Back at the house, it was time for another short nap. I had some appointments to take care of starting at 11:00am. Two clients to visit today, nothing major, just needed to check out the systems and apply some operating system patches. I made a copy of my stealth programs to install on those systems; might as well save a phone call. I already had full root privileges on those systems, and some well-hidden back doors, but it was always useful to have some additional ways into systems.
I took a short nap, then showered and shaved and got ready to go. Today's appointments were up in Grass Valley, which is about an hour northwest of Auburn. It was looking to be a nice pleasant day, and I didn't need to bring a whole lot of equipment with me, so I decided to put the top down on the convertible. The drive to Grass Valley is a nice two lane road through the hills and mountains (once you get out of Auburn), and the smell of the pine trees would be a nice complement to the drive up there.
I grabbed my laptop, and the disks that had the copy of the stealth programs. I set the house alarm, and pulled the car out of the garage, locking the garage door.
The drive to Grass Valley is quite nice. There's a 10 mile stretch of Highway 49 from Interstate 80 that is mostly strip malls and car dealers. But then it quickly turns into a nice but busy two lane highway. The road travels through the foothills and into the Sierra Nevada mountains, but the grade is pretty gradual. Traffic on this road can be heavy, especially on weekends, but at 10 am in the morning it wasn't too bad. Driving with the top down through the hills was quite pleasant and refreshing.
I arrived at my first appointment a few minutes early. I checked in with the receptionist, and poked my head into the boss' office to say hello. I then went into the computer server room and sat down in front of the server's monitor and keyboard. I logged in as a root-level user, and spent a few moments looking at the log and status files. Everything looked ok and normal. There was some high traffic counts during the last two weeks, but nothing that would look unusual to the casual observer. But I was suspicious of any spikes in activity, especially those that happened outside of normal working hours. And there were a couple of those in the log files.
I spent the next hour updating some parts of the system, applying some patches (you won't find any un-patched security holes on the systems I maintain), and making some minor configuration changes. I also loaded my back door programs, along with some mail forwarding commands to route my mail to some of my mail drops. I also installed a mail drop account on this computer; actually, five of them. It was good to have some backups. I secured those mail drops with encrypted password protection, along with a mail access overseer that would watch for unauthorized access to the mail drops. The overseer would ensure that only one of my back door user accounts would be allowed access into those mail drops. If anyone else tried to get into the accounts, the overseer would immediately double-encrypt the mail and move it to a different account. The original mail file would be overwritten fully with random numbers.
Besides, the messages in those accounts would just be a series of encoded IP addresses, along with a time stamp. I'd use those IP addresses to help me determine where those viral packets were coming from.
I did some further testing of the back door programs to make sure they were working properly. I logged in as a back door user, and performed some commands, then logged in as my normal root user. I then looked at the various log files, and there was no indication that any commands had been executed by my back door user account. So the stealth logging program was performing as designed.
I did some final checking of the system, a bit of user maintenance, and checked out the error logs. I found nothing out of the ordinary; everything was as it should be. I logged off the system, cleaned up the area a bit, and left the building after a short status report to the boss (and to drop off my bill, which they would process and send me a check). By that time, it was almost 1:00pm, so I stopped by Fannie Annie's for a roast beef sandwich and a big glass of Mug root beer, and then went to my 2:30 appointment.