comStar Firewall alert - PhaseThrough

hacker’s handbook . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
92
> Well, it is hacking a node. A node where the spider usually has
his attention divided between a couple dozen devices, but a node
all the same.
> Pistons
Jacking Biodrones and cyborgs
While the so-called biodrones and cyborgs aren’t things the
average shadowrunner is likely to run into, most riggers are at least
aware of them. Both of these “drones” (and I use the term loosely)
are rigged, so it follows that they can both be jacked. The easiest
way to jack a biodrone is to intercept the traffic between it and its
handler, and then spoof commands and jam it to prevent it from
receiving any further orders.
> Are you speaking from experience, or is this all theoretical?
Because I think most people would notice if they lost a biodrone,
and even then you’d have to stop jamming it at some point to give
the thing more commands.
> Rigger X
> I did it once as I described it—waited for the thing to get out of
its controller’s range and then did some more serious hacking to
erase the owner’s traces. I think certain interfaces might make the
biodrone more resistant to hacking, but I haven’t confirmed that.
> Pistons
You can also—though I don’t recommend this—try to hack
the biodrone’s implants directly and work your way up to taking
control of it from there, but I don’t know many people that want
to get within three meters of an active biodrone.
Cyborgs may also be jacked, but in this case the rigger is setting
their abilities against a skilled hacker. As a cyborg is little more than
a drone with an integral rigger, it becomes straight-up cybercombat
in many cases. The obvious point of entry is the cyborg’s integral
commlink—perfect for sending spoofed commands or hacking the
cyborg’s drone body wirelessly, which you can be damn sure the
cyborg is going to resist. In the direst situations, I imagine a cyborg
could turn off its commlink, but I’ve never heard of that happening.
You could also try and jack a cyborg body during its maintenance
downtime, though your timing would have to be pretty exact, and
the security on cyborg facilities is nothing to sneeze at.
Jamming on the fly
Sometimes you just don’t have the right tool for the job, and
you have to do the best you can with what’s at hand. Jamming on
the fly is when you really really need a jammer and you don’t have
one—but you do have a commlink, or a radio, or something that
you can program to spit noise into the other rigger’s bandwidth.
Like most techniques, jamming on the fly is somewhere between
a science and an art; more often than not it’s a last-ditch effort in a
non-ideal situation, and by definition you’re not going to be using
the preferred equipment to get it done.
> Can be effective, though. I once took a radio station in Kentucky
hostage for thirty minutes to jam the comms on a military base three
klicks away. They liked me so much they asked me to do a regular show,
but I had to make my getaway before the black copters came for me.
> Kane
eMp An electromagnetic pulse (EMP) is a magnetic field in an
intense state of flux traveling from a central point; when the field
passes through an electronic device (like a power system or the
lasers that read your optical chips), this can produce extreme
voltages and dangerous currents that can burn out components
or damage hardware.
The popular conception of an electromagnetic pulse as an
unstoppable ultra-weapon that can send metahumanity back to
the dark ages of steam power and internal combustion engines
are mostly the product of the media. Optical electronic devices
are mostly immune to EMPs, and our protein and optical storage
media is completely able to withstand them. Don’t believe the sim
that the huge EMP using the Eiffel Tower as an antenna is going to
wipe every commlink and datachip in France. At the very worst,
it’ll probably just fry the power linkages or the antenna, and you
can swap those parts right out.
EMPs are generally the result of certain weapons and devices,
like nukes, that you’re not going to have to deal with. Or
if you do have to deal with the big bombs, the EMP is slightly
less important than the megadose of radiation, heat, and oh yeah
that shockwave that’s about to pummel you. Devices that just
produce an EMP and nothing else are a lot more popular than
nukes these days, though they’re still covered by several multinational
and multicorporate agreements. Runners may encounter
EMPs through EMP grenades, HERF weapons, thunderbirds,
or the Pulse spell.
Just to make it clear, you’re never going to see an EMP.
They aren’t flashes of light or slowly expanding spherical
energy waves like you see in anime. An EMP lasts for all of
about a second, is completely invisible, and unless you’ve got
cyberware you probably won’t even feel it. What you can bank
on is that it will completely disrupt all wireless and radio communication
for a brief moment, and it can burn out unshielded
electronics—not optical electronics, but the parts with actual
bits of metal.
> I heard that if you have a cortex bomb and you’re dead center when
an EMP goes off, it’ll fry the bomb without going off. Truth or not?
> Black Mamba
> Might work, if the cortex bomb shorts.
> Beaker
> Then again, the cascading voltages and currents caused by the
EMP might set off the explosive, or the cortex bomb might go off at
the cessation of a signal, in which case it’s been nice knowing you.
However, most cortex bombs are sufficiently well shielded (especially
if they’re inside a cyberskull) that it’s a non-issue.
> Butch
The best protection from an EMP is inside a Faraday cage—
roughly any space that is completely surrounded by solid metal
or a metal wire mesh. I hear tell some corps and military groups
are playing around with nanotech suits that work as well, but I’ve
never seen or heard of one working.
Unwired
Simon Wentworth (order #1132857) 9