Chapter 16: What Was I So Worried About?

As a formality, you try all the most common passwords. But even the single most common—123456—is only used by 0.2% of people. The real question is what would be the most likely password for Georgia.

Password

We completely cleaned out Georgia’s room last night, packed the clothes in boxes marked ‘Goodwill’ and ‘Second Hand Hooker Supply,’ and piled them in the corner. We flipped the mattress on Georgia’s bed and put clean linens on it. All the sex toys, ropes, cuffs, gags, whips, plugs, and other accoutrements went into a box that was destined for a dump. I put all the jewelry in a shoebox (there were plenty of them in the closet) and decided I’d go through it more carefully later. We flipped a coin for bedrooms and I won, so I get to stay in the little single room and Cinnamon gets the stage.

This morning, I settled down to open Georgia’s computers. All the hard drives are backed up now and I feel pretty confident that I can work on a computer without destroying any data ... or evidence. I’ve examined the box in the office off the kitchen and it seems most likely to be command central. Just to be sure I didn’t corrupt anything on the network, I disconnected the box from the router. Then I ran the list of 250 most likely passwords through the device.

One of the things Dag impressed on me was to use a biometric scanner of some sort when possible, and when not, use a random generator of 12 characters to create my passwords. He said if my mind wasn’t sharp enough to memorize a new twelve-character password at least every ninety days, then I probably wasn’t sharp enough to do this work. But given the choice, most users will choose a simplistic six-character or less password. Almost sixty percent of users choose passwords from a very limited set of alphanumeric characters. Half of users will use names, slang words, regular words you’d find in a dictionary, or consecutive digits or adjacent keyboard characters like qwerty. 123456 is the most popular password on the internet.

For years, a popular internet site allowed the word ‘password’ as a password to almost any account. The first ones you try are things like 123456, password, qwerty, abc123, and so on. But the trick to breaking a password on a device is a little different. Ordinarily, I’d just reboot the machine from an external disk and plunder whatever was on the disk since I’d have access to the machine. But I wanted to know what applications had been running on the thing. I figured that at least the webcam software was running even though I’d disconnected the cameras. What I wanted to know was if she was connected to any websites, what her email looked like, and where her bank information was hidden. If she had any of those programs running, I’d be able to get into anything on any of her computers.

So, what would Georgia have considered an easy clever password she could remember? When I brought the computer screen awake, the password screen sat there waiting my wise input. User name: Georgia. Password: blank. I had a lot of information about Georgia. Social Security number, no good. Address, no good. Name, middle name, last name, father’s name, no. Phone number, no. I clicked on the password hint button and got ‘Future paradise.’ Hmm. Georgia was looking forward to a future paradise or to becoming a future paradise. What would future paradise be?

I absently typed in the address in Savannah: 431Duffy. Nothing. 431DuffyLn. I was in. That was almost too easy compared to what I had to go through to get Simon’s password.

As I suspected, she had a messaging system, email, a chat room, her video, software, an adult internet site, a music player, and a Web phone service open. Now I was going to find out all about Georgia’s life and loves.

The first thing I did was go into the admin or account screen of every running application and change the password to ‘State04.’ Nope, that wasn’t a particularly secure password; it was just one I could use to get in and out of fast if I need to and all these services and applications would have the same password. Georgia was the fourth state to join the union. I had to connect the computer to the ISP in order to make the changes, but I plugged directly from the computer to the modem instead of connecting to the router with all the other devices. I wanted my own secure network before I started exposing any of the other devices to the outside world. This seemed to be Georgia Central, so I was counting on getting what I needed from this computer.

Secret Life

We locked up the house and left about six in the evening. Cinnamon volunteered to stay and guard things but there was no way I’d be leaving her there. The place is spooky with both of us and dangerous for either of us. I did leave a few surprises around the house should anyone come prowling.