Money was an annoyance. It was not something he had a particular interest in, yes it was nice to have, but only due to its ability to make his other endeavors easier. Problem being, Roger was not so willing to waste time in the monotony known as the service industry nor do blue collar work. There being no other legitimate means he had the training for, he would always fall back on cons and other white collar crimes.

Roger had only dabbled in using computer technology to assist him, something he aimed change. The prevalence of wireless networks could his power amazingly useful if used correctly. And today was the day to test a wireless network a possible exploit that could earn him a fair amount of cash.

Th target was gentlemen in his mid fifties who lived in an upscale apartment with his family. His apartment building thankfully sat beside a hotel where Roger could rent a room and set up. A laptop to pick up the signal from his router, and himself to broadcast to the router. It would take the better part of the day so he had food and water already there. He didn't want to have to leave until he was done.

So he sat in a chair, broadcasting on 802.11g, brute forcing the router. His goal was to have the router switch its encryption so his laptop could pick up the signal. This, of course, would cause massive issues to the man's home network. Something Roger had no problem, and if fact he wished he could see the family's reaction to both the nearly dead network and the eventual draining of their life savings.

****************** Later that day************************

Aaron hated going on house calls. House calls were always so awkward. To Aaron, at least, it felt like he was invading their space and violating their privacy. But, house calls were part of the territory and at least he got to drive a “company car”. That was always fun.

Aaron pulled up in front of a rather upscale apartment. This was the kind of job that made Aaron wish he was freelancing. This kind of customer would likely have buckets of money and would pay anything to get what they wanted, when they wanted it. Aaron was not, however, freelancing and he was working for a devil corporate company. It was awful. But, a man with a criminal record (for something that wasn’t really even his fault…) , doesn’t really have much of a choice other than begging for his clearance back, a process which was nearly as likely as winning the lottery.

So, in order to keep the lights on, Aaron was working tech support by the service when it should’ve been performed by the hour. This particular service was slated to take him much longer than an hour, possibly an entire day. The client was complaining of service interruption and inability to access their router. That usually meant that, whether the client would admit it or not, they tried to fix it themselves and messed up.

Aaron reached the top step and stopped a moment to catch his breath. He’d managed to reach the client by cell phone at the bottom of the building to find that the elevator was out. Carrying his pc tech kit up all of those stairs was not necessarily his idea of a leisurely stroll. Aaron walked the short distance left to the door and knocked. The client answered, they exchanged the usual pleasantries and Aaron was shown to the computer and router. The client, the wife in this case, stood in the doorway, watching Aaron work. That was another downside to working in a client’s home. The client was there to watch everything you did, inspecting every aspect of your work. It sucked.

“Alright, to work…” Aaron muttered to himself as he pulled out his standard issue laptop. He opened the laptop, started it up and reached over, unplugging the router, setting about the standard procedure for dealing with a malfunctioning router.

Roger had been at the process for hours. The process was taking longer than he had hoped, but then again this was his first time trying his hand at it. All this time focusing his power was making him hungry so he unwrapped a sandwich and ate it while he looked out the window at the apartment building next door.

While he ate he rested, a brief time where the wireless network was not crippled. It wasn't going anywhere.So he ate, and while he ate he went back over his current plan and then moved ahead to his plans for the money. First he needed more suits, he had one but it was a pain to keep clean. People respond better to someone better dressed, makes them easier to con. Second, needed to place more money into an account of laundered money to buy himself a vehicle. Walking and public transportation were a serious nuisance.

Finishing the sandwich he made his way back across the room and looked at the laptop. The network was gone. A refresh of the list of nearby networks and nothing. He sighed angrily, they were probably tying to fix their network. He would have to wait for it to come back to continue his attack.

Tech support was an exhausting business. After the third time Aaron declined a ‘drink’ from the wife of the current client, he started to think that, just maybe, the client was exaggerating when she called about the network problem. Or perhaps she dialed the wrong number. Anything was possible.

After politely declining, Aaron reached back over and plugged the router back in. The indicator lights on the front began to blink and slowly went to solid, save for the usage light that flickered as it should. That was a good sign. Aaron then began to connect his laptop to the router. When some routers remain unplugged for a particular amount of time, the passwords and all cleared and were reset to the defaults. It’s quite amazing how secure of a password ‘password’ was not. The laptop began to connect, obtained an IP address and shortly gave Aaron internet access.

Aaron proceeded immediately to log into the router’s administrative page to fix the security settings so that the clients would know what the encryption key would be. He set the encryption settings to WEP and entered the specified passkey, causing the algorithm to spit out a seemingly random series of letters and numbers. It wasn’t the most secure set up for a network, but it would do for the average consumer.

As part of his corporate tech squad’s manifesto, he unpacked his software tools that he carried with him to the job site. His custom labeled discs shined in the light of the house and he selected the automated tool that they used to tune up PCs to run faster. He plopped the disc in the open ODD and ran the program on the disc. Man, this job was entertaining.

Before long a new network appeared on the list, it had a default name and was passworded. Roger connected to the network, the signal was weak and took it a while. He tried password, hoping it had been reset, but either it didn't or had been changed already.

Setting the computer back down he refocused his power on 802.11g and assaulted the router. This was becoming quite a pain. He took hold of a bottle of water, unscrewed the cap, and drank. He then moved over to the window and looked across at one of the windows of his mark. If only it were dark out so he could see inside.

“What the hell?!” Aaron said aloud, sitting bolt upright in the chair. For a moment there, the lights on the router had done some sort of an Irish jig. They’d flashed on and off, all of them and he’d immediately lost all network connection. What exactly could do that? In all of his years working with technology, he’d never seen anything like that happen. Very weird.

Now, it seemed to Aaron, that something odd was going on. It was quite apparent that there was either faulty equipment or someone doing something to the network. Either way, it seemed that something was actually going on. He’d have to look into it a bit, but he’d figure it out.

Aaron immediately reached over and unplugged the router. He waited the proper amount of time and cycle, rinse, repeat, he started the process over again, fixed the password and sat to wait to see what happened. There were two options: either the problem would be fixed or it’d happen again.

A noise came from his computer. Once again it had lost connection. Roger made his way back to the laptop and checked the list of networks, nothing, nothing, nothing... there it is. The network came back. Clearly someone was resetting it as a reaction to him shutting it down.

He would have to temporarily change tactics. Maybe he could just fill the frequency with garbage and kill all wireless routing. Eventually the conclusion it was the ISP would be reached... unless they bypassed the router. It was worth a shot, and if they did bypass the router they might leave it plugged in so he could continue his attack on it.

Again he focused his power on 802.11g, this time he was willing the airwaves with bunk to kill routers, and wireless cards within his radius.

This time, the response to the network being restarted was massively different than before. All of the lights on the router were solid. Every single one. Even the one that was supposed to be flickering indicating network traffic. “This shouldn’t be happening.” Aaron said, disbelieving. That was not normal behavior for a network.

Sometimes, in tech support, it really did seem like the computer was working against you. Viruses had a static way of working against you, but they didn’t actively change things on the computer while you were trying to fix them. Also, viruses didn’t effect networks because there was nowhere for them to be stored on a standard router, unless they had attached storage, which this one did not. Plus, it would have to be a pretty sophisticated virus in order to simulate network traffic like that on the router.

No, there was no way this was something software related. This left Aaron with two options: this was either the work of some kind of hacker or something that Aaron had never seen before. It was more than likely someone trying to pull over a fraud on Aaron’s clients. They were likely targets, they had money and they didn’t know much about computers.

“I get the feeling that this is someone messing with you…” Aaron said to the client’s wife, who had taken up her almost sentry-like post at the door. Her reply was lost on Aaron because he was already at work on figuring out how to end this attack.

The goal of the attack was financial gain, as it was most of the time. With this particular attack, it appeared that someone was trying to access information across the network. Aaron was willing to bet, also, that since the encryption settings were going back and forth that whoever was trying to access the network was close, so they could gain access to the network at whim and steal things like credit card numbers, banking information and other things in order to make a quick penny or two.

With that router, top of the line for consumer electronics, the signal would be broadcasted for nearly a thousand feet in every direction. This was also done on two bands in order to keep traffic separate so gaming and movies didn’t interrupt computer traffic. But, that gave Aaron a reasonable sphere in which the attacker could be. That really didn’t make it any easier, though, because that left everyone in the building as a suspect as well as a majority of the people in the next building over as well.

Aaron then had an idea. He logged into the router’s controls. Even though it was no longer functioning as a broadcasting router, it still kept a log of the IP addresses that had accessed the router. The client had two computers; Aaron had two of the IP addresses. There was a third. Aaron quickly grabbed a pen and scribbled the IP address on a sticky note. He then opened some less-than-legitimate software on his corporate laptop and entered the information that he’d just obtained into the search box. Aaron’s laptop was running off a Mobile broadband card that still had a connection. That was fortunate.

The tracing program returned no current results, which while that was discouraging, it returned results of past logged locations. Any time a computer accessed the internet, the IP address is logged as well as the location at which the computer accessed the internet. The software Aaron was using was not exactly legal, but in certain cases, it was necessary. Plus, there really wasn’t any way for anyone to find out that Aaron was running this sort of trace, so it didn’t really matter.

That wasn’t what interested Aaron. There was a result of a logged connection really close to the client’s apartment. It was one building over; in fact, Aaron could see the window from where he was standing. Aaron quickly departed from the residence, crossed to the building and mounted the stair case. This could get interesting.

Roger sat in the chair filling the airwaves with static/ He wasn't sure how long he would have to keep this up, but most likely at least a couple hours. Certainly it would be tedious, but good it was his only play at the time.

While he waited he pulled up solitaire on the laptop and played. It was not the most thrilling thing to be doing but it was mindless enough he could keep focused on broadcasting.

Aaron began to have second thoughts about the Lone Ranger approach he was taking. This wasn’t something he should do, seriously, a computer nerd dealing out good-old western justice? Maybe Aaron could just track down the source and call the police, which was a good idea. But how?

Aaron pulled out his trusty smartphone. He scrolled through immediately and found the app that he was looking for. It was a wifi signal detector, one that, in particular, could be attuned to a certain signal. The app would then give you a direct path to the source of the signal. Some people used it to find hotspots and others used it to hack networks. Aaron, however, was using it for justice (clichéd line).

After many minutes of searching, Aaron found the source of the smothering signal and approached the door. What now? Thinking quickly, Aaron knocked on the door. He had a plan, but it’d be lucky if he could pull it off.

Roger kept up his broadcast, while playing solitaire until he heard a knock. He had told them at the desk to not disturb him, clearly a request too difficult for the overpaid mouth-breather. He set aside the laptop and rose from the chair.

Making his way across the room to the door he stopped his attack on all wireless networks. He didn't want to be broadcasting his thoughts during the inevitable conversation on one frequency. When he reached the door he looked out through the peep hole, it didn't look like a hotel employee. He opened the door part way. Enough to easily converse while still easy to quickly shut if need be.

"Yes...?"