Drugs!

pickarooney

I need a (fictitious) brand name for a painkiller/panacea and am also wondering how one would go about tracing when/where shipments of products from a certain company are arriving in a port, assuming you have fairly easy access to restricted information.

I've watched season two of the Wire as research but am still unsure just how possible the latter is.

Obviously there's something dodgy in the shipment

I guess you would need to involve customs on some level but maybe there's a way to get info from the harbourmaster.

Leafonthewind

I don't know about the brand name, but if you had contacts within the company, they could track the shipments, tell you if they've cleared customs, etc. Like Thomas Magnum used to do with Mac. Bring the guy doughnuts and in return he gives you highly classified information.

pickarooney

Doughnuts - so simple!
The one thing the guy does not have is contacts within the company, for dramatic reasons

Leafonthewind

Does the guy know which port the shipment is arriving at? How does he get that info? If he knows which port, I suppose it then depends on how carefully the records are kept, whether they're computerized and whether the system could be hacked into. Don't you have a hacker lying around?;)

pickarooney

Indeed I do...

Doc Ruby

Get a job as an intern at the insurance company covering the shipment. You'd be astonished at what kind of information insurance companies hold. Or if not, pay an intern, astonishing how little compensation they receive.

Doc Ruby

More useful info:

http://www.marinetraffic.com/ais/
http://www.searates.com/container/tracking/

Panaceadol, ultima, sortit, supprease, befree, instanull, lopain.

pickarooney

I like Lopaine (with an extra E like in novocaine). Some of the others sound like air-fresheners or sanitary towels.

Insurance company... a relative in there with an easy to guess password could be workable.

Doc Ruby

pickarooney wrote: »

Insurance company... a relative in there with an easy to guess password could be workable.

Or you could go down the social engineering route, that's very interesting stuff, like cold reading (like fake mediums do) people over the phone, even including dumpster diving to go spear phishing. Its not "hacking" in the Hollywood sense but it gets the job done in more cases.

Arfan

Easiest way to get someone's password is to ask.

Insurance companies and any large company will have contractors doing all sorts of data analysis and maintenance. They will have access to swathes of customer data. There are usually strict procedures to protect this data but if someone were to "forget" as people so often do who knows where that data may end up.

pickarooney

Right, to make it a little less abstract - there's a guy who suspects (knows, really) that there are regular shipments of illegal drugs coming into a large port. He knows they're being packaged as legit goods as the harbourmaster is beyond suspicion and wouldn't just turn a blind eye to sacks of coke coming into port. So with a bit of digging and a stroke of luck he gets a lead on a specific company which he thinks might be shipping the drugs packaged as something else.

He's not anywhere near the port so will have to do all his digging remotely.

Using the insurance company angle, how would you go about getting confirmation on the dates and times?

The Mad Hatter

Not too long ago, I was speaking to what you'd probably think of as a Generation 1 hacker. He was breaking into computers when the internet was in its infancy. He said, back in the day, the easiest way to get some CEO's password was to call their secretary and run with a line like "Mr Robbins invited me to dinner at his house tomorrow night and I was wondering if you could remind me - what's his wife's name?"

pickarooney

The Mad Hatter wrote: »

Not too long ago, I was speaking to what you'd probably think of as a Generation 1 hacker. He was breaking into computers when the internet was in its infancy. He said, back in the day, the easiest way to get some CEO's password was to call their secretary and run with a line like "Mr Robbins invited me to dinner at his house tomorrow night and I was wondering if you could remind me - what's his wife's name?"

The kind of thing that's so wonderfully simple nobody would believe it in a work of fiction

swordofislam

pickarooney wrote: »

The kind of thing that's so wonderfully simple nobody would believe it in a work of fiction

You could have the hero meet the villain at a fancy society dinner and pump him for information.

pickarooney

Well, he spends 400 pages trying to figure out who the villain is so that would be a bit convenient

Doc Ruby

pickarooney wrote: »

The kind of thing that's so wonderfully simple nobody would believe it in a work of fiction

Its still how its done today. You don't even need to be much of a faceman, just get past the first disbelief barrier, by getting some basic information that will pass a cursory glance, like the name of the marketing manager in the Delaware office.

The accounts department will probably have most of the details, but client files are where you want access, these are files containing things like blueprints, security alarm layout/type/model and setup, schedules of security staff rosters and other details. Its likely that these will be web-accessable since road warriors may need to view data on an ad hoc basis. Insurance companies are all sorts of useful for after-midnight work.

So he has got a) the name of the company doing the shipping and b) the port it will arrive in. This is a problem, since there's no immediate connection to the insurance company or details of the ship registration. You could just "hack the server" and have a stream of glowing matrix text scrolling by the mind's eye, but that's unsatisfactory.

So, who would legitimately want to know the insurance company's details? A rival insurance company trying to steal a customer, government inspectors checking registration, mister taxman, someone who thinks the ship has had a collision with another ship, a relative of a purportedly injured crewman, I'm sure you can come up with a few others.

Next, get on the phone and start dialing insurance branch offices. Whoever answers on the other end would gets a line like, "Hi, I'm John, the new guy on the Help Desk. We need to reconfigure the router in your office this afternoon. The guy who normally does that is home with his sick daughter, and the only other login on the router is your manager's. Can I get their username and password?"

It helps if you're inside another facility so at least the dialling number passes the sniff test. Get yourself a fake badge and a jacket that says XYZ Security Installers on it. Walk up to a door about lunch time with a tool bag in one hand and a ladder in the other, maybe a box or two tucked under an arm. Make a show of not being quite able to get your badge to the reader without putting everything down. People are too polite, they'll not only badge the door for you but then they'll hold it.

Or alternately spoof the caller ID or an email address, both fairly trivial even for amateurs.

Then its just a case of locating the correct files and off you go. You'll probably even end up with a lot more information than you initially wanted, maybe a few tantalising tips as to the real baddie's identity.

I haven't really given much thought to the details and robbed a few ideas off slashdot, but that's the general gist. Few more ideas here.

pickarooney

That's all brilliant stuff. Loads of possibilities opening up.

Antilles

pickarooney wrote: »

That's all brilliant stuff. Loads of possibilities opening up.

And if those don't work, you'll have plenty of time in prison to focus on your writing

DublinWriter

pickarooney wrote: »

I need a (fictitious) brand name for a painkiller/panacea

Most over-the-counter analgesics have a name ending in 'ine' or 'ene'.

'Panaceine', maybe?

pickarooney

DublinWriter wrote: »

Most over-the-counter analgesics have a name ending in 'ine' or 'ene'.

'Panaceine', maybe?

I've nicked this one for another chapter. Cheers