The Root Deepens

Chapter 1 – Planting a Seed

Chapter 2 – The First Sprout

Mac’s apartment was a mess. In the place where a TV would normally be on the wall, he had put up 4 monitors instead.  They were in a nice two by two arrangement, his desk pressed up against the wall underneath. On the desk he had a desktop and next to that a cheap old laptop set up in a dock. A dozen cans of Mt Dew, mostly empty, sat on the desk, and a case of Mt Dew, mostly full, sat on the floor near the leg of the desk. The small trash can sitting behind the case was overflowing with more Mt Dew cans, and a few dozen were scattered around the floor.

Mac stared at the monitor on the bottom left and  read intently , watching for new text messages come in. Jen’s ( the cute barista from Starbucks) texts were of particular interest to him. She had already sent a couple of selfies to someone. He made a mental note that he would need to write a module to scan and start uploading address book data so he would know everyone that people were talking to. It would also be a good way to find more devices to spread the worm to. He also had the thought that he could write a module to upload the entire photo album from a phone.

At 6:30 an update came into Jen’s log file. Mac opened it and saw that Jen had driven from the Starbucks to her apartment. Inside the log file, he got the SSID of her network: GirlsNightOut, and her password: HisCockWasHuge. He saw a script kick off on the process monitor that he was using to look for SSIDs and write the data for the exact location, the SSID, and the password out to a database. He knew this could be handy information at some point int he future. Seconds later the log discovered two new devices that could be taken over by his worm and used to monitor Jen in the future.

Text Message to 555-512-7387 at 7:03 PM CST:
I’m heading home to grab a quick shower and get the stench of coffee off of me, I’ll be over around 9, if that’s not too late

Text Message from 555-512-7387 at 7:03 PM CST:
That will be great, I have some cleaning to do to get ready for you. See you soon.

Text Message to 555-512-7387 at 7:03 PM CST:
LOL

Mac examined the correspondence between the two, and realized that he had a little bit of time to try out taking over other devices inside Jen’s apartment. He told her phone to reach out to both of the new devices he had found. Immediately, he saw his chart go up by one, showing that he now had control of 17 devices. He waited for the first log file to show up. This one appeared to be a smart speaker with a personal assistant. It reported that it was playing music from her Spotify account.

Mac saw the second device appear on his chart, a laptop running Windows. He looked at the log files to find the details and noticed that it was equipped with a webcam. He sent it the command to take a picture of the room it was in, without turning on the indicator  light that the camera was on. Within a minute, he had a picture of her bedroom. He could see the bathroom door open and her bed in between where her laptop sat and the bathroom door. He smiled and sent a command to the laptop to take a picture every two minutes for the next 2 hours. At 7:48 he got his first image. Jen was seated at the computer and was looking intently at the screen. She was topless with her hair up in a towel, as if she’d just come from the shower. Her breasts were large and full, her youth kept them perky. Her nipples were large and pink. He saved that picture to his laptop so that he could enjoy that later, (and he certainly would), and he went back to monitoring the log files with new pictures popping up automatically as they arrived. He caught her from time to time on the camera, but usually with her back turned to him, a towel wrapped around her waist as she was looking into the mirror doing her makeup.

Set Reminder at 8:55 PM CST:
Go to Vicki’s at lunch, buy a couple pairs of panties

Text Message to 555-512-7387 at 8:55 PM CST:
I’ll be there in 20

Text Message from 555-512-7387 at 8:56 PM CST:
I can’t wait to see you

Text Message to 555-512-7387 at 8:56 PM CST:
😃

The pictures from the camera were now showing a dark room. For the next 20 minutes the only updates that came through were from the log showing her current GPS coordinates. This was good but might be a little too much communication. He decided that the next update to the worm should only report GPS locations when a device stops moving and connects to a WiFi network to keep things from communicating too much.

Mac opened another Mt Dew. He didn’t need the caffeine but his lips were parched and he was thirsty. All of his endorphins were kicking in because everything had been working so well. He couldn’t believe how well this was going. He could see already that he would be up all night tweaking modules and just watching data come in.

At around 9:20 he saw the logs update once again. Jen had connected to a new WiFi network and her device sent the details back to Mac’s server. The SSID was “MyHouse”, with a password of “password”. Mac laughed at the details when he saw them. Of course the password was password; why wouldn’t someone do that. This was going to be easy. After a few more moments, there was a report of another four devices that could be infiltrated. He went ahead and released his worm to these new devices.  His chart showed a laptop, a tablet, a phone, and an IP based camera. He literally laughed with joy when he saw the IP Camera and that fact that it was constantly recording to the cloud.

Mac looked at the log for the camera and saw that it wasn’t using a secure connection to send the video feed to the cloud server hosting the DVR functionality. He quickly pointed a browser over to the camera and saw a picture of a bedroom,(obviously a man’s), from what appeared to be just above the headboard and dead center of the bed. He could see the door out to the hallway, and down the hallway a little bit.

Text Message from 555-512-8912 at 11:45 PM CST:
Our usual spot, Saturday night, I’ll be there at 9, the room will be paid for already

At about quarter after midnight, Mac watched as Jen and Rob made their way down the hallway toward the bedroom. He watched the two of them walk through the doorway, Rob was pulling her into him as they walked through the door, giving her a long, deep kiss.