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was careful not to act like a script kiddie. Avoided using acronyms or lame ‘l33t sp3ak’. They made it clear – the ten other members of the closed group – that I was a visitor. Angel clarified the situation.
    unless you pass a test
    You’d think initiations would be too much of a cliché but clearly hackers share a mindset with street gangs. I had no idea what the geek equivalent of demanding you murder a rival gang member was …
    like what?    – I wrote.
    we’ll have to come up with something LTS
    End of subject, because they had something else to talk about. Angel’s group was building a
botnet
.
    I’ve got 3832 bots and counting    – that was Expendable.
    It takes time to get enough bots to launch a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service). It’s a hacker’s brute force way of paralysing a site. Anything can be taken down, from Vodafone – no top-ups, no phone buying, to Man United – no ticket sales, no new, shiny strip for your football-crazy son’s birthday. Basically you get Mrs Naïve Computer User to open an attachment, like a YouTube video with the title ‘The Dramatic Moment When …’ but there’s a virus in the link, or you get them to visit an infected website. Either way, hey presto, their computer is part of the botnet. Repeat this twenty thousand times and you’ve got yourself a decent size botnet. When the botmaster activates thevirus, whatever site he’s targeted goes kaput! It’s the virtual equivalent of trying to get all the passengers on the
Titanic
into the lifeboats.
    You need to bring 5000   – Angel.
    I have over 5000    – Anaconda.
    good job    – Angel.
    do I get my points?    – Anaconda.
    yep    – Angel.
    Anaconda disappeared at that point.
    Seemed like collecting 5,000 bots might be my ‘initiation’.
    who’s the target?    – I typed.
    wait and see    – Angel liked to be in control.
    It didn’t stop the others discussing who deserved a DDoS. I wasn’t that interested so while they dissed eBay, Facebook, Amazon, Ask.fm … I played a few rounds of
Counter Strike
on my computer – they’ve got an anti-cheat system that’s fun to dodge.
    When Angel left the channel, I did too. I had a poke around GCHQ, ‘Government Communications Headquarters – keeping our society safe and successful in the internet age’, wondering how easy it might be to find my way inside.
    I’ve got no idea when I went to bed but I remember thinking, maybe for the first time, that a group of hackers could cripple anything – the National Grid, the cooling towers in a nuclear plant, air-traffic control. I should have been terrified by the prospect, but I think, if I felt anything, it was probably excitement.

12
    By ten o’clock Sunday morning I was on a coach heading for a foreign country where every sentence goes up at the end. I sat on my own near the front. The back was noisy, and I wanted to sleep. It was a three-hour journey with one loo stop in the middle – that was when my peace was interrupted.
    ‘Can I sit here?’ said Ruby – a girl from the other class that I had never looked at, spoken to or sold stolen credit to.
    ‘Sure,’ I said.
    ‘I feel a bit sick.’
    I budged right over and pressed myself against the window. Just kidding!
    ‘Don’t worry, I’ll aim for the aisle,’ she said.
    ‘Make sure you do.’
    We sat in silence.
    ‘Look! A red kite,’ she said, leaning across me and pointing.
    ‘Sure it’s not a blackbird?’ I said, squinting. That was all it took to get us chatting.
    ‘I’m going to work outside – something to do withwildlife, and never ever wear a suit. What about you?’
    I shrugged. But as her face seemed to want an answer I said, ‘Game developer, maybe.’
    ‘You mean computer games?’
    ‘Well, I don’t mean Monopoly.’
    ‘I like Monopoly,’ she said.
    We really had nothing in common. That didn’t stop us talking all the way to Cardigan Bay. We covered immigration, Britain’s Got Talent, coursework