when he finished reading that little book through—a boring read, most of it—and came to the last group, the “#000000” code for the color black: it translated as “flee at once, all is discovered.”
At least there was no sign of that in this message. There was nothing else, either; the person typing at the other end was never chatty. When the code groups stopped, the only thing that came up on the next line was the single word: REPEAT. Danny typed in the six- digit sequences exactly as he had noted them down. He understood the other guy’s concern about making sure that it was right. The code sequence described the times when Danny and his many coconspirators in this hack would be hitting a lot of different servers worldwide, a lot of different player groups in Omnitopia, with the goal being to overwhelm them while accounts were being raided for money. This business would require split-second timing in acting as one character, dumping it, signing out, signing in as someone else, on some other server entirely, and then acting as that person. It had been four or five months ago now that Danny had been sent the software with which to do this work on his own home computer and various others. Those other computers—including the poor dim ones here at work—were now all latent zombies. They would be transformed into willing slaves of his own machine at home as soon as he activated the program there and sent them the necessary command down the broadband line. This was a technique that spammers had been using for years to confuse large systems, and even occasionally to break into military or other classified sites by the sheer weight of numbers overwhelming their gateways to the outer world. In this particular case, the group that Danny was working with had brought the concept of the distributed denial-of-service attack up to a whole new level.
They’d had to. Omnitopia’s Conscientious Objector routine was too damn smart to be taken in by the simple botting techniques of an earlier, kindlier age of spammers. It could immediately recognize a computer that was acting like a bot and freeze it out—shutting down any access from that computer’s network address, and incidentally calling the local cops. The people behind this plan had had no intention of wasting their time on so old and predictable a technique. Instead they were basing the attack on sheer numbers of genuine human beings, which the CO routine shouldn’t be able to profile so easily. If a lot of these logins would be coming from China and other parts of the Far East—places where labor was cheap and there were lots of willing people sitting at keyboards who didn’t care too much about the details of what they were doing as long as they got paid something better than their weekly wage—that was entirely to be expected: it was a resource worth exploiting.
Each person would activate his own or her own share in a pulsed wave of attacks that would come from all over the planet, clogging the Omnitopia servers with resource-heavy demands that would leave certain accounting and cash- inventory routines starved for resources, taking seconds to execute instead of milliseconds. And during those vital fractions of a second, from all over the world, many hands would reach into the virtual cash register while its drawer was stuck open and pull out wads of the green stuff.
Danny smiled to himself in quiet appreciation of the elegance of the scam and its simple audacity. His own nameless and faceless handler had been cagey about the details, but the number of keyboard slaves involved in the attack sequence was apparently somewhere up in the millions. There was no way the Omnitopia people would be able to defend against that completely—especially not at this time when their inside sources had confirmed that the new Omnitopia servers would be vulnerable.
And they were coming into that magic time now, Danny knew. The attacks would be taking place very soon—he’d known just how soon once he got these code groups home. But one way or another, within three days it would all be over. Omnitopia would be looking very stupid, and the Black Hat Ring who’d hatched and carried out this exploit would be famous—or infamous—worldwide if anonymously so. Danny wasn’t particularly concerned about the fame: all he’d wanted was a chance to get out of this loser’s life of minimum-wage jobs and into a life of