Hernonymous [A Hacker's Diary]

Her calm and Her storm[Prenonymous]

The monstrous snores of sleeping children reverberates off the dirty-green walls of my room as I type commands into John Dell, the relatively slow but good enough computer that I am lucky to have in my room. I am careful not to pound the keys on his keyboard too hard or too fast ere I wake any one of the crybaby triplets sleeping on my mattress. It is annoying, but I have to walk on eggshells; I know very well what would happen if one of them blinks awake, and I want no part of that.

Wouldn't it be nice to see the moon? To have it light up the room just a tiny bit, Wouldn't it be nice to open the windows so the smell of sweat fades out as fresh night air comes in?, wouldn't the sound of the nightly crickets be so nice if they weren't dulled out by the closed windows?. I would give my soul to open up the windows and curtains, but if I do then those kids would wake up and I'll get in trouble.

John beeps twice in quick succession, startling me, but also telling me my vulnerability scan on the Wattpad website has reached one hundred percent. I smile the hacker smile that I've seen so many times on the big TV screen in Amanda's super cool mother's shop when mama and papa would allow us a three-hour Sunday outing time for good behaviour.

To be honest, I have been a very bad girl. I am not sure mama would give me any outing time this Sunday, I played my role very terribly when the welfare man came last. I was too tired and angry to pretend to be having fun, how can mama expect me to look happy after feeding me darn yam porridge for six days straight?. At this point in my life, I would rather eat bugs and dirt

John beeps once more and opens up my scan results automatically, my smile widens, and this one is genuine. It is obvious from the results that Wattpad blocked my digital footprint(I mean my IP and MAC address) in an effort to protect itself from my peaceful scan.

The more I think about it, the more my smile widens until it's a wide grin. It is just funny- No, just adorable, that Wattpad held a meeting over how to keep the bad guys out, and they concluded banning public internet addresses was the best idea. How could it not occur to them how utterly useless it is?

It takes two clicks to my connection settings and a little over five keystrokes to change my IP address and MAC address, wipe my cache and effectively become a new person. I confirm that my little trick works and I can access Wattpad with my new identity. It's a damn shame that I and my two brain cells can fool a giant like wattpad.

The words of Luke the lurker from a strange movie about a haunted piggy bank comes to my mind "only a fool does the same thing twice and expects different results". I might be crazy, idiotic, or mad, but I am not foolish. I know for a fact that Wattpad would also block this address before my scan completes if I do things in the same way.

It is clear that I would need a way to automate the process such that when one address gets banned, the other goes up with a latency period short enough that it won't cut my scan. I would need to code an IP changer that fits my needs- No, I would need to steal the code off some website.

Six minutes, it would have taken the whole of six minutes to write an imperfect IP changer that is just good enough. However, thanks to super smart people existing, I get something robust in seconds. I run my scan again and this time, I am successful. It is evident from my results that Wattpad has some pretty nice secrets just waiting to be revealed.

The vulnerability scan didn't bring up anything big or print "Database Hacked" in stereotypical hacking blue, but it held a lot of hints. I notice, almost instantaneously, a tiny flaw in Wattpad's advertisement framework that could let me read and potentially modify the code that controls how their advertisement works.

The power to serve everyone more advertisements than they bargained for, or to shut off the advertisement completely if I so desire. It is good, but it doesn't give me the rush I crave. I need passwords and I intend to get them.