The American Connection

overseas. And the sheer number of cards was astonishing.

Thousands and thousands of them. Maybe 10 000. All he could

think was, Shit! Free connections for the rest of my life.

Hackers such as Force considered using cards to call overseas

computer systems a little distasteful, but certainly acceptable.

The card owner would never end up paying the bill anyway.

The hackers figured that Telecom, which they despised, would

probably have to wear the cost in the end, and that was fine by

them. Using cards to hack was nothing like ordering consumer

goods. That was real credit card fraud. And Force would never

sully his hands with that sort of behaviour.

Force scrolled back over his capture of the numbers which

had been injected into his machine. After closer inspection, he

saw there were headers which appeared periodically through

the list. One said, ‘CitiSaudi’.

He checked the prefix of the mystery machine’s network

address again. He knew from previous scans that it belonged to

one of the world’s largest banks. Citibank.

The data dump continued for almost three hours. After that,

the Citibank machine seemed to go dead. Force saw nothing

but a blank screen, but he kept the connection open. There was

no way he was going to hang up from this conversation. He

figured this had to be a freak connection — that he accidentally

connected to this machine somehow, that it wasn’t really at the

address he had tried based on the DEFCON scan of Citibank’s

network.

How else could it have happened? Surely Citibank wouldn’t

have a computer full of credit cards which spilled its guts every

time someone rang up to say ‘hello’? There would be tonnes of

security on a machine like that. This machine didn’t even have

a password. It didn’t even need a special character command,

like a secret handshake.

Freak connections happened now and then on X.25

networks. They had the same effect as a missed voice phone

connection. You dial a friend’s number — and you dial it cor-

rectly — but somehow the call gets screwed up in the tangle of