“In case you’ve forgotten, in its truest form, social engineering is coercing or tricking employees of a firm into giving away their network access.” I tried to calm him down. “I’m not after passwords.”
“Just what are you after?”
“Information, I guess.”
“Well then, I stand corrected.” Gavin sat back, raising his hands, palms out. “You’re not using Sandy for social engineering, you’re using her for espionage.”
My cheeks burned. He was right, of course.
“Does she know? Does she have any idea what kind of people you have her chatting with?”
I had no answer. I wasn’t even sure, myself.
“Whistler, it’s got to be Whistler… definitely. The best snow and the après ski parties are great.” Sandy filled the mug on her desk then handed me the coffee pot. “And you boss? Where are you hitting the slopes this Christmas?”
My mind wasn’t on skiing. I derailed the conversation by bringing up Anna Ku Klux Klan and the email correspondence.
She didn’t miss a beat. “It’s going great. I think she’s totally for real and getting to know her is interesting.”
That was a surprise. “You’re getting to know her?”
“Sure, she’s really open and we’ve been chatting about a lot of stuff.”
“Geeze Sandy, I haven’t been following, and you’re running a conversation with this…” I looked for the right word, “…subject.”
“She’s not a subject, Jess. She’s a woman, a person. It sounds like you should go through the correspondence yourself.”
In the Russian webmail account I found an astonishing twenty seven emails from Anna and about half that number from Sandy. All this back and forth letter writing had taken place in little more than a couple of weeks. It simply knocked my socks off.
Anna’s letters were in English. Her syntax, grammar and spelling made them almost unintelligible, but she seemed to me, genuine. I hadn’t become suspicious, reading this subject’s letters, and I was surprisingly drawn in by what Anna had to say. The letter writer was either truly innocent or really good at this sort of deception.
Sandy’s letters were predictable and cautious. I saw she was trying to draw Anna out with amateur personal questions. Sandy’s replies revealed nothing about herself. It looked like she’d tossed in just enough pithy commentary to things Anna revealed to keep her writing back. I couldn’t shake the feeling that Anna was genuine, and I had to consciously block a feeling of false empathy for a subject I had never met and who may very well turn out to be a syndicate plant.
One of the emails Anna sent had six attached photographs of various tourist sites in central Turkey. Anna described each as a place she had visited with her boyfriend while on an arranged tour from Russia. No big deal, but my jaw dropped, reading that she was expected to marry the guy. She felt trapped, writing, it didn’t matter to anyone else that she hated him. It was hard to imagine someone revealing something that intimate to a total stranger.
Sandy had ignored the hated boyfriend statement and commented on the postcard-like quality of the scenic snapshots. In a postscript she asked Anna why she hadn’t sent any photos of herself.
I shoved off from my desk and coasted backwards in my office chair. “Sandy, have you been using machine translation with Anna KKK?” I wanted to know if it was giving Anna’s letters an unintentional emotional slant.
“Translation? Haven’t used it since the democracy blog.” Sandy said, still sitting at her desk. “When I was using machine translation she made fun of my Russian and suggested we correspond in English.”
“Anna speaks English?”
“If you call that English. Maybe she’s using machine translation.” Sandy said.
“Nope,” I office-chair surfed back to my desk and looked over Anna’s replies, “This is the real McCoy. Machine translation wouldn’t be this full of spelling errors.” Sure, someone with a very rudimentary knowledge of English could modify occasional words from a translation program. It might fool a human reader into thinking it was just bad English, but this was different, too inconsistent, and way too heartfelt to be fake.
By the time I was reading Anna’s last letter I was hooked and intrigued by the writer of those awkward missives. It was definitely time for me to take over the conversation. I assumed my Russian was better than Anna’s English, but if I switched languages mid-conversation, Anna would know there had been a change in personnel. I wasn’t going to take that risk.
In her most recent email, Sandy wrote, “Why only pictures of Turkey and none of you?”
Anna had responded by attaching several photographs of an uncomfortably self-conscious young woman. I assumed the photos were of Anna, herself. She accompanied the photos with an explanation, in limited English, that she was pleased and astonished someone would be more interested in photos of her than of the wonders of Turkey.
Sandy was happy to pass the Anna correspondence on to me and, without being asked, sent a report entitled, Anna Dossier, to my in-box three days later. The Anna Dossier file contained several documents, including the transcripts of their correspondence on the democracy blog, email and a real-time private chat arranged through a sub service of the Russian webmail provider called Acquaintances. What really impressed me was that Sandy had taken it upon herself to include a page she called Anna’s Profile, complete with photos. It concluded with her own impression of Anna backed up with the facts she gleaned from their correspondence. I must admit, it left me wondering whether Sandy knew more about what I did off the company time sheet than she let on.
Shards of colorful glass adorned my driveway and crunched under my bike tires when I got home. More smashed Christmas lights. “Last bloody festive season I put up lights,” I fumed under my breath. When I bought my bungalow in Kitsilano, the neighborhood was just starting to become trendy. Since then, with house flipping and skyrocketing real estate, it had become a hip location for the upwardly mobile and their often angry, bored kids. These children of the me generation, with every gadget imaginable, were bored out of their minds. They filled the void by mimicking their favorite Los Angeles street gang, wrecking stuff, binge drinking and beating the shit out of each other.
I usually followed dinner in front of the TV with a couple of hours of paint stripping, sanding, or other low-impact form of renovation-recreation. That night I was intrigued by Anna, though. I kept thinking there could be something, anything she might divulge that I could spin into a paid mission back to the former USSR, back to the theater of Menchikovskaya’s bloody operations. Leaving the TV going in the background, I opened my laptop, logged onto my work account and reopened the Anna dossier.
From her photos, Anna looked like she could be anywhere from 35 to 40 years old. She was thin, conservatively dressed and rather severe. Her makeup was overdone, out of style, and she sported a very 1980s perm and highlights. I had a hard time believing the note below the photos, “Age: 26.”
The rest of Sandy’s report provided some of Anna’s personal and professional data. Anna was a structural engineer within a large company and had taken a vital part in completing several impressive civil and private building projects. Thoughtfully, Sandy provided photographs and addresses of each project. By the time I got to Sandy’s description of Anna’s family, I was thinking Anna was either a child genius or a liar, hardly a believable lure for someone in my line of work. Reading that Anna’s mother was also an engineer at the firm reminded me this was a family business in the Sicilian sense. Keeping it in the family meant it really wasn’t unusual for a member’s child to go right from university into a position that would normally take years to reach.