Invasion of Privacy: A Deep Web Thriller #1 (Deep Web Thriller Series) by Ian Sutherland Page B

peer-to-peer network coupled with cryptography to control and secure the transactions. But most importantly, it was completely unregulated by any government. For Brody, bitcoin’s main benefit was that it was virtually untraceable, especially for smart people who masked their credentials when creating accounts. Brody always set up a new account for every job he took on, just to further confuse anyone who attempted a trace. 
    He pressed submit. His account was created. He was inside.
    * * *
    The man who called himself Crooner42 on the CrackerHack forums scanned the SWY system logs in real time. Every action that users took on the website was recorded in the system logs. Crooner42 often whiled away time watching the logs fill with the activity of tens of thousands of paying subscribers. It was amazing to observe how addictive the site was. His site. It made him feel proud.
    It was also making him very rich.
    A new entry appeared in the log. Damn, it was just one of the regulars logging back in. A few more entries appeared as the same user navigated through the site and chose a video feed. The log entries highlighted that this user had all the options turned on for the location he was viewing. Perfect, a high-paying customer. Crooner42’s favourite type.
    But Crooner42 was growing impatient. He’d set the trap perfectly. Fingal had taken the bait and then he’d had no choice but to accept the challenge. He knew Fingal would waste no time. 
    Crooner42 was fully aware that the first step on any pentest was to passively scan the target. In the case of SWY the only information available in the public domain was the site itself. Unlike websites for bricks and mortar businesses, SWY had no published list of employees, office addresses or any contact details from the physical world. 
    That meant Fingal would have to jump to the next step and familiarise himself with the site itself. Crooner42 had set the site up so that some of the webcam locations had looping teaser video feeds, just enough to give future customers a taste of what was inside if they parted with their money. As a non-registered customer, Fingal wouldn’t really be able to find out much. Certainly not enough to pull together enough information to formulate an appropriate pentest strategy. 
    No, Fingal would have no choice but to register as a new user on the site. That’s what Crooner42 was looking out for in the logs: the creation of a new account. The only problem was that the site was becoming so popular that he was getting hundreds of new user registrations every day. But whoever registered in the next few minutes was bound to be Fingal, hiding behind a fake email address. After all, that’s what Crooner42 would have done.
    So where the hell was he? 
    Crooner42 glanced at his Breitling. It had been thirty minutes since Fingal had accepted the challenge on the CrackerHack pentest forum. And, so far, no new users had registered in that time.
    Crooner42 had snorted out loud when Fingal had tried to lighten the seriousness of the challenge with his impudent, “Sure, sounds like fun” acceptance. That hadn’t fooled Crooner42 at all. He knew that Fingal would be shitting himself. 
    And so he should be. 
    Public humiliation in the global hacker community wasn’t trivial. It takes months, if not years, to fully recover. Crooner42 knew this better than anyone. He’d been through it, and much, much worse. All thanks to Fingal. 
    Now it was payback time.
    Come on Fingal. Register for fuck’s sake.
    Crooner42 was in his two-bedroom penthouse apartment that overlooked the Thames to the south. Not that he ever went out on the balcony to take in the expensive views. He had used some of the income from the site to buy the flat. He’d hired an interior designer and given her the brief to design the world’s best bachelor pad. She’d not let him down. Everything was stone, leather or glass. The colour spectrum supposedly ranged between ecru and burnt umber,