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Authors: Victor Karl
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items that we needed. It was amazing how many places sold this kind of stuff in the area. We agreed that Bill would run around Monday and start acquiring the equipment since I had to be at work. It was not a good time to take off since I was the lead on a very tricky project for one of our customers to back track who had been behind a professional attempt to compromise their systems to gain access to the company’s Intellectual Property. I gave Bill my debit card and PIN to make the purchases as well as my American Express Platinum card. I was already thinking ahead on forming a Limited Liability Corporation so that I could pay Bill some kind of salary and potentially write off some of this stuff no matter what the outcome would be.
Chapter 7: In or Out
T he offices of Clavis Aurea occupied the 7 th and 8 th floors of a nice looking glass office building on Main Street in San Diego. From my cubicle on the eighth floor, only the CEO and head of human resources had offices, I could see west to the bay and the early sunlight playing off the water. We designed our entire space with high security in mind. None of the employees had laptops; everything was developer class workstations running Windows 7 and using the 64-bit operating system. In addition, we had a full range of Linux and UNIX systems at our disposal.
The doors and PC’s all required biometric access using retina scanners. The door ingress and egress points required a retina scan in both directions and the doorways did not permit more than one person at a time using a “ dead man” door system. Our desktops are for analysis and research, while virtualized workstations sitting in the secure server room were for ethical hacking and other paid for services. We had a completely separate and isolated environment including different Internet Service Providers where we performed the real sensitive work similar to counter espionage. In this area, clients, including some un-named government organizations came to us so we could help solve their problems. What we did was to figure out how someone gained access to our client’s systems, data accessed and how to mitigate a future occurrence. Where we differentiated from others, and where the law gets a dark shade of grey, is trying to reverse the process to determine who did it and to see if we could follow the trail to the source. Sometimes, not often, we actually recovered the data or messed around with it so that the perpetrator thought they had gotten away with something good.
Jeremiah Stevens was an impressive figure as he walked around the office. The light grey in his crew cut hair was the only indication that age may be catching up with him. Otherwise, his 6-foot one frame and lean body could have been from someone 20 years younger. His most striking feature was a pair of blazing blue eyes set in a chiseled face. He was the CEO, but you would never know it by just watching him sit down at a workstation and chat with the other analysts. He was former Army and just prior to his retirement as a 50-year old colonel, ran the Army cyber security team. In that position, he gained international recognition as an expert in cyber espionage among the military community and many of the three letter organizations. I could never prove it, but I thought that he might have left the military so he could help them as a civilian and eliminate certain governmental constraints. Jeremy’s cell phone and office phones used encryption to protect what I considered highly sensitive conversations and he was in constant contact with military and government entities.
We typically worked in two person teams by design. The concept was that it was less likely to miss something if you have two sets of eyes reviewing data and dissecting things. My partner for the last 3-weeks was George. George was one of those people that if it were not for computers he probably would have no life at
Chapter 7: In or Out
T he offices of Clavis Aurea occupied the 7 th and 8 th floors of a nice looking glass office building on Main Street in San Diego. From my cubicle on the eighth floor, only the CEO and head of human resources had offices, I could see west to the bay and the early sunlight playing off the water. We designed our entire space with high security in mind. None of the employees had laptops; everything was developer class workstations running Windows 7 and using the 64-bit operating system. In addition, we had a full range of Linux and UNIX systems at our disposal.
The doors and PC’s all required biometric access using retina scanners. The door ingress and egress points required a retina scan in both directions and the doorways did not permit more than one person at a time using a “ dead man” door system. Our desktops are for analysis and research, while virtualized workstations sitting in the secure server room were for ethical hacking and other paid for services. We had a completely separate and isolated environment including different Internet Service Providers where we performed the real sensitive work similar to counter espionage. In this area, clients, including some un-named government organizations came to us so we could help solve their problems. What we did was to figure out how someone gained access to our client’s systems, data accessed and how to mitigate a future occurrence. Where we differentiated from others, and where the law gets a dark shade of grey, is trying to reverse the process to determine who did it and to see if we could follow the trail to the source. Sometimes, not often, we actually recovered the data or messed around with it so that the perpetrator thought they had gotten away with something good.
Jeremiah Stevens was an impressive figure as he walked around the office. The light grey in his crew cut hair was the only indication that age may be catching up with him. Otherwise, his 6-foot one frame and lean body could have been from someone 20 years younger. His most striking feature was a pair of blazing blue eyes set in a chiseled face. He was the CEO, but you would never know it by just watching him sit down at a workstation and chat with the other analysts. He was former Army and just prior to his retirement as a 50-year old colonel, ran the Army cyber security team. In that position, he gained international recognition as an expert in cyber espionage among the military community and many of the three letter organizations. I could never prove it, but I thought that he might have left the military so he could help them as a civilian and eliminate certain governmental constraints. Jeremy’s cell phone and office phones used encryption to protect what I considered highly sensitive conversations and he was in constant contact with military and government entities.
We typically worked in two person teams by design. The concept was that it was less likely to miss something if you have two sets of eyes reviewing data and dissecting things. My partner for the last 3-weeks was George. George was one of those people that if it were not for computers he probably would have no life at
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