Lucy did. The C prompt came back with the message “No files found.” We tried again. We tried looking for a file called “Synonyms” and still had no luck. Then she got the idea of trying to find any file with the extension “SQL” because ordinarily that was the extension for any file containing SQL commands, commands such as the ones used to create public synonyms on the office data tables. Scores of file names rolled up the screen. One caught our attention. It was called “Public.SQL.”
Lucy opened the file and we watched it roll past. My excitement was equaled by my dismay. It contained the commands Margaret wrote and executed long ago when she created public synonyms for all of the tables she created in the office data base— commands like CREATE PUBLIC SYNONYM CASE FOR DEEP. CASE. I was not a computer programmer. I’d heard of public synonyms but was not entirely sure what they were.
Lucy was flipping through a manual. She got to the section on public synonyms and confidently volunteered, “See, it’s neat. When you create a table, you have to create it under a user name and password.” She looked up at me, her eyes bright behind her thick glasses.
“Okay,” I said. “That makes sense.”
“So if your user name is ’Auntie’ and your password is ’Kay,’ then when you create a table called ’Games’ or something, the name the computer gives it is really ’Auntie Games.’ It attaches the table name to the user name it was created under. If you don’t want to bother typing in ’Auntie Games’ every time you want to get into the table, you create a public synonym. You type the command CREATE PUBLIC SYNONYM GAMES FOR AUNTIE.GAMES. It sort of renames the table so it’s just called ’Games.’ ”
I stared at the long list of commands on the screen, a list revealing every table in the OCME computer, a list revealing the DBA user name each table was created under.
I puzzled, “But even if someone saw this file, Lucy, he wouldn’t know the password. Only the DBA user name is listed, and you can’t get into a table, such as our case table, without knowing the password.”
“Wanna bet?” Her fingers were poised over the keys. “If you know the DBA user name, you can change the password, make it anything you want and then you can get in. The computer doesn’t care. It lets you change passwords anytime you want without messing up your programs or anything. People like to change their passwords for security reasons.”
“So you could take the user name ’Deep’ and assign it a new password and get into our data?”
She nodded.
“Show me.”
She looked at me with uncertainty. “But you told me not to ever go into your office data base.”
“I’m making an exception this one time.”
“And if I give ’Deep’ a new password, Auntie Kay, it will get rid of the old one. The old one won’t be there anymore. It won’t work.”
I was jolted by the memory of what Margaret mentioned when we first discovered someone tried to pull up Lori Petersen’s case: something about the DBA password not working, causing her to have to connect the DBA grant again.
“The old password won’t work anymore because it’s been replaced by the new one I made up. So you can’t log on with the old one.” Lucy glanced furtively at me. “But I was going to fix it.”
“Fix it?” I was barely listening.
“Your computer here. Your old password won’t work anymore because I changed it to get into SQL. But I was going to fix it, you know, I promise.”
“Later,” I quickly said. “You can fix it later. I want you to show me exactly how someone could get in.”
I was trying to make sense of it. It seemed likely, I decided, that the person who got into the OCME data base knew enough about it to realize he could create a new password for the user name found in the Public.SQL file. But he didn’t realize that in doing so he would invalidate the old password, preventing us from getting in the next time we tried. Of course we would notice that. Of course we would wonder about it, and the idea the echo might be on and echoing his commands on the screen apparently didn’t occur to him either. The break-in had to have been a onetime event!
If the person had broken in before, even if the echo was off, we would have known because Margaret would have discovered the password “Throat” no longer worked. Why?
Why did this person break in and try to pull up Lori Petersen’s case?
Lucy’s fingers were clicking away on the keyboard. “See,” she was saying, “pretend I’m the bad guy trying to break in. Here’s how I do it.”