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

other? 
    Although Brody was analysing the site like a normal user, in his mind he was already jumping ahead to identify potential exploits he could use to gain root access. If the feeds were truly live it meant they most probably came from sources external to the SWY site, which meant potential backdoor routes into the site. If they were fake, then the site was little more than a catalogue of repeating video files, which meant it would be self-contained and harder to crack.
    Brody continued clicking around for another twenty minutes, getting a feel for it. Occasionally, he switched modes to read the site’s native HTML, the code that the browser interprets to display the content as a graphical web page. This enabled him to gain a limited understanding of how site was architected. Most modern websites were simply a gluing together of scripts and open-source widgets from all over the world. Each could have known vulnerabilities he could exploit. But, from an initial scan, he noticed nothing with an obvious exploit.
    From the HTML and the scripts, he could determine the underlying technology components used to make the site work. There was an awful lot of Java, which was being used to give the site its interactive feel and manage the video feeds, along with some python and PHP. Java is a programming language where the human readable source code is compiled into a machine code, which the computer can execute but is impossible for humans to understand. Brody tried a decompiler to reverse engineer the machine code back into a source code format but Crooner42 had professionally obfuscated it, preventing the decompiler from working. The implications weren’t lost on Brody. This challenge might be tougher than he’d originally anticipated.
    It was time to get serious. He would head across the road where he had access to more equipment. Also, the Italian muzak was starting to annoy him. He liked to hack to orchestral music played very loud. One of his movie soundtrack playlists should do it. Stefan was chatting with other customers, his back to Brody. The trainee waitress was making coffee. Brody estimated how much he owed and doubled it. He placed a £10 note on the table. 
    Just as he was about to close the PC, Brody noticed something. The call centre location was still on his screen and he’d spotted some pixelated letters moving from right to left in the bottom left corner of one of the webcam feeds. He clicked in and the webcam’s stream filled his screen. The webcam observed the comings and goings of a doorway. He saw a man wearing a business suit exit through the door. But, more importantly, mounted on the wall above and to the right of the doorway was what looked like the bottom corner of a massive digital display. Brody squinted his eyes but it was impossible to make out the text scrolling across it. He was aware that these readerboards were commonly used in call centres to display status summaries about the number of calls in progress, operators free, total calls resolved that day and so on. 
     He clicked back to the location summary, hoping to find a better view of the readerboard in one of the other feeds. The last stream was the one. It was from a webcam pointed solely at the readerboard. However, it was a premium stream requiring him to pay an upgrade fee to receive the remaining feeds as video. He clicked his consent and a charge of fifty-nine pence was added to his account. All five of these premium images converted from still to moving videos.
    He maximised the stream focused on the call centre’s digital readerboard. Now filling his screen he could easily read the scrolling text. As he’d thought, it was a massive electronic LED ticker with scrolling call queue metrics displayed for all the call centre operators to see. However, on the left area of the readerboard the time was displayed digitally. Brody compared it to the time being shown on his watch. The readerboard was a minute behind his own. He put that