(click once …then click again to enlarge) Image: Mashabe/Flickr/Marcopako

Taken from the first chapter of Memories with Maya:

A corporate deal was going down, and I wanted in on it.

I switched to the remote access app on my cellphone, and my laptop’s screen showed up. Thirty-five connections already.

I nuked them all.

The woman and the two men had their laptops out. I looked at the clients beginning to reconnect to the Copa Cabbana2 network.

It was the coffee shop’s network I was spoofing. I scrolled through the list of clients connected and scanned the area. There were only four people with laptops, and the other three didn’t look like a Cheryl. So the hot business woman had a name: Cheryl PC. I’d stick with only her first name. The other connections were from cellphones and digital slates.

I could tell laptops from slates and phones by the operating systems showing up as people clicked through the ads to access the free Internet service. I made decent money running a free wireless access point in public places, routing people through a landing page that generated advertising revenue for me.

The earnings more than made up for the monthly data package I was paying for. But that was not where the big money was. One laptop came up as Magnus HP. I looked around. The only person who looked Magnus enough was the man in the blue blazer. People like Cheryl and Magnus were my gold mines.

I swiped through the tabs on the app to access the key-logger. The sniffer was running fine. A stream of possible user names and passwords were filling the columns.

Not everyone used encrypted traffic on public networks; it was a shame. —Memories with Maya