Confessions of a Hackaholic

I took the hex dump from wireshark and analyzed it.  The magic header “Gh0st” was clearly visible.

I felt the sudden wave of excitement running through my nerves, but it was soon followed by the pang of nervousness and anxiety. Patience; whispered my mind.

My Remote administration Tool, or “rat” as they call it, had successfully penetrated the machine, now all I had to do is -wait. That’s the thing about hacking; you need patience and luck, lots of it actually. 

If it was a piece of cake, and anybody could do it, where the world would be at this stage no-one knows.

Next, It was time for my payload to do the trick, I inserted my USB, and uploaded the carefully pain strikingly crafted payload in the machine. It was a success. I remember how I had found this Payload on some hack forums and how I had edited and modified it for my own gains. Unknowingly I got a smug look on my face. There are people who keep saying, “you need to be a good programmer to be a good hacker”, and here I was, doing all right, without even being an average coder. I believe, you don’t need to be a good coder, just need to have basic understanding of how code works when you come across it and how to modify it for your own use. Let’s face it, everything that is needed has been already coded, thousands of rats, numerous payloads, nobody needs to write the fresh codes, just improvise. And that’s the gift I had, I could improvise on anything I could get my hands on. I already had such a huge collection of tools, commands, etc.

I scanned through my laptop result thoroughly. There was no green text box with “access granted” field like how they show in movies. This was real life and this was happening. I felt sweat forming on my forehead and it fell on the touchpad of my laptop within whiskers. It was that hot in Pune. Humidity with added pain to use root-kits for this hack was adding to my irritation, I have never been a big fan of Root kits or rats, especially when there are so many vulnerabilities to exploit.

It reminds me of a quote from the movie “The fault in our stars” – that’s the thing about love, it demands to be felt.

In my life, there was no love, and this quote was twisted into– “that’s the thing about vulnerability, it demands to be exploited” – Fault in our windows. That was the twisted trajectory of my life these days.

I checked the time, it was almost past 12. I needed sleep. This was the last hack for the month, just one more sleepless night, I assured myself. Did I believe in my assurance? I doubt so, but I had to make sure I stayed all right. These hacks were getting more and more frequent now, there was a mole in our hacking clan, there is always one. And we needed to find and flush him out sooner.

Just few more hours of waiting, and then I will have the hashes, I will start my script for decrypting the paraphrases and sleep, I decided.

I got up, drank the cold coffee from fridge, looked myself in the mirror, I looked like a drug addict, without actually being on a drug.

I started brushing my teeth and concentrated on the sound which followed, It felt synonymous to the sound my decryption script would make while cracking through every hash-code, if it made any. I was going crazy, I was becoming crazy, or maybe I had become one already.

I lay there in my bed, looking at the fan and trying to decrypt whether it was rotating or revolving. I couldn’t even decipher what the hell I was doing with my life.

I didn’t realize how and when in the middle of figuring out the unknown, I dozed off.

And then, she came…

Like she always does; silent, soothing, supportive, listening, advising, cute, beautiful and the entire goody –goody adjectives combined.

The only problem is, she only exists in my dreams, appearing only when I am asleep and making me join the puzzling pieces of my dreams together to form morbid and vivid picture of that unpredictable beauty.

Her smile is the most unique one I have ever seen for when she smiles her eyes twinkle. And her eyes, well , what can I say about those eyes, when I look into them, I see a whole new world forming, where there is her and me and butterflies and fairies, where peacocks dance to the tune of our love while the angels are busy writing our love stories..

What I most like about this dream girl of mine is the fact that we are on the same wavelength, we connect so well, and the more I get to know her, the more I sleep that is; the more interesting things I decipher about her. It’s amazing really how one person can get you out of your depression, in my case it’s my dream girl. I wish I get sleep whole day and night, I wish I could get time for the same, if I could I would, I would sleep through the whole day and night just to get the dreamy glimpses of her.

“wake up” she whispered in my ears. I was awake in my dreams of course, but I didn’t want to wake up, I wanted to hear her voice again, I wanted to hear her “Wake up” again.

“Wake up”. She said,  I smiled, she slapped me softly on my cheek, the brush of her fingers; smooth.

“Your RAT has settled down, time to decrypt” she continued whispering. The fact that she knew so much of technical stuff was such a turn on but tonight I didn’t want to hear anything of it. She was well read, could write awesome, and was a brilliant conversationalist, all in all, she was perfect; she is perfect.

But the main reason I fell for her was her ability to get the butterfly in my stomach every time she appeared.

I looked at her with sleepy eyes; her smooth and silky untied hair glistened under the influence of oncoming sun rays through the window.

“Do come in my life soon, I feel empty without you” I gave her one of those “I am your puppy” expression. She chuckled.

“I have already arrived, just open your eyes and look around” she winked.

It took me a while to understand her sarcasm but by the time I did, she was already on her way.

“Good” and “goodbye” she said as she retreated through the window while giving me a flying kiss, her slow retreat was complete as she transformed from the diminutive figure into a tiny bright spot which I tried catching into my right palm unsuccessfully.

Loud buzzing sound of alarm woke me up. The sun rays had started entering my room through the window. It’s almost as if my dream and reality were in sync with each other.

It was 6 am. I had slept for 5 straight hours, which was rare. I needed to complete the decryption before heading to the office.

I started the script, made myself coffee and kept pondering about my abnormal life.

Where every other normal guy in town had love in reality and hacking in their dreams, I had the opposite. Hacking was real for me, but love for me remained an illusion, so much of a transformation since the shift to Pune.

Every once a while, the nostalgia creeps in. where I look back at how I was, and how the things were back in Goa.  I have been single for almost 2 years now, I have been clean for over a year now, I miss the love, I miss the care, I miss the fun, I am missing out on reality, I have become so engulfed in this oblivion of my own where in the life seems so unstable, so encrypted, where the only companionship for me includes, the operating systems, the commands, payloads, viruses , malwares, Trojans, the only friends I have are rats, the only task I do is to intrude into systems. I have become so accustomed to these abnormally sleepless digitized nights, that I have lost the difference between reality and dreams, between bots and people, between zeroes and ones. I have lost the count of time and hours.

The zombie look I have acquired will be questioned in office today; people will ask me all sorts of questions like “Are you depressed?” “Are you on drugs?”, some guys will even go on to say “he is from Goa, he must be under the influence of alcohol, he must be high and having a hangover” and as always I will smile for one thing I can’t be is argumentative. I will nod, they will keep quite. And only I alone will know the real reason for my bad hangover, for believe me when I say so, I am never high on weed or alcohol; I am only high on hacks...