I wrote this short story back in 2009. I never did anything with it until now. In light of the news headlines and activity with Verizon, I thought I would share this unedited short story! Enjoy it, but remember...This is my work and you can link to it, but please do not copy it.
deTEXTives
513-555-8754:
OMGYG2BK ##
859-555-7732:
HONEST TO GOD, SHE WAS BUCK NAKED ##
513-555-8754:
IN THE BOARD ROOM? I SO WISH I WAS THERE. ##
315-555-0213: CARRY ON BOYS, I HAVE TO GO. TATA. ##
It was now almost
7:30 PM and Brendan Parker was ready for his lunch break. Brendan was a junior systems administrator
at Verizon. He worked at a
non-descript building just outside of Utica New York. He along with a group of sixty employees were the people who
kept the Verizon texting service up and running for over twenty-five million US
customers. This is a twenty-four
hour, seven day a week operation. Brendan
is twenty-six years old, and lives just outside of Utica, near the old Utica
Club brewery, along with Janice Fanelli another junior administrator. Janice is a small and attractive young
woman with auburn hair and an ashen complexion. She is a year older than Brendan. Their living together was merely a financial necessity.
The only
fringe benefit of the job from Brendan’s point of view were those times when
things went smoothly and he got a chance to read through some of the racier
text messages that were stored at the Verizon datacenters located in ten cities
throughout the country. The
snippet above was one of six thousand lines of text messages from the headquarters
of Fifth Third Bank in Cincinnati that were sent via company Blackberries just
yesterday. Brendan peered at his
computer through his trendy black rimmed glasses and continued to format a
report requested by Fifth Third.
They wanted to know the volume of text messages being sent by their
employees. Most people who use
Verizon texting service do not realize that for billing purposes, Verizon
captures and records every text messages sent through their service. There is a gigantic data base that
stores these messages. Those
millions of messages are kept for six months. A group of very smart developers and database administrators
have created search engines and tools to help Verizon text administrators like Brendan
and Janice help the accounting team with any special billing inquiries.
Even the
savvy CIO’s at banks like Fifth Third Bank did not realize the wealth of
information hidden in the midst of the senseless drivel that are the make-up of
most text messaging exchanges. Of
course, Homeland Security is fully aware and although Brendan cannot confirm
this, he is absolutely sure that federal agency has full access to the entire
texting database and more than likely keeps more than six months of texting
history in its databases. But Brendan’s thoughts at this moment were on what was
that woman doing naked in the Board Room and what did she look like?
At the end
of the day shift and start of the evening shift, Edna Woodward had scheduled a
meeting of all administrators.
Edna was a true blue Verizon lifer. She had gray hair, small stature and is a high energy
fireball. Edna is not what most of the young admins imagined for the director
of the operation. But that is what
she was. This was not a regularly
scheduled meeting and it is very usual for meeting to span across work
shifts. Brendan hoped he wasn’t
about to get laid off. He was
still at least six months from climbing out of the credit card debt he created
for himself the first eighteen months after graduating from SUNY at
Binghamton. Brendan’s curly red
hair and freckled face belied his willingness to support a local bookie during
the end of his college days and his first year of work at Verizon. He needed his job.
At 8:05 Am
Edna convened the meeting in the drab, windowless conference room, “Please
people, lighten up! I called you
all together to help me find out why our service has been running slow at times
over the past six weeks.”
The large
Smart Board at the front of the room came alive and there was a graph showing
small dips in the average transmission time for text messages starting the
third week of April. The changes
in times were in milliseconds.
These delays were not ones that could be detected by individual
users. But to big providers like
Verizon, they are troublesome.
Edna continued, “As you can see this is not a critical issue, but there
is some industry buzz that one day in May, the AT&T texting service was
down for one hour and the cause was not a ‘network’ failure as the Bell Boys
reported to the press. We do not
want our service to be down for even a few minutes.”
A hand went
up near the back of the room. It
was Dharmesh Patel who is by far the nerdiest of this room filled with card
carrying, certified nerds.
“Miz
Woodward, you point to several places on the chart where there are ten to
twenty minutes of time with delays, but it appears that there is a consistent
delay every day between 1:00 AM and 2:59 AM. Is that not more of a concern?”
Edna quickly
replied, “The delays at those times are a know anomaly. That period of time is not a concern to
you or me. Is that clear? What I need now is your awareness of
the issue. Please log any work you
are doing that touches our database servers. Keep track of any inquires you run against the
database. We have to make certain
we are not the cause of the problem.
That is all, sorry for keeping some of you past your shift.”
As the group
filed out of the room, Edna added, “Brendan and Dharmesh, can you come to my
office for a few minutes.”
Brendan
paled and thought once again about being fired. Geez. But
surely they cannot let Dharmesh go.
Edna settled down behind her desk.
She was one of only three people in the group with an office. The rest of the team is all assigned
identical six foot by six foot cubicles.
She motioned to Brendan and Dharmesh to sit down across from her. Edna’s black eyes darted back and forth
between her two administrators and finally began, “This is a serious
situation. I want the two of you
and Sandy Blumberg of the afternoon shift to resolve this issue. I will rearrange your work schedules to
free up time for you to work on the problem. I already had the developers write some artificial
intelligence programs that will help you search the database for possible
misuse. Brendan, I want you to
take on the responsibility of coordinating the work and keeping me informed
about any progress you are making.
Your work on this project is between the four of us. I will speak to Sandra at the end of
her shift. Brendan please report
to my office when you come in tomorrow and join me when I speak to Sandra.”
Brendan was
glad to be back in his shared apartment.
Janice, who worked the afternoon shift along with Sandy, was still
asleep in her bedroom. He was
dying to tell her about the meeting and his new assignment. Brendan reflected, what am I thinking?
Telling Janice is probably not a good career building decision and by the time
he heard movement in Janice’s bedroom and finally the rush of shower water in
the bathroom, he had come to terms with the fact that this is one work
situation that he could not share with his roommate. Brendan was apprehensive about working with Dharmesh. He was so smart but was even more
naive. He was certain Edna asked
him to work on this project only because she knew Dharmesh needed a
babysitter. Sandra Blumberg is
another situation. Brendan would
love to have to babysit Sandy. He
has had a crush on Sandy since she started work last July after her graduation
from RIT. Sandy is a friend of
Janice and has even been to the apartment a few times to meet Janice before
they went out together. Both are
by far the best looking nerds at Verizon.
Sandy is tall and slim with long blond hair. Her age is very hard to pin down. Sandy could pass as a high school sophomore or as an
extremely attractive soccer Mom depending on how she arranged her hair and
applied her makeup. In fact, when Brendan
was reading the Board Room text message earlier in the day, the naked body he
envisioned was the one he imagined was under the jeans and halter top he had
seen Sandy wearing when she was at the apartment two weekends ago. Brendan thought Edna could not have
picked two people that would be harder for Brendan to ‘manage’ than Dharmesh
and Sandy. One is much too smart
and the other much too sexy.
Brendan
arrived at Edna’s office at 11:45PM Thursday night. Sandy was not there yet and Edna took this opportunity to
share some additional information with Brendan. “You have done good work these past few months. I am considering you for a senior
administrator position that was recently authorized and funded for our
department. If you can handle the
extra responsibilities of the assignment and provide the team leadership
required, I will have no problem putting this promotion in motion. I hope this is just the extra
motivation you need to resolve the sensitive problem we are facing.”
Little did
Edna know that for Brendan, just not being fired was as motivated as he needed
to be.
Brendan
asked, “With all the work Verizon has done with its firewalls and the periodic
verification of their security, how would someone from the outside be tinkering
with our database servers?”
Edna
continued to look down at the paper work on her desk and then raised her head
to look directly at Brendan, “Did I say the problem was coming from outside the
firewall? You must keep an open
mind if you are going to be successful.
Perhaps I am the perpetrator.”
Brendan forced a chuckle, but immediately knew that the work he and his
team were about to undertake, might not make them the most popular kids on the
block.
There was a
knock on the office door and Edna cried out, “Come on in.”
Brendan’s
heart skipped a beat. He was
thinking how fortunate he was that he worked a different shift than Sandy. With her in any adjacent cubicle, he
imagined his work ethics would dissolve to mush. Edna filled in Sandy with the objectives of the team and
again stressed the confidentiality of the work. In less than twenty minutes Sandy was going home and Brendan
was starting a new work day.
The
following day Brendan spent the first two hours of his shift thinking of ways
to attack the problem at hand. How
to use the assets he had, the immensely intelligent Dharmesh and captivating
Sandra, was the first task he tackled. He decided he would assign Dharmesh to review and try
to determine any patterns in the anomalies that they saw on the Smart Board yesterday. He knew he did not have to give
Dharmesh much direction in the endeavor.
He was confident that within a couple of days, he will know more about
any relationship between the periods where the texting service was slowing down
than he wanted to know. Dharmesh
was thorough and tenacious. He
will ask Sandy to review and start to work with the artificial intelligence
algorithms Edna made available to the team. Having some experience with the tools prior to Dharmesh
recommending where to apply them was necessary preparation. Brendan reserved an activity for
himself. Part of that reservation
was very selfish and had been one of his secret desires for months and
months. Brendan also decided that
the team needed a place to meet that was outside of their Verizon facility and
one where their anonymity was more or less assured. Such a place existed for Brendan. The old Utica Club brewery made famous by their singing and dancing
steins, Schultz and Dooley, was back in the macro micro brewery business
providing out-of-date retro beers for specific concessionaires. The brewery had
renovated its in-house tavern and it was now a popular meeting place for the
younger Utica area crowd. Big sellers
for this operation were all associated with New York City baseball teams,
Ballantine Ale for the Yankees, Rheingold Beer for the Dodgers and
Knickerbocker Beer for the Giants.
After his
vending machine lunch, Brendan started his own research. The massive database of text messages
was too imposing for systems administrators like Brendan to search. Poorly constructed searches adversely
affect the performance of the texting services provided by Verizon. But small controlled searches can go
unnoticed by performance monitors and are only found after the fact if there is
a reason to do a use audit of the system.
Administrators were not to seek and read text messages unless
authorized. Now Brendan had carte
blanche to search the database.
Edna had given him a list of the cell phone numbers of each Verizon
employee located in Utica. The
first number Brendan searched was 315-555-4589, Sandra Blumberg’s cell phone
number. Limiting his search to the
past month, Brendan was soon looking at a list of 789 text messages. He sorted the messages by the cell
number of the other texting partner and found over two hundred to 315-555-0231
which he knew belonged to Janice Fanelli.
315-555-4589: GF, WHAT ARE YOU DOING 2NIGHT? ##
315-555-0213: NIFOC, SOME GAMING. ##
315-555-4589: NASTY. IS ADONIS THERE? ##
315-555-0213: NW. HE IS AT
THE UC TAVERN WITH WILL AND JIM. WANT TO COME OVER? I’LL DRESS :) ##
315-555-4589: OK SEE YOU IN 15 ##
The thought
of Janice Naked In Front Of Computer was exciting enough, but for Sandy to
reference him as Adonis was beyond the scope of possibility. The tagline of ‘Adonis’ might be the
height of sarcasm. This
thought quickly brought Brendan back to reality. Another message cast a ray of hope for Brendan.
315-555-4589: GF, GOT A MINUTE? ##
315-555-0213: FOR U ANY TIME U NEED SANDY ##
315-555-4589: R THERE ANY GD MEN IN UTICA. ##
315-555-0213: ANOTHER BAD DATE ##
315-555-4589: DISASTER ##
315-555-0213: I’LL COME OVER, WE CAN TALK ##
315-555-4589: GR8. I HAVE
TISSUES AND CHARDONNAY ##
That was
enough for now. Brendan knew he
had to start expanding his search and made a list of key words including:
network, database, search, money, meeting, performance, dangerous … He planned to pass this list onto Sandy
and ask her to run it against all the telephone numbers on the list he also
provided. He called Sandy and
Dharmesh and set up a meeting at the Utica Club Tavern for four o’clock the
following Saturday. Ah, his first date with Sandy. Ugh, his first date with Dharmesh. Friday afternoon Brendan saw Dharmesh at their shift
change. He confirmed the Saturday
meeting and verbally explained the first task that he wanted Dharmesh to
tackle. He would not see Sandy
until the Saturday meeting.
Two hours
before the team’s first meeting, Brendan was in the kitchen mixing a protein
shake. Janice was just up and
showered and asked Brendan to sit at the table with her for a minute. “Brendan, September is going to be my
last month in the apartment. I
just put a down payment on a condo over at the Beaver Valley Golfing Community. I move in the first of October. Sorry to spring this on you like this.”
Brendan was
glad to be sitting down. The
thought of not having someone to share his rent was the first thing on his
mind, but wondering how Janice who cannot be making any more money than he was
buying a condo had his head a twirl. “A condo? In Beaver Valley? That sounds so plush. Did you hit the Mega Millions?”
Janice shook
her head, “No, I have just been watching my nickels and dimes and I think
investing in real estate at this time makes sense for me.”
“I wish you
the best of luck. I am having a
hard time investing in lottery tickets, no less a new house. Any ideas on whom I can get for a new
roomie?”
“Sorry Brendan,
I know this stinks and I should have given you more notice, but things just
happened. I will give the new
roommate question some thought and get back to you.”
Brendan was
taken aback and somewhat pissed that he did not get more warning from Janice
about this life changing move. He
made a mental note to review more of her text messages to see just how spur of
the moment this condo purchase was for Janice.
When Brendan
arrived at the tavern, he noticed that Dharmesh was already sitting at a table
with a large manila folder next to his glass of beer. Just as he arrived at the table, he spotted Sandy. She was wearing tight fitting pink Capri
pants and a white halter top. She,
as always, looked stunning. Brendan
had no recollection of what, if anything, Dharmesh was wearing. They both waved her over to the table
and quickly ordered three more beers.
Brendan recommended that they set aside this time every Saturday to
meet. If additional time together
was required, any of them could call a meeting. Finding time other than a weekend will be difficult, since
each works a different shift at Verizon.
They also agreed that there will be no email or texting communications
about the project. Brendan spoke,
“It is my impression that Edna believes that someone on the inside at Verizon
is very involved in this issue. I
have to agree with her, since the security on our systems is truly A1. Someone probing our database from the
outside will surely show up on one of our periodic intrusion tests.” He pulled out his own manila folder and
handed it to Sandy, “Here is a list of all the cell phone numbers for our
Verizon workers. I also included a
long list of key words that might be associated with suspicious behavior. Can you use the AI program to run
against both of these lists?”
Sandy
answered, “I will do it first thing Monday afternoon. Is it alright if I add some additional words to the
list? Anyway we can find out if
any employees have a non-work cell phone and can we get the cell phone numbers
for their significant others?”
Brendan
lamented wishing he had a significant other. “Yes and yes. I
will get those for you early next week.”
“Dharmesh, what is in that large pile of papers you have there?”
“I have
already associated every poor performance period for the past six months with
any work submitted by the database administration team, any regularly scheduled
database queries and any searches that can be initiated by the accounting
department. I am unhappy to report
that most of the poor performance periods do correlate with known database
inquires. I will continue to look
into those that do not correlate.
Perhaps when Ms. Blumberg has finished her work we can look more closely
at the one thousand or so unidentified problem areas.”
Brendan
rocked back on his stool, “One thousand, I thought you had things narrowed
down?”
“Oh I do, I
have already eliminated six thousand five hundred and twenty-eight poor
performance periods.”
Sandy
interjected, “That does make our work easier Dharmesh, and please call me
Sandy.”
“Yes, Miss Sandy. You should both know there is another
area that troubles me deeply. Edna
told us not to look there, but I fear we must.”
Dharmesh
then shared some details about the forbidden time period between 1:00 AM and
2:59AM each day. Each day at
exactly 1:00.00AM performance drops noticeably. Four days out of seven the performance is degraded until
exactly 2:59.59AM. The other days
the drop in performance stops at any time up to thirty minutes before
3:00AM. That was until about two
months ago. Since July 15th,
the performance remains poor right up to 2:59.59AM each and every day.
Dharmesh
stopped to ask, “This is not strange? What could do this and why is there this
change the past six weeks?”
Sandy spoke,
“Perhaps there is a maintenance task going on during this time or… No, we are
the system administrators; we have to know if there is scheduled
maintenance. And why was Edna so
secretive and abrupt about these two hours. She makes it sound like a state secret.”
Brendan mused;
it probably was a state secret. He
more and more liked his Homeland Security theory. At this moment, he wished Janice was part of the team. Her specialty was network
administration. She of all the
people save her partner and her supervisor had to know if there was data or
access granted any government agency.
But he was sitting at the table with all the resources at his disposal
and three of the four people he can trust on this project. Janice was not one of those people. Brendan ordered one more round of beer
and some chicken wings. They at
least could enjoy the fruits of their expense account. Brendan focused the next thirty minutes
on Sandy and if he was not mistaken, she seemed to enjoy his attentions. Dharmesh was busy texting continuously
with who knew who, and in what language?
The next
week each team member was busy at their personal piece of the puzzle. Dharmesh stayed a little late after his
shift and asked Brendan if he could have a quick work with him in the break
room. It would not take long. Dharmesh reported that there were no
database queries running against the database during the forbidden hours. If he had to guess (Dharmesh’s guesses
are usually money in the bank) was that someone was ‘merely’ reading from the
database at that time. Since the
read was at a steady state for one hundred and twenty minutes, he believed
someone was copying raw records from the database. On Tuesday Sandy called Brendan and asked if they could have
breakfast together after her Wednesday morning shift, “Café Utica at eight
twenty, sure thing.”
At the Café,
Sandy reported that she has found some suspicious patterns in some of the
texting conversation the artificial intelligence algorithm has already
searched. She has refined the key
word list and added several additional financial terms. She has noted this search refinement
has yielded an abnormally high number of text session from the 513 and 859 area
codes. She asked Brendan, “Can I
get Dharmesh to help me narrow down these messages. There are thousands of them and finding ones that might be
pertinent is like opening oysters looking for pearls. Dharmesh might be able to find a way to do this much more
efficiently. We might also need
help from Edna and the Verizon security team. If you give us the OK, we will let you know by Friday what
other help we need.”
“I will
speak to Dharmesh tomorrow when I come to work. I will prime Edna on getting the security help. I will also press her a bit about the
one AM to three AM time period. It
looks like we cannot ignore this time period. We should have breakfast more often, I am enjoying this.”
“Are you
flirting with me Mr. Parker? If
so, please continue.”
That brought
a warm feeling to Brendan’s loins, he continued, “Sandy, did you know Janice is
moving out? She says she has
purchased a condo at Beaver Valley.
That area is quite pricey, isn’t it?”
Sandy
paused, not wanting to violate any confidences and then added, “We have not
seen that much of each other the past few weeks. She has been awful busy. Buying a place might be the thing occupying her free time. I kind of miss her company. But, you are right, Beaver Valley is
expensive. You have to get home
and get some rest. Thanks for
breakfast. Bye”
“My
pleasure, see you soon.”
Dharmesh had
called Brendan early on Saturday afternoon and asked if they can change the
meeting time until four thirty. Brendan
said, “No problem Dharmesh, get there when you can.” The idea of spending a half hour alone with Sandy was no
hardship for Brendan. He arrived a
few minutes early and was surprised to see Sandy already at a table. She was dressed in a red and white
checkered blouse with white short shorts. Her hair was done up in a rather retro style that Brendan
just could not place. As soon as Brendan
arrived she took his hand and led him over to a section of the room dedicated
to the Miss Rheingold contest.
From the years 1942 through 1964 the brewers of Rheingold beer held a
month contest to elect the Miss Rheingold girl of the month. Local New Yorkers filled in and mailed
hand checked ballots to the brewer each month. At the end of the year, the public would then vote for a
Miss Rheingold for the year. This
was quite an honor for any New York girl.
While still holding Brendan’s hand, Sandy stood still in almost a pose
near the row of pictures listing the yearly winners of the Miss Rheingold girls. Brendan almost gasped as he looked up
at the 1964 winner and swore he was looking at Sandy. In fact both Sandy and the winner in the picture were identically
dressed and it now was clear why Sandy’s hair looked different. The picture was captioned Brenda Weiss,
Miss Rheingold of 1964. Sandy
said, “This is my Mom! She was a
student at Barnard College in the sixties and entered the contest. Pretty, wasn’t she?”
Soon Brendan
realized his mouth was agape. He
looked at the picture and then at Sandy.
He immediately wondered if human cloning was possible or perhaps Sandy’s
father had no significant genes.
The two women were dead ringers.
“Pretty, she is a knockout.
Can you get me a date with her?
Ouch, ouch, I was just kidding.
Stop hitting me. Your
resemblance is uncanny. If the
contest was still in place, you would be Miss Rheingold of 2009. Wow.”
Over on the
other side of the room was Dharmesh waving his arms and calling their
names. Sigh, it’s back to
business. Dharmesh was
excited. He said he was late
because he woke up at three this morning and went in to work to run some
advanced queries he had developed.
He had the results and was eager to share them.
Dharmesh
started, “I am certain there are bad people in Cincinnati and some in New York
City whose names should be given to the SEC. I believe they are using text messages to get insider
information on pending leveraged buy outs, mergers and acquisitions. I am not so sure about the people in
New York City, they just might be stupid but honest people. But those in Ohio are bad.”
Dharmesh
went on for twenty minutes before either Brendan or Sandy could ask any
questions. He was apparently able
to mine data from conversations originating from workers at Merrill Corporation,
a printing and internet company that handles merger and acquisition activities
for many global companies; that on surface was nothing but when many text
messages are agglomerated they give very good indications of pending M&A
deals. None of the individual text
messages is in itself incriminating, but using artificial intelligence and
looking at hundreds if not thousands of these “innocent” messages the
principals and some of the terms of the pending deals could be figured
out. This information was worth
millions when carefully planned trading was done on the deal participants’
common stock. Text messages
complaining of working late, missing happy hours, numbers of documents that
needed to be printed or scanned, waiting for deliveries from London or
Copenhagen, long conference calls with Singapore were all snippets of
information that could help identification of the principals involved and the
scope of the pending deal. As far
as Dharmesh could determine, there were also other people in the Cincinnati
area that seemed to be celebrating some victories but were very careful in not
disclosing the nature of the actual victory. They did include detailed descriptions
of the nature of their celebrations.
When
Dharmesh needed a gulp of beer, Sandy quickly asked, “Dharmesh, but we did not
find anyone making queries against our database from either inside or outside
of Verizon. How can this be?”
“Miss Sandy,
not against our copy of the
database, but do we know if anyone else has a copy or copies of our
database? Brendan, we have to meet
with Edna and share this news.”
“I agree,
Dharmesh, but there is one more piece of work we need to do. There has to be someone inside the
Verizon family that is a part of this scheme that is providing access to our
data or they are getting into another authorized copy of the database we do not
know about. What can we do to find
out more about this?”
“That will
be very hard. I do not know where and how to begin.”
The three
ordered burgers and a pitcher of Rheingold beer in honor of Brenda Weiss. Brendan promised Sandy and Brendan he would approach
Edna Monday afternoon about a meeting between the four of them.
When Brendan
got back to the apartment, Janice was sitting in the living room watching
TV. “Where have you been? You seem to have a standing date
Saturday afternoons?”
” I met some
friends over at the Utica Club Tavern.
We had some beers and an early dinner. Nothing special, do you have any roommate suggestions yet?”
“What about
Sandy Blumberg, she mentions your name once in awhile. I know she is a little stretched paying
for rent at her apartment. And
believe me, this place is a real step up from her place!”
“Thanks, I
like Sandy. I will ask her about
it. You know Janice, you Sandy and
I all make the same amount of money more or less. I am just amazed you are considering purchasing a condo on
our salaries. Who would give any
of the three of us a mortgage? Did
your rich uncle die?”
“Good guess,
actually a maternal aunt of mine in Villa Hills Kentucky just across the river
from Ohio passed away and left me some money. If you remember I had to make several weekend trips to that
area late this June and early July.
Almost all of my mother’s family lives in the area. I have several cousins in the
area who are doing very well. I thought
it was time I stepped up my life style a bit. That is hard to do in Utica! Hopefully, I can afford the place in Beaver Valley.”
Monday, Brendan
scheduled a lunch meeting with Edna for Wednesday at noon. Tomorrow Brendan was going to come in
on the day shift and meet with Verizon security experts from headquarters in New
York City. Monday afternoon, Brendan
faxed a list of all the cell phone numbers Dharmesh had located in the
Cincinnati area that included both the 513 and 859 area codes. He asked if the security team can match
names with those numbers. If the
phones were corporate numbers, that will be even more help in the
investigation. Still, Brendan thought he was missing something. He walked into Edna’s office and asked
if they could speak for a few minutes.
“Edna
without naming names or agencies, does Verizon provide our databases to other
parties? If so, how is it done?”
“All I can
tell you is that we follow all federal laws and all executive directives. If the government wants information we
have and has the legal rights to the information, we will provide it. If that information helps in our
security, we provide it very willingly.”
“So it would
not be unfeasible that information from our database was transferred to the
government on a regular basis.”
“That sounds
feasible to me.”
“But Edna
isn’t it odd that the randomness in the time it takes to make that transfer has
suddenly changed the past six weeks?”
Edna stood
up at her desk, “It has? Whey
wasn’t I told?” She was fuming.
“Why weren’t
you told, Edna no one on the team knew there was data being transferred? Remember, those two early morning hours
were out-of-bounds to our investigation.
Let’s pick this up at tomorrow’s lunch meeting.”
That night Brendan
reviewed all the information the team had gathered. He also started to review the spreadsheet the Verizon
security team had sent him in an overnight package with the list of names and
companies associated with the cell phone numbers Dharmesh had identified in the
Cincinnati area. Nothing was out
of the ordinary except for a high correlation of First Third Bank Blackberries
and the list of suspected cell numbers.
He finally shut off the light and went to sleep. He was up early, but did not have to go
to the office until eleven that morning.
He was sitting at the kitchen table when Janice walked in. He offered her a cup of tea, chamomile,
which she gladly accepted. He
politely asked Janice questions about her aunt. It seems Aunt Mildred had six boys of which three were
bankers like their father. He was
a vice president of the Third National Bank in Cincinnati. He had done well and so were his Irish
boys. The family name was
Farrell. One of the other boys was
an investment banker and the last two were partners in a corporate law
firm. Yes the Farrells had done
very well. Janice was apparently
the daughter Aunt Mildred never had.
Today was
reckoning day. The meeting was
held at the Holiday Inn on Eire Boulevard in the heart of decaying Utica New
York. Edna welcomed everybody and
introductions of all in attendance were completed in the first five
minutes. Brendan, Dharmesh and
Sandy moved to the front of the room and attached Dharmesh’s laptop to the
Smart Board provided by the hotel conference staff. It took nearly thirty minutes for the
investigative process to be explained and another twenty minutes to explain the
results to Edna and the security bigwigs.
Brendan got very nervous at the silence in the room. They had not been asked any
questions. Finally, the Senior VP
of Security asked Brendan if any of the names or companies they had sent to him
correlated to any Verizon employees.
Brendan said he found no connection. He did point out that there are high suspicions that
personnel at Fifth Third Bank are involved, but there was no smoking gun in any
of the thousands of messages they had reviewed both by eye and using the AI
program. Dharmesh stood up and
asked if he could pose a question to them. Brendan quivered.
“Mr.
Preston, sir; is there any reason you know of that would explain that during
the past six weeks the randomness of the time spent transferring data from our
database to wherever had disappeared?”
Preston shot
a glance at Edna and she just shrugged her shoulders. “That fact was just made available to me yesterday. I made inquiries through channels but
have not heard back as of this morning.”
Jim Preston
recommended a recess and told everyone to reconvene back at the Holiday Inn at
three o’clock. The security
executives went to their rooms with their laptops and cell phones. The Utica team headed back to the
office. Little was said, and it
was very evident that Edna was on pins and needles. Brendan was thinking separation was more likely than a
promotion. Dharmesh and Sandy went
off to see it they had missed something.
Brendan was
totally deflated. He could do
nothing but stare ahead into a blank space inside his mind. He longed again for those slow periods
when all he had to do was sit, search and read the sex fanned text messages
that were imbedded in the huge texting database that was at his constant
disposal. Just a couple of weeks
ago this activity had taken him the titillating Board Room sight of a naked
woman. When was that? Brendan sat up and activated his
keyboard. He remembered the
incident was at an improbable time like three in the morning. He then remembered the phrase “buck
naked”. He wrote a quick query: SEARCH for “BUCK NAKED” BETWEEN
01092009:0250 and 30092009:0330.
In seconds there it was:
859-555-7732:
HONEST TO GOD, SHE WAS BUCK
NAKED ##
Brendan then
went into the full database at this point in time to see if he could recreated
the entire conversation. He wanted
all the salty details. In the next fifteen minutes here is what he
reconstructed from this three way texting session:
513-555-8754:
HI CUZ, WE ARE CELEBRATING. ##
859-555-7732:
THIS WAS OUR BIGGEST PAYOUT YET. ##
315-555-0213: U
COULDN’T WAIT FOR ME 2B THERE? ##
513-555-8754:
NO AND GUESS WHOS GIRL FRIEND WAS WITH US? ##
315-555-0213: NOT THAT BLOND FLOZZY. ##
859-555-7732:
WE WENT TO THE BANK AND ENDED UP IN THE BOARD ROOM. ##
315-555-0213: WITHOUT ME, UR A SCUZ. ##
513-555-8754:
NEXT THING I KNOW, STELLA HAS ALL HER
CLOTHES OFF. ##
513-555-8754:
OMGYG2BK ##
859-555-7732:
HONEST TO GOD, SHE WAS BUCK NAKED ##
513-555-8754:
IN THE BOARD ROOM? I SO WISH I WAS THERE. ##
315-555-0213: CARRY ON BOYS, I HAVE TO GO, TATA. ##
Brendan
stood up like he had seen a ghost.
He almost wished he had. It
was now two thirty. He quickly
dialed a number on his cell.
“Are you up
and about? Good. I have a big favor to ask, can you meet
me in the lobby of the Holiday Inn on Erie Boulevard at three o’clock for a few
minutes. It is very important. Great, thanks.”
He then
rushed to the parking lot to meet Dharmesh and Sandy. While driving to the motel, he asked if the number 859-555-7732
was on his list. It wasn’t. How about 513-555-8754? Yes it was and it was a number for a
Blackberry at Fifth Third Bank.
Brendan blurted out, “I think that is good news for us, not so good for
a friend of ours.”
Sandy looked
at Dharmesh and squinched up her face as they pulled into the motel parking
lot. It was now almost exactly
three o’clock. Brendan looked at
both of them, “Go ahead; I will be there in a couple of minutes.” Just as they left down the hall to the
conference room, Janice entered the front door and saw Brendan in the lobby.
“Brendan,
what is this all about? This is so
not like you.”
“Bear with
me Janice. I need you to join me
for a few minutes. I am meeting
with Edna and you can help me out.”
“Edna is
here and she is meeting with you.
This better be good.”
Opening the
conference room door and apologizing to all for being late, he quickly
introduced Janice Fanelli to everyone in the room. Edna looked puzzled and Jim Parker was slowly turning
crimson. “Mr. Parker, Janice is an
employee here in our Utica office.
She is a junior network administrator. I suspect she is a very competent network administrator and
probably is very over qualified for the work she is doing. Dharmesh can you load the slide that is
on this memory stick and bring it up on the Smart Board”
Everyone’s
attention turned to the slide now projected for the entire room to see. Jim Parker’s face and neck were crimson
by now. Brendan turned to Jim
Preston’s second in command. “Jonathan can you look up the names and companies
associated with the three phone numbers that are included in the text messages
on the screen before us?”
Jonathan
Bane went to his laptop and retrieved this information:
513-555-8754: Sean
Farrell of Fifth Third Bank in Cincinnati Ohio
859-555-7732:
Ian Farrell of Farrell and Farrell
in Florence Kentucky
315-555-0213: Janice Fanelli of Verizon in Utica New York
Brendan
slowly turned to Janice who suddenly did not look to well. “Janice do you know these two
gentlemen?”
Janice spoke
in the softest of voices. Brendan
prodded, “I did not hear that can you speak up?”
Janice
repeated for all to hear, “They are both my cousins.”
“That was a
pretty lurid text exchange you had and at quite a late hour. Dharmesh tells me it was the same day
that BP Gas announced the takeover of Conoco Oil. Was that the cause of the celebration? Please tell us all how you did this,
you and your cousins.”
Janice broke
down and told the entire story.
She knew of the transfer of daily information the Homeland Security
database in Waco, TX. She knew how
the data was transferred and that it was impossible to intercept once the
transfer was initiated. The
technology for this transfer was developed by the NSA and was minimally
invasive to the Verizon system.
Janice realized the days where the full data transfer finished in less
than two hours provided an opportunity to piggyback a transfer to another
location. After working with a
covert database administrator, Janice found a way to stream a subset of the
entire database to a hosted server that was owned by the Farrell and Farrell
law firm. That subset extracted
financial information from a list of financial firms in a cleverly designed
query written at the network level to hide the query and its activity from all
security audits. The query was
almost identical in content to the one Dharmesh used to retrieve the
information that had uncovered the operation.
That evening
the police authorities arrested Janice Fanelli. The next morning the Securities and Exchange Commission
security team rounded up the Farrell brothers and charged them with several
incidents of insider trading. Edna
was on cloud nine and Jim Preston was a hero down at corporate
headquarters. Brendan knew his
promotion was set.
Edna told
Brendan, Dharmesh and Sandy to take the rest of the week off. First order of business for the three
of them was dinner at the Utica Club Tavern. It must have been the Tavern and the beer that brought them
the luck to solve this Gordian knot.
At the end of dinner, Brendan asked Sandy if she would like to spend the
next few days at the Turning Point Casino Hotel in nearby Verona, NY. She did and a wonderful time was had by
all.
Now all
Brendan needs is to find a new roommate, or has he?
End of story
Barbara and I are on our fourth stop of
our summertime California trip. We
are staying at a lovely cottage near Paso Robles (www.vrbo.com/170229).
This cottage is as nice as the one we rented in Los Olivos (see previous blog
post) and actually more scenic. A renowned silversmith, Randy Stromsoe (www.randystromsoe.com)
owns the cottage. Randy and his
wife, Lisa, live in a large “barn” down in the valley below the cottage. The first floor of the building is his
workshop and the family lives upstairs.
They have several acres of grapes under cultivation and a friend and
neighbor actually takes the grapes after harvest to make some fine wines.
The cottage is located on a property at
the intersection of Old Creek Road and Route 46. Old Creek road winds, and I do mean winds, about twelve
miles to US1 near Cayucos. Route
46 runs from Templeton to US1 just south of Cambria. The drive to Cambria goes
over the mountains protecting the shoreline at 1,741 feet and has some
spectacular costal vistas. We have done most of our food shopping in Templeton,
but the town lacks a full grocery store, yet has a Trader Joe’s. We also found a local fruit stand with
delicious heirloom tomatoes. Next
to Trader Joe’s are a fish store and an adjacent meat market. Both are small but adequate. 
Did I mention that it gets very dark at
night up on our hill? It
does. We have had no moon in the
early evening and there are more stars visible than I can imagine. It is possible to sit out on the front
porch after dinner and enjoy the evening breeze with little or no harassment
from insects. The only break in
the evening silence is the buzzing of insects in the trees and the occasional
car traveling along RT46 about 1,500 yards away. I did have one insect visitor in the afternoon that I wish I
had missed. Walking to our car
that we park about 50 yards from the cottage – the driveway up to the cottage
is not one where you want to use reverse gear at anytime. We park at an area we can turn around
easily to head back down to civilization. Coming back from the car I noticed
something ambling along a large graveled area at the side of the cottage. Taking a look, it was a spider, a
large, very large spider. Using my
foot it took about three kicks to get the beast back into the forested back of
the house and into the fallen oak leaves.
Heading straight to Google, I was able to ascertain that I had
encountered a California tarantula. I am not a big fan of spiders.
We played golf twice this week. It was the Ying and Yang of golf
courses. The Links at Paso Robles
was rather “rustic”. No water, no
sand in the traps, no benches, no shade and long. The gas golf cart sputtered and belched every time it was
started. The only foliage besides
grass were coyote bushes. Beyond
the rough (and everyone knows I play beyond the rough) were expanses of hard
packed soil. Your ball could roll
another 50 yards in this outback area.
The clubhouse is a double wide.
It was cheap, $33 each with a cart. We did get to see a rocket launch that took place at Vandenberg
AFB while playing! Two days later we played
Hunter’s Ranch merely a mile and a half from the links. This was a very nice course. Like most California courses we played,
it was not set up for a woman’s game.
Barbara found it very hard.
The slope rating is 131 from the white tees. I shot a 93 even though I shot a double bogie each of the
four par fives (with a good drive on each of those holes!). We went through three bottles of water
and four Coors Lights during the round and were glad we took the pro shop’s
advice to fill our cooler with ice at the restaurant. We walked off the course and the temperature was 102. Dry heat or not, we were roasted.
I am really rambling on this post. Let me sign off with one more light
coincidence. Remember that nice
bottle of wine we had at our first meal in the area? Later that afternoon we headed from the cottage to Templeton
to purchase some groceries. Less
than two miles from the cottage, Barbara notices a billboard up on a mountain
surrounded by trees indicating the next left turn is the tasting room for Epoch
Wineries. The next day we stopped
in and tasted and bought three fine wines. The 2009 Reserva Tempranillo and the 2010 Authenticity are
the two best wines we have had on this trip.
