01110: The Web Lady

Blackness underneath me. Just a whirring sound of the rope that made me slowly descend bit by bit. I shot a look upwards. Kayami-senpai had clearly done this a lot of times before. For me however, it was the first time working together with someone at hacking. Maybe a test was not the most optimal environment to figure this out, but I had to take it as it came. Yesterday we didn’t do anything at the computer directly, but our cooperation working on the QR code went as smoothly as it could. I could only hope that it hadn’t been just a coincidence and we actually were on the same wavelength.

I looked down. “There is the ground!” I called.

“Good!” she replied. The whirring got slower.

We had decided that I would be the one to hack into the machine while she was my backup from the outside. To my surprise she had taken this kind of role much more serious than expected and emptied her bag with countless electrical devices and custom-made circuit boards on the table. It turned out that her specialty had to do with hardware of any kinds.

While I was down here, she intercepted any external connection and was able to alter it if necessary. It would most likely be overkill, since the most crucial security measures were taking place inside the machine, but it also didn’t hurt to have a backup plan. If the machine tried phoning home or I triggered any traps Kayami-senpai could alter or even block all the traffic.

“I’m in,” I said.

“Great … just give me a second before you start.” Her hands raced across the keyboard. In regard to speed Kayami-senpai was somewhere in the ballpark between Ando-sensei and Airii-senpai when she wore her headphones. I did not exactly know what she did there, but she seemed to be experienced. Instead of plugging the network cable straight into her laptop, she had plugged it into one of her custom boards. With a USB cable it was then wired to her laptop. A few commands raced across the window on her screen.

Airii-senpai sat next to me and examined my screen. Ouzen-senpai took the seat next to Kayami-senpai. Without a word they watched us, while Naoki-senpai sat at his laptop opposite from us and stared at his screen.

“Okay, I’m set,” Kayami-senpai finally said and looked at me.

I put my feet onto the dark cave ground and took out a flashlight to check out the vicinity. Everything looked clear. Just dark cave walls and nothingness. A small pond at the side. I unhooked myself from the rope and made my way deeper into the cave.

“I’ll start with the file system,” I reported.

The machine was really empty. Plain walls, nothing fancy installed. It was almost too empty. We were tasked with retrieving a secret code from a text file saved to the desktop of the system’s main user. Obviously, it was protected. I needed to escalate my permissions to obtain administration access. An exploit was necessary, but before I used that, I better took a close look around. If a security software like Yamata no Orochi was installed, this would kick me out faster than I could look.

My footsteps were the only sounds, I heard. Tap, Tap, Tap. Tension rose inside my body when another quiet and distant noise mixed in. It was a bit aggressive but also melodic, someone playing an instrument in the distance. I walked into the direction of the sound. And then I saw it.

“What kind of program is that?” I asked.

Kayami-senpai leaned towards my screen and took a look at the console window in front of me. Her eyes darted across the lines. “Fuck!” She rushed back to her device. “That’s Jorougumo.”

A smug smile appeared on Naoki-senpai’s face, who was still looking at his screen closely. I heard the scroll wheel of his mouse.

“What is Jorougumo?” I asked.

“One of Ando-sensei’s security programs. It hides itself as a harmless system routine and monitor’s all activity inside a network. Compared to all his other programs however it is much more aggressive. Respect to you for even finding it.”

Much more aggressive than Yamata no Orochi? Inside the cone of my light, sat a slender figure. A beautiful woman with black, accurately made-up hair and wearing a pitch-black kimono. She sat in a heel seat on the cave ground and played a melancholic tune on her Biwa. Her eyes were turned down at the instrument, as she plucked on the strings with the big fan-like plectrum. Nervousness rose inside my body.

“Don’t move a muscle. Just stay there,” Kayami-senpai said. She as well was hectically typing on her laptop. Drips of cold sweat rose on her forehead. “It’s over as soon as it spotted you as a threat.”

“What do you know about this program?”

“The base of Jorougumo is like the packet inspector inside a firewall, but it is even much more powerful than that. Normal packet inspectors just scan the whole network traffic passing through. If they find a virus or any different threat inside, the packet gets blocked before it can cause any damage. Jorougumo however actively indexes and discovers the whole network architecture additionally. Every switch, every router, every hub. It scans all the devices it can reach and keeps track of status changes. If any abnormalities occur, you better be far away. It will block the device from any communication or actively DoS it if necessary. And this goes for all devices participating in a communication … our laptops as well.”

An aggressive rip on the Biwa. The woman was gazing up at me with a dark glare. I noticed barely visible strings hanging in midair. Like a spider’s web they came from all different directions of the cave and led right to her. They vibrated in differing, seemingly random intervals.

My laptop was connected to the machine as well. Otherwise, I would hardly be able to hack into it. This meant that everything I did and every command I sent to the machine was analyzed by Jorougumo. A wide smile grew on the woman’s face. Her hand ran over the strings. She pulled one up, to hold it in-between two fingers.

“How do we defeat it? Maybe kill the main process with an exploit?”

A dry laugh left Kayami-senpai’s body. “You can’t defeat a monstrosity like this. The process runs with the highest access permissions on root level. We can even be glad if it doesn’t notice the man in the middle listening.”

The options raced through my mind. It would surely attack as soon as I started doing anything suspicious. My gaze fell onto the thin strings and back at the woman. Her pupils were white, staring into nothingness in front of her. Her only way to take decisions was determined by the strings and the packets sent to her. She was just listening on the network adapter and on nothing else. It meant that if we altered the packets she was receiving through her strings, we were able to simulate a totally inconspicuous network and Jorougumo would not be alerted by anything I did – at least in theory.

My gaze shot to Kayami-senpai. She just happened to have established a man in the middle. Every packet, every vibration on the strings, were redirected through her laptop. In other words: We were able to pull all of this off. “We just have to modify all the traffic to look inconspicuous.”

“Do you even have a remote idea on how many packets are passing through the network interface? It is completely impossible to modify all this.”

I pushed myself close to her, to shoot her a sly grin from immediate distance. “Not for a computer.” My eyes went over the program she was using to analyze the traffic. “Does this tool accept any scripting languages to alter the packets?”

Kayami-senpai didn’t back away as she eyed me a bit skeptical. Her expression slowly turned into a kind of strange admiration. “This … could actually work. But we have to know how which packet has to be altered. Do you even know what alterations are necessary when?”

It was a really complicated endeavor. All network packets had special fields and values like a letter had a recipient’s name and a ZIP code. Jorougumo checked all the field values and if they matched with the actual network’s architecture. When altering anything, all values had to be consistent across all requests and not contradict each other.

We needed someone with an insane amount of knowledge and understanding of low-level network communications. Someone who knew how we could trick this program into believing everything was fine. Such a person could make a catalogue with rule sets of packet alterations. With the right information I could then create a script that applied all these rules to the real traffic fed into the machine. As it happened, Kayami-senpai had just revealed her specialty within exactly this field of low-level hardware.

“Do you know what alterations are necessary?” I asked her.

She slowly nodded, a bit uncomfortableness rising in her eyes. “Actually … I think I can figure the alterations out for you, but no promises that I don’t forget anything. This stuff is really complicated.”

It was obviously not the most elegant solution, but it was certainly the only one we could pull off against such a strong opponent in a small amount of time. What did the White Hoods actually want to achieve with this insane test of skill? Maybe Ando-sensei brought them the idea to provide us with an unsolvable task like he did back in the day with Yamata no Orochi. He was the club’s adviser after all.

I pulled up my development environment and started scripting an algorithm to alter the packets. The bare body was done in a breeze. I turned to Kayami-senpai. “Do you already have something for me?”

“Oh … uh, you’re fast. Sure, I’ll send the first rules over.”

For the next quarter of an hour, it was a fast paced back and forth between the two of us. I had my troubles keeping the concentration at its highest level, but I absolutely had to prevent any errors. Besides programming I also checked Kayami-senpai’s rule sets for plausibility with the little networking knowledge I had. I even spotted a few smaller careless mistakes from her side, and she was able to fix them before I turned them into code. When all rules had been implemented, Kayami-senpai moved to my side. “Should I take a look over your script as well? Not that you’ve made any errors.”

I studied her face a bit perplexed. Right. Backing up each other was not a one-sided thing. Maybe she was not the biggest programmer herself, but it was the same thing with me checking her rule sets. Four eyes saw more than just two – plus it gave me a feeling of security, not having to suffer through all of this alone. I gave her a smile and nodded. “Yeah, thanks!”

I scrolled through the little program. Not more than 600 lines of code but a lot of copy and paste involved. We looked through everything and after that I sent the code over to Kayami-senpai. She fed it into her analysis program and started it. If everything worked fine, this should lead Jorougumo to believe that it was looking at a completely inconspicuous network. Like a big reflective shield that hid my suspicious actions from the software.

I looked back up at the woman who was sitting in front of me. She still held the string in her hands, the vibrations from its end telling her what happened on the outside of the cave. It seemed like she had not noticed any changes, staying still while she listened to the vibrating strings. If there was just one hole in our shield, hell would break loose.

“Well, hope we didn’t forget anything!” I said and executed the software to escalate my system permissions. It ran, tested a few things and then from one to the other moment a message appeared on screen: ‘Access granted’

“We are in!” Kayami-senpai shook my shoulder while bouncing up and down in joy. “Now you just have to get to the desktop.”

I could not really believe it. We actually made it past this insane opponent. I still observed the woman in front of me closely for another moment. She still held the string in her hand then let go of it. It swung after. With her plectrum she lunged wide back and then plucked all the strings at once, making them resound hurtful in my ears.

“Fuck! That’s not good at all,” Kayami-senpai jumped back to her laptop.

The sound echoed deep into the cave and slowly the woman leaned onto the ground. She started twitching and her legs slowly distorted. Her hips morphed into a wide shape; her lower half slowly deformed into … a spider. The beautiful woman’s face now had a row of additional eyes at the side of her head.

With one leap she was right in front of me, her thin leg piercing right into my direction. Only in the last second, I managed to evade the deathly strike. She left me no time to think. Another hit into the ground and a second one, each hard enough to make the rocky ground crumble. Rock sprayed out into all different directions. I rolled to the side. Out of the motion I pulled my katana and deflected her next strike, to the side.

She was fast, like really fast. I had my troubles parrying her attacks. Blow by blow she pushed me towards the cave wall. I couldn’t even manage an attack from my side. There was no reaction time, no time to think. Parrying the beast was everything I was able to do. I had to concentrate, needed to find a hole in its attacks. Parrying, Deflecting, Waiting and with one moment it was there.

I used the hole, swirled through it and struck at the gigantic spider woman in front of me. A scream of pain followed shortly afterwards. One of its legs fell to the ground as the face of the woman turned from pain into pure rage.

I prepared for the next attack, holding tight to the handle of my sword. It was not even a second after, when I heard a voice. “Duck down!”

It was my unconsciousness that reacted. My consciousness took another second to realize what actually happened. Out of my motion I fell onto my back, when I saw all the remaining limbs of the spider exploding right in front of me. The beast’s torso fell to the ground, screams of anguish echoing through the cave. A figure landed between me and the beast gracefully like a cat. Kayami-senpai looked back at me. “Take a run for the god damn file. I’ll buy you time.”

My eyes widened. It was this very moment that the insane difference of skill between us hit me. I hardly managed one leg, but she just completely obliterated all the others in a single strike. She was so fast that I hadn’t even recognized how she had done it. A bladed whip laid in her hands. Was this her weapon?

There was no time to think about this now. I picked myself up from the ground and took a sprint through the dark cave, the noises from the fight still in the distance behind me. The folder was not hidden deep inside the file system and with my current access permissions not even restricted, but I just needed to get there RIGHT NOW. There was it, another single click and … the connection was cut.

I stared at my screen, unable to comprehend the insane amount of stuff that had just happened. My whole body was trembling like a leaf. My first gaze was meant for Kayami-senpai.

I saw how she swallowed, still looking at the screen. Her hands laid on the keyboard. She slowly pulled them back. “Sorry … I could not protect you.”