The Fourth Woman

The Fourth Woman Chapter One

The reflection staring back at me is a stranger. Red lipstick?  Give me a break. I grimace at my image and a serial killer grins back. What was I thinking? My date tonight is supposedly someone intelligent, so why am I preening for him?  With a swipe of tissue and a quick application of gloss, my normal self reappears. Even without slasher lips, I can be formidable—six feet tall with a black and gray buzz cut for starters. Silver Fibonacci spirals dangling from my ears.

It’s a Tuesday evening in October, my jacket is on, and I’m about to step out when my desktop computer vibrates with red flashing lights.  

ALERT! YOUR COMPUTER HAS BEEN LOCKED! ALL YOUR DATA ENCRYPTED! TO REGAIN ACCESS, YOU MUST PAY 10 BITCOIN WITHIN 72 HOURS! FAILURE TO PAY MEANS WE THROW AWAY THE KEY AND YOU LOSE ALL YOUR FILES!

A ransomware attack. Goddammit.

Obviously I can’t deal with it now, or I’ll be late for my date with Vincent. We’re supposed to meet in half an hour at a local bar in Cambridge, Mass. My first date from Professionals.com—first date in years, to be honest—and it’s already a bust.

For a few seconds I’m paralyzed, hyperventilating, my eyes darting to the four bare walls of my office.

Focus.

I flirt with the idea of abandoning everything, locking up, and going to meet Vincent anyway. Postpone the flak until tomorrow. But the sane personality, the one that always takes charge, banishes the thought immediately. Forget it. You’d be a basket case.

My business always takes precedence. Damn.

I send a hurried message to Vincent. Sorry, emergency at work. Reschedule for Friday?

Fat chance. He probably has ten other suitable women—matches, in the lingo of the dating site—all lined up, ready to go. My inbox isn’t exactly brimming with matches. I already said no thanks to an engineer who sent me two hearts and five emoji winks. I’m sure he’s perfectly lovely, but I’m just not a winky, happy-clappy type of person.

This computer hacking would be a disaster for anyone, but it’s especially bad for me. I’m supposed to be a crackerjack cybersecurity expert. My company—Madeline Geiger Cyber Solutions—motto is: Your computer is my business. People pay me big bucks to protect their networks, so if it becomes known I’m a victim of ransomware, it’s goodbye to the lovely old house in Cambridge, the suite of offices in Harvard Square, and my full-time office manager, Shawna.

That’s Shawna Robinson, my vivacious young employee who waved goodbye about an hour ago. She too has a big date tonight, with her boyfriend, Lonnie.

 “Madeline, go whoop it up tonight with that new man of yours,” was her parting shot. My proposed rendezvous with Vincent has blossomed in her imagination. She’d be outraged if she knew I’d canceled my date. Shawna’s superpower is her charm, a bubbling brew of dimples and inner radiance. She is someone who’ll never have to resort to online dating.

I, on the other hand, am not a slayer of men. The best one could say is my looks are striking, with my tall, skinny bod and aristocratic nose. Only a mother would call me beautiful, and mine does with regularity.

Some more fun facts about me: thirty-three-year-old widow, destined to be single and sex-starved forever because there’s never enough time to put effort into my social life. Goal with this online dating gig: to recapture the romantic happiness of my early marriage, though probably futile. I’ve really been looking forward to meeting Vincent, who is no film star either, but has an eye-popping scientific resume. I’m intrigued. He seems promising, but thinking about him now is self-defeating.

Instead, I must figure out how a lowlife infiltrated my computer and got past my so-called impenetrable firewall. Their demand: ten bitcoin. Today that’s about $900,000. But cryptocurrency is volatile—it could be a million dollars next week. I won’t pay a cent, because if there’s one thing I’ve learned in this job, it’s that paying is the kiss of death. Those jerks always come back for more.

How did I get caught? I never go phishing, which means I never click on unsolicited links. Shawna and I have unassailable fortifications on our computers, encrypted software I myself wrote and continue to market and license. There hasn’t been a problem with it in the three years since I started the business. Any person—wetware in computer lingo—who comes into the office is carefully monitored and not allowed near our computers. Definition of wetware: irrational gray matter floating in the squishy confines of human flesh. It is always the weakest link in a computer network. I’m basically suspicious of wetware, which probably explains the deficiencies in my social life.

So with all these precautions, how did I get hacked?

My brain processes this while I copy the malware code from the infected desktop to my laptop. Then I wipe the desktop clean by deleting everything on it and painstakingly restore all my files from backup. This is my reward for being diligent—okay, obsessive—and backing up every keystroke to storage.

The time creeps by. It’s almost 9:00 p.m.

If I can’t neutralize the ransomware, the hacker will attack me again and again until I pay up or lose my business. That’s how they operate.

Since I trust my software, the source of my problem must be hardware—the gadgets that connect me to the internet. The only way someone got into my computer is through the Ethernet cable, my connection.

My office is in an old Cambridge building, where I rent a suite of three rooms. The cable is attached to the back of my computer, an inelegant blue snake that is stapled to the bottom of the wall and winds around the room to one of the far corners, where it disappears through a small hole in the floor. My office is on the first floor, so there must be a basement underneath me. I’m still settling in here and have yet to explore it.

I grab a flashlight, secure my office with a double lock, push through a heavy door at the end of the hallway, and go down a staircase to the underground room that houses my cable connection. The stairs are steep and poorly lit, the air frigid as I descend into the bowels of the building. A sweep of my flashlight shows there’s not a soul around.

I check my phone. No response from Vincent. Damn!

The downstairs is dark, dank, and unfinished, with a dull cement floor, pipes and gray stone walls. There’s also a furnace making a godawful clattering noise.

In the corner under my office, my cable emerges from the basement ceiling and enters my router box, which is connected to a panel on the wall labeled Verizon. That’s their fiber-optic network. All good, except there’s something mighty puzzling about my router box, which sends internet connections to each of my three rooms on the first floor. Instead of being safely secured in my office, where it belongs, it’s directly under my floor, in the basement, accessible to every hacker and their mother.

And some freeloader has taken advantage of the faulty setup.

A fourth cable that doesn’t belong to me extends from my box and disappears into the cover panel of the furnace. No router of its own. It looks like the villain is the heating company, which remotely monitors the furnace system. The jerk who set up the furnace piggybacked on my connection; they’re getting a free internet ride, paid for by me.

It takes about two seconds to figure out how I got hacked. The heating company made itself part of my network, one of their employees fell into a phishing trap by clicking on a malign link (the bait), and the malware smoothly traveled into my computer. Unbelievable. This is embarrassing. I should have checked my hardware on moving-in day. Shame on me.

If my theory is right, the heating company is also dealing with a ransomware attack. The same hacker who ensnared me would have caught them too.

The furnace panel has a phone number. After I’ve punched in the digits, a stern voice tells me it’s after hours, then the phone goes dead in my hand. It’ll have to wait until tomorrow. Damn! Thieving assholes. The heating company deserved to be hacked.

I take note of their address, then use my Swiss Army knife to slice through their illicit cable. Let them figure out why they’ve lost their ability to monitor the furnace. Before leaving this awful room, I make a mental note to install a small surveillance camera that will keep an eye on my Ethernet cable. And tomorrow I’ll move my router box into my office.

Back upstairs, I fidget with my phone. Still no indication Vincent received my message. Shit! Perhaps he’s at the bar right now with a soul full of hope, keeping his eye out for a tall woman in a navy-blue business suit with a nice buzzy haircut. And then I realize how late it is—almost 10:00 p.m. He probably went home in disgust long ago and crossed me off his list.

This is my first foray into online dating. I met my husband Mike in college and married him when we were computer science graduate students. Children. I was a virgin.

Focus on the hacking attack!

My next goal is to track down the IP address of the computer that sent the ransomware. Find the computer, access it, destroy it. The hacker is probably using a spoofed IP address (namely fake) he assumes can’t be traced back to his actual location. He’s mistaken. This hacker doesn’t realize he’s messed with the wrong person. I can find his real address if I get him to chat to me from his actual source address. Revenge will be sweet, but it may keep me here all night.

The malware code is straightforward and I plunge right in, spurred on by adrenaline. There’s a button that says PAY NOW! My entry ticket. In the comment box, I write: Can’t pay. Can you lower your price?

Another screen of bile pops up.

YOU NOW OWE 20 BITCOIN! PRICE DOUBLES FOR EACH DELAY! GET YOUR ACT TOGETHER! PAY NOW TO UNLOCK FILES!

I write down the new spoofed address.

Our exchanges become more and more heated as I insist I can’t pay.

ALL YOUR PERSONAL FILES WILL GO ON THE INTERNET IN ONE HOUR! ALL PERSONAL EMAILS! ALL YOUR PRIVATE DATA AND PORN! YOURE TOAST!

Each time he yells at me from a new spoofed address, it narrows down the path and gets me nearer to his computer. Yes!

My phone jangles on my desk. Mom. Not now, please.

With a shaking hand, I kill the call.

Speed is crucial. I dare not lose him. Yet it’s maddening how slow this algorithm is, working backward on the branches of a tree, limb by limb, to get to the root, the source computer, eliminating all but a handful of networks. Time drags, grinding on, testing my patience.

My phone pings. I glance at it. Vincent. It’s 1:30 a.m. Why is he only writing now, at this ungodly hour? Do I really want to date an insomniac?

The computer address of the hacker pops up on my screen. I’ve got him!

Mom and Vincent will have to wait.

With a murderous heart, I send a stream of malware speeding to the hacker’s computer.

Turn off the internal thermal protection sensor inside the guts of his computer, disabling the fan that cools down the hardware. Let loose a barrage of infinitely looping algorithms that will pierce the brain of his computer, his nerve center, his central processing unit. Grind away until his computer is smoking in front of him, literally fried to death.

He’ll need a new computer. Vengeance is sweet.

I breathe deeply for a second, then call my mother, who doesn’t reply. Why did Mom call so late? When I try again, a humanoid voice apologizes because Mom’s voicemail is full. God I’m tired. I drop my head in my hands and let out a cry.

My spine is knotted with anxiety by the time I click on Vincent’s message.

His response, sent through Professionals.com, is brief.

Can’t meet on Friday. How about tomorrow, same time same place?