Free Cyber Terror by Malcolm Rose

was no sign of recognition at all. “Who?”
    “I want to know why you hacked into an aeroplane’s flight system.”
    “I didn’t!”
    “Why did you run away? What have you done?”
    “Look. I...” He stared down at his lap, littered with glassy diamonds. “I don’t know who you are.”
    “I’m Jordan Stryker and I can turn pretty nasty.” He felt like a fraud because he never thought of himself as cruel.
    “All right. You see, I’m not supposed to be here. I don’t have all the papers to...”
    For a few seconds, Jordan didn’t realize what Dipak was trying to say. Then he twigged. “Oh. Okay. But if you’re an illegal immigrant, how come you’ve got a driving
licence and a car?”
    Looking even more guilty, Dipak kept his head bowed. “The car’s not mine. It’s a friend’s.”
    Two people walking past stopped to get a good look at the accident. Realizing there was only a dent and a broken window, they moved on. The Warner twins gazed out of their unit’s
window.
    Jordan laughed softly. “This is really piling up. I could get you into a mountain of trouble. I could tell the police you’re not supposed to be in the country, you’re driving
without a licence and you go in for a lot of hacking.”
    “Will you?”
    “Yes.” He paused for two or three seconds before adding, “Unless you show me every cyber attack you’ve made this year.”
    Dipak groaned.
    “Do we have a bargain?”
    Clearly doubtful, Dipak hesitated.
    Jordan took out his mobile and pretended to get ready to make a call.
    “All right,” said Dipak.
    “Back to your place, is it?”
    “We can do it here, right now, if you want.”
    “How come?” Jordan asked.
    “I don’t keep records on a hard drive. Not safe enough. I hide my stuff in the deep web. I can access it from any computer.”
    “The deep web? What’s that?” Jordan paused and then added, “Don’t tell me here. Park the car – if it still goes – and we’ll sort it out
inside.”
    Dipak did not look comfortable in jeans and sweatshirt. Most likely, he would have preferred to wear something more formal, but his circumstances probably prevented it.
    As he logged on, he spoke quietly and quickly. “When you surf the internet, that’s all you’re doing. Surfing. Skimming the surface. You’re seeing a tiny percentage of
what’s really there. There’s this huge mass of stuff beyond the reach of normal search engines. It’s called the deep web. It’s made up of sites that don’t work any
more, abandoned addresses, online businesses that have gone bust and that sort of thing. Quite a few are military sites from the early days of the internet – long since dumped and replaced by
more secure technology. People like me dive down into it, drag up a dead site, revive it to do what we want and then sink it again. No one’s any the wiser. Back down in the depths, nobody
else is going to come across it. It’s a drop of water in a great big ocean.”
    “Handy.”
    “Yes. There’s a lot of information down there. Lots of data and details of people’s lives in discarded sites. If you want someone else’s identity, there’s plenty to
choose from. Lots of passwords as well. When people replace a website, they often keep the same password.”
    “So you go fishing for it?”
    “Exactly. Loads of spam comes from dead addresses. And the deep web is where you’ll find horrid sites as well.” He pulled a face and said, “You can guess the sort of
thing.”
    Jordan began to warm to Dipak. He was keen, clear and convincing. No doubt he was a good hacker, but Jordan could not assume that he was as harmless as he seemed. Jordan had to continue playing
the part of a bully. He had to remain suspicious.
    “There you are,” Dipak said, waving at the monitor. “It looks like a site for an old netball team. It is. But the team disbanded years ago. Now, I use the fixture list to log
all my online activities. The results speak for themselves. A win’s