appeared over the characters’ heads once again.

_ Trotsky: “Check out your gold.”

Player: “Woah! I have 2000 gold pieces.”

Trotsky: “Maybe we can make a deal?” _

I was about to make Trotsky an offer that he couldn’t refuse.

Source: archived original

Part VII · Jul 8, 2005

“No dice on the recording, man!” Scrap said as he sped around the corner, nearly knocking me down. “We missed whatever just went on, but we’ll get anything new! It’s dumping to the external firewire drive, so we have lots of bytes to burn.”

I motioned for Scrap to approach me and whispered some instructions in his ear.“Chief, not on the first date!” Scrap joked as he pulled a pack of smokes from his pocket. “I’ll get right on that.”

Scrap exited the room with a crisp crackle of his Zippo lighter flinging open. He really wanted a smoke badly.

“Ken, anything else from our balloon buddies on the screen?” I asked, peering over Ken’s shoulder.

“Not yet. It would appear that the other player is thinking about Trotsky’s offer, or maybe he’s taking a bathroom break or something.” Ken replied as he increased the view magnification of his character. The technology behind Huge Kingdom was astounding.

“You can take a leak in cyberspace?” I joked, staring intensely at Ken’s screen.

“That’s one feature I won’t be submitting to management.” Ken responded.

Within a few minutes, our virtual couple started to communicate again.

_

Player: “Couldn’t I get in trouble for this?”

Trotsky: “No. Trust me on this. Think of me as a God in this game. What I say goes. This place revolves around me!”

_ Ken almost jumped out of seat.

“No way! No frick’in way! I can’t believe he said that!” Ken said as he slammed his fist into the desk. “That egotistical bastard!”

I was starting to think that “project ownership” meant something spiritual to these folks at MMM. Not that it would be a bad thing.

“You say that like you know the fellow with the pointy horns.” I said, carefully watching Ken’s expression.

“That bastard! It’s got to be Duke! Duke Skyscraper! That little prick.” Ken exclaimed while making a really nasty “bitter beer face”.

“Duke. That was one of the programmers that was terminated from MMM, correct?” I asked.

“Yes, and thank every Deity in heaven for that. Duke was a real piece of work. He worked on the core code of the game, or the ’engine’ as we called it. The guy was brilliant, but his ego was so large he had to sit in the chair next to him at meetings.” Ken replied.

Several programmers in cubes near Ken’s desk could be heard snickering and agreeing with Ken’s observations.

“Yo, yo, yo!” Scrap chanted as he once again tried to run into me upon entering the room. Scrap had his laptop in his hand and was busy flipping through PDF documents containing screen shots of web browser windows.

“Ken, call Steven and tell him I want to speak with him immediately. We’re going to have an impromptu meeting of the minds.” I said as I took the laptop from Scrap’s hands.

“A meeting? What about?” Ken asked.

“My little offer to Trotsky. But I’m going to need to use your Paypal account.” I replied.

Source: archived original

Part VIII · Jul 11, 2005

“Let me see if I understand this correctly.” Steven said as he paced around the conference room. “You want to approach this ‘Trotsky’ guy and buy some Huge Kingdom wares from him?”

“Yes.” I said. “We need to establish whether or not Trotsky really can do what he claims. After we’ve established this, we’ll move onto the next phase of the investigation.” Steven was quiet as he mulled over my words. “I’m going to need to talk to Ronald about this. I’ll be back in a little while.”

“Understood.” I said as I watched Steven leave the conference room.

I grabbed Scrap and motioned for him to walk with me. We left the conference room and proceeded to the Huge Kingdom operations center.

“I want you to look at the capture that was taken during Trotsky’s little deal with that player.” I said. “Grab Ken and that programmer that was on our contact list.”

“Chuck?” Scrap asked with a squint of his left eye.

“That’s the one. Break the traffic down for them, don’t miss anything. We need to grab any possible artifacts from that traffic.” I emphasized as we entered the operations center.

“Got it. You want to go over some of the traffic with me?” Scrap asked as he nervously played with his Zippo again.

“I have something else that needs my attention.” I said as I backed out of the operations center doorway. “Remember, find the needle in the haystack.”

“Dude, that’s a BIG haystack.” Scrap said as he sat down in front of his monitoring laptop. “And me without my pitchfork.”

I wandered back to the conference room and opened up Scrap’s laptop. My eyes grazed over the PDF documents that Scrap had made out of his web browser windows. Scrap had done exactly what I asked him to do. He had found several Huge Kingdom items for sale on eBay, all were for sale by a single seller ‘hugekingdomwares’. The seller had a very low feedback score of 23.

Surely this seller hadn’t sold 23 Huge Kingdom items already!

A quick flip of the latch on my trusty Powerbook and I was browsing to eBay to do a little merchant research.

I located one of the items that Scrap had found, and then clicked the “View seller’s other items”.

The item list read like a character’s inventory sheet.

** S xxxxxxxxxxxx Level 30 Wand of Wonder

S xxxxxxxxxxxx Level 35 Staff of Serpents

S xxxxxxxxxxxx Level 50 Spell of Confusion

S xxxxxxxxxxxx Level 75 Medallion of Murder

B xxxxxxxxxxxx Phoenix Coyotes Jersey Signed Entire Team

S xxxxxxxxxxxx Level 20 Boots of Blunder

B xxxxxxxxxxxx Phoenix Coyotes Hockey Stick Signed Entire Team

** Interesting. Trotsky seemed to have a penchant for Phoenix Coyotes signed memorabilia.

“Chief!” Steven said in a firm voice so loud that I jumped in my seat.

“Steven. What’s up?” I asked as I scribbled more notes on my notepad.

“Ronald said it’s a go.” Steven said as he made a ’thumbs up’ with his left hand.

Time to see how greedy Mr. Trotsky was.

Source: archived original

Part IX · Jul 12, 2005

“Die Elvish scum!” Ken was yelling as he laid waste to a group of small creatures that were attacking his character with swords.

I glanced at Ken’s character panel on the screen and admired “Centslayer”. He was playing as a level 10 Centaur and apparently enjoying himself.

“I’m guessing that you’re out of debug mode and letting the rest of Huge Kingdom know you’re here to kick ass and chew bubble gum?” I joked.“Yeah baby, and I’m all out of bubble gum!” Ken said, completing my movie reference. It didn’t take a second guess to figure out that Ken was a true geek on more levels than computer networking.

“Where’s our good friend Trotsky?” I queried while taking a seat next to Ken.

Ken picked up some gold pieces that the Elves were offering to spare their lives and sped off to a portal pad. Portal pads were used in Huge Kingdom to move between “continents” in the game.

“He’s in the sand desert recruiting female friends.” Ken replied in the middle of a large flash of light as the portal was engaged. “This will only take a second…”

Less than a minute after appearing on the portal pad in the sand desert, Ken found Trotsky amongst a group of Amazon warriors.

“The dude has style, I’ll give him that.” I commented as I admired the Amazon wardrobe. “I wonder how many of those Amazons are forty-something men sitting in front of their computer in their underwear?”

“You don’t want to know, man. Ninety-percent of our players register as males. Do the math!” Ken exclaimed as he zoomed in on Trotsky’s location. “There’s our buddy!”

Trotsky was having a private conversation with one of the Amazons.

“Ken, can you kick on your magical bugging device or whatever you call that cool balloon monitoring thing?” I asked.

“Say no more.” Ken said as he flipped down the developer console and entered in some debug commands. Balloons once again appeared over all the players heads.

** Trotsky: “Seriously! $1000 this week alone. I’m making a fracking killing. I’m going to have no problem making it to the all-star game this year.”

Amazon: “You are amazing. Am I getting dinner out of this?”

Trotsky: “More than that if you want.”

Amazon: “Let’s start with dinner.”

** “Before this turns into a bad episode of ‘The Sims’, let’s approach Trotsky and ask about buying something. Ken, what would be most valuable to a Centaur?” I asked.

“The Shield Of Redemption. It increases almost all of my magic skills and reduces the impact of magic attacks against me by twenty percent.” Ken proudly replied.

“Let’s buy one.” I suggested as I took a piece of paper out of my notepad.

Ken approached Trotsky and initiated chat.

** Ken: “Hey, I’m looking for an item. Can you help? I’m kind of new around here.”

Trotsky: “Maybe. Whatcha looking for?”

Ken: “My friend is a Centaur also and he has this thing called a ‘Shield Of Resumption’”

Trotsky: “You mean ‘Shield of Redemption?”

Ken: “Yeah, lol. That’s it.”

Trotsky: “What a noob. lol. Yeah I have one. What do you have to trade?”

Ken: “I just killed a mess of Elves. I have one thousand gold pieces!”

Trotsky: “I don’t take gold. Make me an offer in American dollars.”

Ken: “??? You can do that on here?”

Trotsky: “No, I mean we do the deal outside of the game and I give you the shield.”

Ken: “I have no idea how to do that.”

Trotsky: “You want the shield or not?”

Ken: “How do I know you really have the shield?”

Trotsky: “I’ll drop it on the ground over there by that cactus. You can look, but don’t touch it. If you grab it, I’ll kill you instantly.”

Ken: “Sure of yourself?”

Trotsky: “That just cost you 20 life points.” **

Ken glanced at his character panel.

“Son of a gun. He just drained me 20 points.” Ken moaned.

I grabbed Ken’s left hand before he could type.

“Hold up. We’re going to move things ahead a little faster than planned. Tell him this.” I said as I handed Ken some scribbled notes.

“Are you out of your mind?” Ken asked, his eyes as bright as a wizard’s fireball spell.

“Oh, I’m dead serious.” I replied.

Source: archived original

Part X · Jul 20, 2005

Ken read the note that I handed him and proceeded to place both of his hands back on the keyboard. He froze, as if in a complete state of shock.

“He’s gone! What the hell?” Ken asked as he panned his character around Huge Kingdom. “He just frick’in disappeared!”

“Think we spooked him?” I asked. This wouldn’t be the first time that I played my ace card too fast and ended up scaring away the fat cats from the poker table.“Dunno. But he’s not in Huge Kingdom anymore. Crap!” Ken complained as sunk into his chair. “What’s the plan, Chief?”

“We rest.” I said. “We’re calling it a night for now, it’s late. I’ll shoot Steven an E-mail when I get back to my hotel room and let him know our progress.”

I exhaled deeply and left the room. A few minutes later I was walking into the operations center and disturbed by a strange noise coming from the backside of a server cabinet. As I walked around the cabinet, I was greeted with a pathetic sight. Scrap was sitting on the floor, back pressed up against the cabinet, laptop on his thighs, and snoring so loud that he could be heard over the noise of several Sun E450 servers nearby.

“Scrap!” I said as I nudged his leg with my foot. “SCRAP! WAKE UP!”

Scrap opened an eye and jumped to his feet so fast that he almost dropped his laptop on the floor.

“Sorry man, I was reviewing the traffic with a couple of peeps and I must have drifted off.” Scrap lamented as he yawned into his hand. “Are we calling it a night?”

“Affirmative.” I responded as I picked up my gear. “Find anything yet?”

“Man, I guess it would depend on how you define ‘something’. Chuck and I were pouring over that last dump and weren’t having a lot of luck. Ken was over with you, so we weren’t able to get his expertise on where some of these network addresses were or what they were for that matter.” Scrap replied as he dug through his pockets for his trusty pack of Newports. “And I think I’m out of smokes. Nice.”

We loaded our gear into my rental car and headed back to the hotel for some relaxation and room service. I had really lucked out on the suite that I was staying in. It had two queen size beds, a huge bathroom, a patio for Scrap’s smoke urges, and high speed internet connectivity.

I was finishing off a sandwich and scribbling away in my notepad when I heard Scrap start typing rapidly on his laptop and start mumbling under his breath.

“What’s up?” I asked Scrap as I threw an empty water bottle at his head.

“You know what I noticed when I was reviewing this traffic earlier?” Scrap queried as he chucked the water bottle back at me.

“Was that before you fell asleep?” I joked.

“Nothing. I mean, there really wasn’t anything out of the ordinary in the traffic dumps that we isolated. Chuck was scratching his head the whole time.” Scrap said as he closed the top of his laptop. “Just doesn’t jive, man.”

I nursed my water bottle for a few seconds, dedicating some brain computing cycles to the matter at hand. “Scrap, nothing looked out of the ordinary because we were expecting to see something out of the ordinary.”

“Duh.”

I tapped my water bottle on the desk. “What if we should have been looking for something extraordinary?”

“What?”

“Listen. Think of this as a simple network security problem. If you break into a system, let’s say a system that is very useful, and you want to have complete access to that system anytime you want, but you don’t want anyone to detect that you have that access, what would your course of action be?” I asked Scrap.

“Dude, that’s textbook. You keep exploiting the same vulnerability that let you in, hoping that nobody else finds it. You install a backdoor or something.”

“Or…” I began. “You make your traffic look like it belongs there.” I said, raising an eyebrow.

Source: archived original

Part XI · Jul 21, 2005

Scrap threw his water bottle against the wall, nearly knocking the coffee pot off of the table.

“This haystack just gets uglier and uglier, man.” Scrap whined.

“Don’t they all? I’m going to complete the rest of my interviews tomorrow. I want you to get with Chuck and look at all the traffic captures again. Approach it like you were troubleshooting an application error or something. Make no assumptions about what you’re looking for, and the artifacts might just appear in front of you.” I said. “Ok, Indiana Jones. You E-mailing Steven all of this? Ask him to get some bagels or something for the morning.” Scrap said as he jumped on his bed. “I’m wiped.”

I was still wide awake and in the process of transferring my written notes into case file collections on my Apple Powerbook while simultaneously composing a status E-mail to Steven.

** Steven, An update on today’s activities, and an agenda for tomorrow: … I need to finish interviewing the rest of the staff, especially anyone associated with the development of Huge Kingdom. Please have Mr. Slinkpips prepare an interview schedule, and keep it confidential. … Scrap will need access to Ken Banobi for the entire day. … Execution of the sting operation that we discussed will rely on the availability of the suspect character and his willingness to cooperate. … I need your permission to pull salary scales on the entire company. I will explain this later.

P.S. Scrap would like some bagels

Chief **

I closed the lid of my Powerbook and watched it instantly go into sleep mode. It was time for me to do the same.

The next morning came entirely too fast and found both Scrap and myself a bit sleepy-eyed but eager to continue with the investigation.

“Did you remind Steven to get some bagels, man?” Scrap asked as we packed our gear into my rental car.

“Yes, I did. Good grief, go to the continental breakfast over there in the lobby and get your own bagel.” I said, pointing to the lobby of the hotel.

“SWEET!” Scrap said as he ran off. I guess I was packing the car by myself. An hour later we were walking through the doors of MMM and were greeted by receptionist Barbie.

“HELLO! How are YOU? Glad to see YOU! Would you like some COF-FEE?” Barbie asked in between answering phone calls.

“Sure.” I replied as she buzzed us into the hallway that led to our makeshift office.

“Chief! Hey, not to bombard you this early in the morning but our buddy Trotsky is back in the game and he’s wheeling and dealing stuff all over the place!” Ken announced, nearly tripping himself as he leapt through the conference room door. “And, we appear to have a new problem.”

“Oh no! Steven forgot the bagels!” Scrap said, wincing with every word.

“What…” I began.

Ken stared at me with a look of disbelief. “Chief, I don’t think he’s alone this time.”

Source: archived original

Part XII · Jul 26, 2005

“The little bastard has friends!” Ken said as he panned around the Huge Kingdom landscape.

We were standing behind Ken and watching the events unfold. Ken was playing as his debug character, invisible to the rest of Huge Kingdom.

“So, all of these friends of Trotsky are selling merchandise too?” I asked.

I had been standing behind Ken for about five minutes and hadn’t seen a single deal go down. Ken leaned back in his chair and glanced towards me.

“I only knew that they were his friends when I saw them group over by the Aged Oak over in the forest kingdom.” Ken explained. “I crept up on them, opened up the message monitoring and it was quite clear to me that this was some sort of an organized operation.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“Ken, tell me you saved a transcript.”

Ken brought down his virtual console screen and scrolled through the console messages.

“Paydirt! Yeah, I got it. Hold on.” Ken said as he hit a few keys on his keyboard and his game screen shrunk to a 640x480 resolution window.

“Nice.” I said.

“Yeah, it’s cool. The transcript is over on that printer.” Ken announced with a quick point of his index finger towards a large HP Laserjet printer.

I retrieved the transcript from the printer and took a few moments to review it.

The last conversation piqued my interest:

** Trotsky: “Yeah, it’s awesome man. I can’t believe you totally scored on that soloman sword of severance.”

PlayerZ: “LOL Let me tell you he was so happy to finally be able to slay the pit dragon, he almost wanted to kiss me.”

GigglesME: “Yeah, like anyone would want to kiss you. Fool.”

Trotsky: “Dude, you are 0wn3d!”

PlayerZ: “Whatever. I just PP’d you the cut. I need help on the weapons codes cuz some of them aren’t working and I can’t sell wut I can’t find.”

GigglesME: “Funny because I don’t have a PP email that says I got the money.”

PlayerZ: “I sent it to Trotz account.”

Trotsky: “DAMMIT u are supposed to send it to G’s account. Reverse it NOW.”

PlayerZ: “Sorry. Calm down.”

GigglesME: “bbl. Gots to run.” **

This case was getting more bizarre by the minute. I approached Scrap.

“Kick it with Ken in here, take notes, keep your eyes open. I’ll be back.” I whispered as I walked out of the room. I was heading towards the human resources conference room.

I took a seat at the end of the conference room table. A quick glance at my watch showed 09:00 on the dot. Slinkpips was running late.

I entertained myself with a quick game of Tetris on my cell phone.

“This puzzle has more disjointed pieces than the Windows operating system.” I joked.

A noise at the conference room door distracted me. It was Slinkpips!

“Chief, hello, sorry I’m late. It took me longer than expected to pull together the information that you asked Steven for.” Slinkpips said as he pushed a brown envelope across the table. “It’s all there as you requested. I have provided the complete salary scales for all current and terminated employees, and there are meeting notices for your staff interviews that start in…”

“When?” I asked, noticing that Slinkpips didn’t finish his statement.

A knock could be heard at the door.

“Right about now!” Slinkpips said as he stood up and opened the door.

I was about to start a marathon interview session, and quietly grabbed my Powerbook out of my laptop bag. I opened the lid, typed in my password and glanced at the person sitting across from me.

“HELL-O! How are YOU?”

It was receptionist Barbie.

Source: archived original

Part XIII · Jul 27, 2005

Slinkpips closed the door behind him. Barbie sat perfectly still in her chair, her large blue eyes stared a hole through my head.

“Barbie, why are you here today?” I asked, my fingers gliding across the trackpad on my Powerbook. The large blue eyes disappeared for a few brief seconds as Barbie blinked, each eyelid movement an attempt to jumpstart a thought from her lovely head.

“Um, I have no clue!” Barbie responded.

I couldn’t argue with her statement.

BEEP

A quick glance at my cell showed that I had a text message waiting from Scrap.

“Excuse me.” I said as I returned the message to Scrap.

I cleared my throat. “Barbie, I was looking through your file and was surprised to see that at one time you were on the product development team for Huge Kingdom. You were a quality assurance tester?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah! I did that for a while but got bored and decided to be on the phones and work my way up to personal assistant someday. I’m a people person, you know?” Barbie said, blinding me with her smile.

“Sure. Ok. During your testing, were you responsible for finding any juicy bugs? Tell me something exciting that happened while you had that job.” I said with a smile.

Barbie thought for what seemed to be an eternity.

“Like, I found a cool bug with the transporters. They are these big blue circles that you step in and you’re like ‘WEEEEEEEE!’ as you’re zoomed over to another part of the kingdom. Anyway, if you clicked on your inventory panel while you were transporting all kinds of weird stuff happened to your character and you’d freak out! I got a free dinner from Mr. Krump for finding that.”

I popped a few notes into my Powerbook. “No kidding? Wow, that’s cool. How fast was that bug fixed?”

“Okay, I’m not sure… I found it right after my little niece’s birthday party. OMG she is SO CUTE. That would be, ummm, ten, carry the one… it was about two weeks!”

That sure was a lot of math to figure that out. Now I was the one blinking.

Barbie and I conversed for another fifteen minutes. About her niece.

BEEP

“Excuse me.” I said as I reached for my phone. Time to send another reply to Scrap.

“Barbie, I have to get moving on my interviews. I want to thank you for taking the time to talk to me.” I said as I shook her hand, the motion nearly making her dizzy.

“OK! BUH-BYE!”

I sat back down and struggled to remember the screensaver password for my Powerbook.

“Holy cripes. Whatever she has, it’s contagious.” I moaned.

Cue the next knock on the door as Slinkpips made another appearance.

“Hi Chief! Chuck is here to see you!”

I rubbed my eyes. This was going to be a long morning. “Bring him on in.”

Chuck was your typical geek programmer. Goatee, shoulder-length hair, fashionable glasses and about three days of stubble. The smell of cigarette smoke, mountain dew and McDonalds breakfast sandwiches permeated the air.

“Yo.” Chuck said as he extended his hand.

“Hi there.” I responded. “Do you know why you’re here?”

“Hell yeah.” Chuck said. “And I got what you need.”

I paused.

“And exactly what would that be?” I demanded.

“I stayed up all night last night, and I got the goods on your Minotaur.”

Source: archived original

Part XIV · Aug 2, 2005

“Do tell.” I said as I sat back in my chair and studied Chuck’s expressions for hints of sincerity.

“Alright, well you know how Scrap and I were pouring over those traffic dumps last night and weren’t really finding anything, right?” Chuck asked almost rhetorically.

I nodded in agreement.“Ok, well I was really frustrated when I went home last night and all I could think about was those traffic dumps. So I came back into the office last night with some fresh clothes and I’ve been at it since the wee hours this morning, and I found something that I think you’ll find very interesting.” Chuck said.

I folded my arms in front of me, a bit perplexed.

“Whatcha got?” I asked.

“Well…” Chuck began as he pulled some printouts from his back pocket, “this is a normal capture of traffic that shows that a player has acquired a new item in the game and has added it to their inventory.”

“Is that XML?” I asked as I read through the traffic capture. It sure looked like XML to me.

“Close. We call it HML for Huge Markup Language. All inventory inquiry transactions are performed via HML transactions over our encrypted connection between the client and the servers.” Chuck revealed with a smile. “Remember, the clients are stupid. They are just a window of what is happening on the servers with regards to inventory.”

My eyes were growing bigger as I examined more of the transaction. Things were really making sense now regarding the inner workings of the game.

Chuck wasn’t done.

“Now! Look at this capture, Chief.” Chuck said as he unfolded another printout.

“Notice anything different?”

My eyes scrolled through the new capture, and jumped back periodically to the other printout as a reference.

“Holy sh…” I mumbled. If I was reading this capture correctly, there was a huge security hole in the inventory function of the game, and we had the proof right in front of us thanks to Chuck.

“Chuck, if I’m reading this right, and I think I am… the client is issuing commands embedded in this HML language that the servers are accepting, interpreting and executing?” I asked.

“It would appear so, and if you look at those commands you’ll notice that they contain a lot of game variable names. Only programmers and testers should know those variables, especially the item codes.” Chuck said.

“Couldn’t these variables be found by some attempted reverse-engineering of some sort? Debugging executables? Something like that?” I pondered out loud.

“Ordinarily, I would completely agree with you. But there is way too much detail in that request. We are capturing this between the boxes that handle the encryption and the servers that do all the work. We’re looking at every component of the transaction as it left the client. There’s not much doubt that somebody was very precise in what they were doing.” Chuck said as he stared off into the ceiling.

“Why do I get the feeling that this scenario is all too familiar to you?” I asked as I raised my eyes over the printouts and looked at the bottom of Chuck’s newly-exposed chin.

“Well, it should be familiar. I fixed this as a bug report eons ago.” Chuck responded.

“Whose bug report was it?” I asked.

“She just left the room.” Chuck replied.

Source: archived original

Part XV · Aug 4, 2005

Chuck’s interview hadn’t been over for more than ten seconds before I called Scrap on my chimp phone.

ring

“Yo.” Scrap answered.

“Mission accomplished? According to your text messages, things went great?” I queried.

“Not a prob, bro! I have an entire dump of the CVS for Huge Kingdom on the scraptop, and I checked on your special request - everything is rock’in!” Scrap answered with total enthusiasm.

“Awesome. Anybody see you taking care of my special request?” I asked.

“Nope. I’m like the mist rolling over the stage at a fine Vegas strip club.” Scrap said melodically. “Except I didn’t make contact with any female life forms.”

“I’m sure they are grateful, dude. Grab your scraptop and meet me at Starbucks. Time to round third base.” I said while rubbing my eyes.

“Chief, you know I don’t go past first base on a date.”

Sigh.

By the time I had finished my yammering with Scrap, my monkey brain was crying for coffee in the worst possible way. My eyes were hurting, my ass was asleep, and my attitude was waning. I grabbed my Powerbook bag and headed for the parking lot.

“Like, um, do you need another restaurant recommendation?” I heard as I passed receptionist Barbie.

“No thanks - I’m going to work from home for a while.” I replied as I opened the door with my shoulder.

Hey, Starbucks is just like home to me, and there just happened to be one within walking distance about a block away. Perfect.

Scrap was waiting outside for me on the patio, coffee in one paw and a half-smoked Newport in the other.

“Wassup!” Scrap said as he scanned the screen of his scraptop furiously.

A few minutes later I had a frothy frap on the table and I was waiting for the results of Scrap’s CVS-foo to answer some pretty important questions.

“Hell yeah, man. Hell yeah. I found the patch. I found that freak’in patch.” Scrap said, raising his arms in the air and making little devil ears with his fingers.

“No kidding?” I said as I stole a glance at the screen. I referenced the case notes on my powerbook from my conversation with Chuck. Sure enough, the patch version numbers matched.

“Dude, who checked in the patch?” I asked, unable to find the information in front of me.

“It was Chuckie-poo alright. He checked it in about… two days after it was reported.” Scrap replied, lighting up another Newport.

Interesting.

Source: archived original

Part XVI · Aug 9, 2005

“Ok, so if we run a ‘diff’ on that code with the final production code, what’s missing? What has changed?” I wondered out loud.

“Chief, I hate to be the negative newman here, but nothing changed according to CVS.” Scrap spouted off. “However, I got a surprise for you. And it’s not even your birthday, man!” Scrap rummaged around his laptop bag and pulled out a shiny gold CD. He extended his monkey paw towards me, a grin slowly creeping across his face.

“What’s this?” I asked Scrap. There wasn’t any writing on the CD.

“I grabbed a client CD from Ken’s desk. Want to play a little Huge Kingdom?” Scrap asked as pulled his spare Windows laptop from his laptop bag.

“I’ll watch you, I have coffee that needs drinking.” I responded in between sips of perfectly prepared frap goodness.

Scrap installed the software, set up an account using my credit card, and found himself wandering around a grassy plain.

I scrolled around the notes on my powerbook from Chuck’s interview, and had Scrap try to duplicate the console commands needed to exploit the inventory bug. Scrap tried for almost fifteen minutes before we found a crucial step in the process. Each command had to be preceded by a single apostrophe and ended with a single apostrophe.

“Check out Scrapitarius, man. Not only do I have all the gold and weapons of my choosing, but I’m about to go talk to that hottie amazon over there!” Scrap proclaimed.

I was trying not to laugh during the entire time. One can only see Scrap embarrassed by virtual women so many times in one sitting.

My eyes reverted back to my notes, and then over to Scrap’s scraptop that I had placed side-by-side next to my powerbook for quick reference.

“Hey Scrap.” I said.

“Yo! Not now man, I’m thirty seconds from getting this girl’s phone number.” Scrap whined.

“Look at this patch again. Isn’t this thing supposed to intercept single apostrophes and take them out of the HML?” I asked.

Scrap reluctantly placed his game on hold and glanced at the code.

“Aw man, that is smart! That is way smart! He parses the HML, puts the values into memory, parses out the single apostrophes and other escape characters, but he never writes it back out! It’s going through untouched dude! What an idiot.” Scrap said as he shook his head.

Chuck’s patch was broken.

Source: archived original

Part XVII · Aug 15, 2005

“That’s just rude, man.” Scrap whined as he looked up from his laptop.

Scrap had been continuing the great adventures of Scrapitarius for the past hour as I sat in silence, staring at my notes.

“Rude? What?” I asked as I raised a single eyebrow.

“I was ten seconds away from getting her phone number, and then she says that my sword isn’t big enough.” Scrap said in disgust.I struggled to contain my laughter as I looked back down at my notes.

A few seconds later, a familiar voice rang in my ear and a cold coffee frap was sat on the patio table in front of me.

“This one is on the house, hon.”

The voice belonged to the wonderful girl behind the Starbucks counter that had prepared our drinks during the afternoon.

“You know, I really enjoy making the drinks a lot better than running this place. Getting out of management was the best thing that ever happened to me! Well, aside from the whole ‘money’ thing, but I’m certainly happier now.” she said as she wandered back through the patio door, carefully dodging Scrap’s blatant stares.

Wait a second.

I grabbed my laptop bag and fumbled around inside until I found the folder of human resources files that Slinkpips had provided me.

“Dude! You are so cut off from the frap! Are you high or what?” Scrap declared as he closed his laptop and lit up another cigarette.

I scattered the contents of the folders around the table, and carefully selected the spreadsheet of employee compensation, and some select employee files. I flipped through the papers quickly, scanning for something I completely overlooked.

“You know, when I talked to Slinkpips, he said that they terminated two programmers for non-performance.” I began. “But he failed to mention something that is right here in the records … and that could be because of the way I phrased my question.”

“Oh man, what?” Scrap asked as he leaned over the table and nearly impaled himself with the straw extruding from my drink.

“How does a QA analyst walk away from a job that pays nearly twenty thousand more dollars to take an admin position?” I asked.

“Barbie? She said that’s what she wanted to do, eh?” Scrap replied.

“That would almost make sense, but according to a performance report shoved in the back of her file here, she was demoted for non-performance.” I said as I handed the sheet to Scrap.

“Ok, ok. Hey I’ve been let go from a few jobs and I haven’t exactly owned up to the fact that I was let go.” Scrap announced.

“And she could have left the company, but she didn’t.” I said as I thought things through.

“What time is it Scrap?”

Scrap stared at his watch.

“Nearly five o’clock! Wow, we’ve been here a while.”

I started packing my notes back into my laptop bag and motioned for Scrap to do the same.

“Woah, man. Where are we going?” Scrap wondered out loud.

“To see if my special request you took care of paid off.”

Source: archived original

Part XVIII · Aug 19, 2005

“BUH-BYE!”

Receptionist Barbie was on her way home for the evening and graciously held the lobby door open.

“See you later!” Scrap replied, grabbing an eyeful of Barbie as he narrowly missed being smacked by the closing door in front of him.“Do me a favor …” I said to Scrap as I grabbed his arm. “Walk around, do a head count, find out who is still here.”

Scrap nodded and wandered off down the farthest hallway.

I made my way down the main hallway and found Ken at his desk, still wandering around the virtual landscape of Huge Kingdom.

“This is really frustrating.” Ken complained.

“Eh?”

“Trotsky made several appearances this afternoon. A few deals were made. By the time I approached him, he was gone.” Ken explained.

I stood and watched Ken monitor conversations between several players.

“Yo.”

Scrap had returned and leaned towards me like he was going to tell me a secret.

“Three people left. Ken, Steven and Chuck. Everybody is busy.”

I returned Scrap’s gaze, and without hesitation gave him the ’thumbs up’ signal. Scrap wandered off, and I headed towards Steven’s office.

“Chief! I was just reading the status E-mail that you sent me last night. Very intriguing.” Steven said enthusiastically.

I closed the door to Steven’s office behind me and sat down in a nearby chair.

“I’ve been chasing this rabbit for a few days, and I believe we’ve found the rabbit hole. My question to you is whether you want me to point you to the rabbit hole, or whether you want me to see how far the rabbit hole goes.” I said with a smile.

Steven sat quietly in his chair and stared at the ceiling.

“Ronald said he wanted a name, but he wanted enough evidence and details to justify him terminating a person’s employment.” Steven explained. “Do you have that evidence?”

BEEP

“Excuse me, Steven.” I said as I glanced down at my cell phone and read a text message from Scrap.

A smile crept over my face.

“Steven, I think we should have a meeting with Ronald tomorrow morning.” I said.

“Because … ?” Steven asked.

“Scrap just found the proverbial gun, complete with smoke.”

[Aside]

Ok investigators …

• what was the special request I had Scrap take care of, and what did he find?

• who is holding the smoking gun?

• who is getting fired?

• where did they slip up?

[/Aside]

Source: archived original

Part XIX · Aug 25, 2005

Conclusion - Part I

“Good morning everyone.” I said as I entered the conference room. Steven and Ronald were seated at the conference table with their notepads and pens ready.

“What do you have for us, Chief?” Ronald asked.

I plugged my Powerbook into the presentation projector and brought up a prepared presentation that I had been up all night writing.“Huge Kingdom has a huge flaw that has permitted several individuals to manipulate inventory items in the game. The flaw was identified during development by QA analyst Barbie and corrected by one of your programmers, Chuck.” I explained.

“Chief, I’m confused. If the flaw was fixed, how was it still being exploited?” Steven asked.

“A strange string of events happened leading to the answer. The flaw was fixed by Chuck and checked into the source tree. This fix was compiled into the early beta builds of the Huge Kingdom software. Several weeks before Huge Kingdom went gold, several programmers were terminated by MMM and one QA analyst was horizontally transferred to an administrative assistant position.” I answered.

“That was Barbie. We had doubts whether she was actually filing her own bug reports. When it came down to it, she wasn’t qualified for the job. I believe that a counseling form in her file reflects that.” Steven interjected.

“Correct. The bugs were actually found by Chuck and given to Barbie to file. Careful examination of CVS check-in records showed that Chuck had actually fixed the bug two days before Barbie reported the bug, withdrew the fixed code, and then checked it back in after Barbie reported the bug.” I said.

“Why would Chuck do that? He’s one of our best programmers. He took over a lot of programming responsibility when Duke was terminated.” Ronald asked. “Chuck is a good guy.”

“That is the one part of the investigation that took me the longest to figure out, and it’s fit for a soap opera script.” I replied. “Chuck and Barbie were doing a lot more than sharing code.”

I proceeded to the next slide in my presentation.

“Oh man.” Steven said as he stared at the e-mail on the screen.

“But first, let me describe the events from last evening.

I took Steven and Ronald back to the previous evening after my meeting with Steven:

(fade out to the MMM server room)

“It’s freaking cold in here, man.” Scrap muttered as sat down on the floor of the server room.

“Have some coffee.” I said, handing Scrap a paper cup of coffee commandeered from the MMM coffee machine.

“Are you really sure about all of this?” Scrap asked, glancing at the traffic scrolling across the scraptop.

“We’re going to find out.” I replied.

DING

A console beep erupted from the scraptop as reverse-highlighted text appeared in a console window.

“Woah.” Scrap said quietly.

“WHAT!” I asked impatiently. I placed my hands on both sides of the scraptop and turned it to face me.

“That’s an interesting piece of SMTP traffic you have there, boss.” Scrap said with a grin.

I scrolled down through the headers of the captured traffic until I could read the entire message.

** From: [email protected] To: [email protected] Subject: hey

Steve is on the phone with Ronald. There’s a meeting tomorrow morning. I have tried to tell you that this wasn’t worth it, but you wouldn’t listen. I should have never have let you talk me into this because it was stupid to begin with. The holes are being closed in tonight’s maintenance window. You should have listened to me about a lot of things. Love, C **

I finished my story to find Ronald and Steven mesmerized.

And they hadn’t even heard the entire story …

Source: archived original

Part XX · Aug 30, 2005

Conclusion - Part II

There was a long, uneasy silence in the room. The only distinguishable noise in the room was the fan of the projector, diligently doing it’s cooling duties.

The recent revelations about Chuck and Barbie were a bit overwhelming to Ronald and Steven, who sat perfectly still in their chairs. Neither of them was playing with their expensive gold-plated ball-point pens anymore. I moved on to my next slide.

“As I said earlier, the relationship between Chuck and Barbie took quite a bit of time to research. The motives of both individuals to participate in this activity weren’t clear at first, until more advanced investigative measures were implemented.” I said, pointing my laser pointer at some log annotations on the slide.

“Chief, um, what exactly are we looking at on the slide?” Ronald asked nervously.

“This is a log file from a customized monitoring application that was installed on Barbie’s reception workstation. I became suspicious of Barbie after interviewing several staff members that worked alongside her in the quality assurance department.” I replied. “If you don’t mind, I’d like my associate to give you the details regarding this.”

“Of course.” Steven said as he watched Scrap approach the front of the table.

(Fade out to Ken’s desk, with Scrap standing next to him. Ken is wandering around Huge Kingdom with his debug character.)

“So, you say there are some female types that play this game, huh?” Scrap asked.

“Yeah, but not many. And I swear that the people that sign up and say they are female are probably male. People are weird.” Ken shot back as his character approached a pair of female dwarves wandering around a meadow.

“Nice attire!” Scrap blurted out.

BEEP

“What was that?” Ken asked.

“Chief wants something.” Scrap replied as he looked at his phone.

From: Chief Message: Barbie is up next. Put ears on her machine. Message back when done.

“Uh, I’ll be right back.” Scrap said as he hastily grabbed his scraptop bag and headed toward reception.

Barbie’s workstation was a beige box workstation running a Windows operating system. Her workstation wasn’t locked.

“Sweet. No lock-picking necessary.” Scrap said to himself as he removed a CD from his scrapsack. He inserted the CD and brought up a command prompt from the start/run menu.

d:\tools\monitoring\windows\2000\ears.exe /s /n

The CD drive began to spin, and a message box appeared on the screen.

**Big ears are listening. Logging: Stealth Reporting: None **

The CD ejected automatically, and Scrap returned the CD to his scrapsack.

“Like taking dollars from a drunk stripper.” Scrap joked as he exited the area and sent a quick message.

To: Chief Message: Big ears are listening. Out of area.

(Fade back to conference room, Scrap is explaining the log files on the slide.)

“The software monitors all activity on the workstation and writes a hidden log file to a directory twenty layers deep. The log file is encrypted with a key that only I and the Chief know. The log file is removed from the workstation, decrypted, and run through a parsing application. The parsing application generates a lot of output. We have sifted through the output and displayed actions of interest on this slide.” Scrap said in a most eloquent manner as he changed to slide with a more readable output displayed.

Ronald and Steven’s eyes were surveying the contents of the slide, their eyes dodging from side to side like they were watching a topless tennis match.

“Barbie was SELLING our virtual assets online?” Steven said in disbelief.

“And making a killing.” I replied.

Last installment up shortly!

Source: archived original

Part XXI · Sep 5, 2005

Conclusion - Part III (End)

The slide on the screen appeared to disturb Steven and Ronald to the point that they were both getting a bit unnerved.

“What we have here is a black market for Huge Kingdom items that began with several key MMM employees.” I explained. “We’re going to talk about the specific actions in a later slide. I’d like to stick to our timeline and show you the series of events that led to this. Firstly, a key vulnerability in the Huge Kingdom inventory was discovered in the quality assurance process. The vulnerability was discovered by Chuck, who then allowed Barbie to file it as a bug. At this time, Chuck and Barbie had a semi-romantic relationship. According to employee interviews, Barbie’s skills were noticeably inadequate for her position. Chuck was privy to this opinion and made every attempt to help Barbie appear like a functional part of the team - including providing her with bugs to file and the necessary background material to explain the bugs.” I paused briefly to advance my slides. Steven was holding his head in his hands.

“Secondly, Chuck never officially added the bug fix to the production builds of Huge Kingdom.” I said.

“He added the fix to the CVS, however the fix wasn’t complete.” Scrap interjected. “If you look at this slide carefully, you’ll notice that there is code to clean the requests to the server-side inventory handler. However, the code is intentionally broken. The version of the code that would have fixed this is 1.0.4. This code was copied into a 1.0.5 version, but a key sequence of code was removed which actually cleaned the requests.”

“Exactly.” I added. “Chuck did this with the intention of providing Barbie with more opportunities to report critical bugs. What appeared at one time to be a ‘medium’ level bug fix would later be found by Barbie to be a ‘high’ level bug fix.”

“But how the hell did he do this under the nose of Duke when he was here? Duke would have been employed at the time this happened.” Steven asked.

“Duke spent his last weeks at MMM working on core engine components and fixes that never made it into the game. With Duke distracted and upset by management not wanting to implement a lot of his suggestions, Chuck was doing all source and build management.” I responded. “The change control function failed miserably. Management oversight was almost non-existent at this point.”

Ronald glanced frequently at Steven, watching his reactions to my report. It appeared that Ronald was not a happy CEO.

I moved on to the next slide.

“Looking at our timeline, Barbie has been moved to an administrative function at the request of Mr. Slinkpips. I thought this move was strange, and asked several other members of the staff about it. Are either of you aware that Mr. Slinkpips regularly attends after-hours happy hours with staff members? Two employees revealed in their interviews that Mr. Slinkpips has been known to sing Karaoke with Barbie and a few other staffers. You may have a possible conflict of interest in your human resources department.” I said.

“Oh, lovely.” Ronald moaned.

“This next slide goes into a bit more detail about the slide we saw earlier. This shows specific activities on Barbie’s workstation that were captured by my associate. You’ll notice some key items here:

1. Barbie spent a lot of time playing the company product, which I understand is allowed by company policy. You’ll notice, however, that several in-game chat conversations were captured. The software we installed was only able to catch Barbie’s part of the conversation through her keystrokes. These conversations are the same conversations that Ken had been recording for us as he followed our mischievous minotaur around Huge Kingdom - otherwise known as Trotsky.

2. You’ll notice that several of the conversations are between Barbie and other characters. From her side of the conversation, you can see that she is trying to arrange the sale of Huge Kingdom items.

3. On the following slide, you’ll see captured eBay traffic that shows her account name ‘hugekingdomwares’, the posting of Huge Kingdom items for sale, and seller to buyer communications.

4. Towards the bottom of the same slide, you’ll see captured webmail traffic from hotmail.com. Barbie has logged in as user ’trotsky’ to read emails from Paypal indicating that payment has been received for several items. You’ll also see emails where Barbie has used the same account and funds to purchase items on Ebay.”

Ronald interrupted me.

“Chief, I have to thank you for a very complete investigation of this matter. To be quite honest, I’ve heard enough of this matter. Steven is going to perform a little house cleaning for me. If it’s not too much to ask, I’d like you and your associate to stay and help us plug these holes in our product, staff and procedures.”

I glanced at Scrap, who returned a nod.

“We’d be happy to assist, Ronald.” I said as I shook Ronald’s hand.

Ronald had a brief heated discussion with Steven and left the room.

“If the information on your slide is accurate, they were using embedded commands to manipulate the inventory parser on the server. I’d like to see this in action.” Steven demanded.

“Allow me.” Scrap said as he removed a laptop from his bag.

The demonstration was wildly successful. Steven was completely aghast.

“So Barbie decided to take advantage of Chuck and her knowledge of this bug to make some cash on the side? It just seems so risky.” Steven said as he stared at Scrap’s laptop.

“There aren’t too many more dangerous things in life than a woman scorned.” I mumbled.

“Boy can I vouch for that.” Scrap said in agreement.

Barbie and Chuck were interviewed by Steven and an attorney and terminated that same day. Ronald met with Slinkpips shortly after our meeting and severely reprimanded him. Slinkpips somehow retained his position in the human resources department.

Scrap demonstrated the bug to the last remaining programmers and worked with the development team to squash the bug.

After my presentation to MMM’s legal department, they were very eager to implement safeguards immediately. I spent my last few days on this engagement writing a security plan and policies for MMM, including an entire software development life cycle and change management program.

=*=

The plane ride home couldn’t have come soon enough. Scrap and I were mentally exhausted and were planning some rest and relaxation time.

“That was the most bizarre engagement I’ve ever seen.” I said as I sampled the free pretzels and questionable-quality coffee provided by the flight attendant.

“You got that right, man. The whole thing was a bummer all the way around.” Scrap said in between swigs of cola.

“What do you mean?” I asked. “You looked like you were in your element there towards the end.”

“Maybe so.” Scrap said. “But I would have really liked a date or two with Barbie. Wowzers.”

“You are unreal.” I said as I tossed a pretzel at Scrap.

Source: archived original