So it s Saturday, and h3X is alone again. She gives her friends a call and finds out that their night was a lot less eventful than hers. After that, it s time to check the laptop and, of course, check on the box she took over yesterday. The laptop s cooling fan vent no longer hums, and she unlocks the console to see what John the Ripper found. The screen reads:

(kG$77L_)       root(Yl74K!9)       dizzy(CanHcky)       james

This day is off to an awesome start, h3X thinks. She had an excellent night, and in the morning, as if ordered from room service, she gets toast, coffee, tomato juice, and the passwords of the guys for breakfast. She consumes them in order. First, it s time to eat something and regain some of the energy lost in the past eight hours. Then h3X goes online and sees if the box from yesterday is still there. It is.

Although most hackers have several bounce points and other systems they can use to hide their traces in the land of the Internet, h3X does not possess such assets and, quite frankly, she doesn t care a bit about that. In theory, most, if not all, hackers are traceable one way or another. But in reality, most system administrators don t have the skills and are not going to hire an expensive consulting company to track her down. Even if they did,...