BSOFH: Catering to a niche market.
“Oh, there you are, Terry,” I said to the Intern as he peered cautiously around the doorjamb. “Come on in. You’re finally going to learn the secrets of my operation.”
“What IS all this? And why is it even darker than in the sysadmins’ cubes?” he wanted to know.
“This, my boy, is my money-making operation. You don’t really think I can afford all my toys on an ISO salary alone, do you? Not to mention the ongoing bribes.”
He gazed at all the women sitting around with headsets, staring at flatscreens. “You’re running a HELP DESK??”
“Not quite. Meet the one, the ONLY, security phone chat line. And by chat I mean a very special kind of chat. We give the security geeks the one thing they can’t get anywhere else.”
He shivered. “You mean ...?”
“Yes. We talk SECURITY to them. Raw, unadulterated, uninhibited security. We use the words they want to hear. And believe me, they pay a LOT for it.”
I took him by the first pod, where a comely young thing was saying, “Oh yeah, I’m compliant, baby. Want to see my controls?”
“Auditors,” I said, shaking my head and moving him along to the next pod down. “They’re the kinkiest of the lot. Here, this girl is popular these days.”
She had a cloud taxonomy diagram on her screen. “No, no, the cloud can be anything you want it to be. What do you WANT it to be? ... oh yes, we can be private ... very ... private ...”
“What’s that?” asked the Intern, pointing to a symbol pinned up on her cubicle wall. It had a silhoutette of a squirrel with a circle and line over it.
“Never mind. We used to have this one really insistent caller. He was free with the bucks, but the girls were getting a little creeped out.”
From the other end of the room, a voice moaned loudly, “YES! YES! The saturation of vulnerable technology measures the aggregate attack surface available to the exploit code!” The Intern blanched and covered his ears.
“Boss?” said one worker, tugging on my sleeve. “We got a Code Twenex.”
“Okay, don’t panic. Where’s Mike?”
“He’s on break.”
“Tell Pete to stop tweeting and take the call. He’ll do well enough.” I turned back to the puzzled Intern. “We got a woman on the line. It’s rare, but it happens. I charge ‘em double, though. Our boys tend to be exhausted after just one 15-minute session.”
“I just can’t believe you’re making money with this,” the Intern said. “Isn’t this ... well ... illicit? I mean, it’s got to be wrong somehow.”
“Why?” I replied. “It isn’t cheating unless you actually USE the exploit.”
“No, I mean, don’t they have families?”
“Look, we provide a valuable service here. Not everyone can go to a conference as often as they need to. This way they can let off steam, get it out of their system, and go home and pay real attention to their loved ones. Our clients report that they’re much less likely to sneak a look at their BlackBerry, read Liquidmatrix, or talk about responsible disclosure in their sleep. Their home life is BETTER, not worse. One woman even called to thank us, to say she finally could stop role-playing DNS zone transfers.”
“Okay, THAT was TMI.” The Intern looked faintly disgusted. “Can I go back to GRC console hacking now? This is all making me feel a bit dirty.”
“Yeah, go ahead, kid,” I laughed. “You’re not old enough to appreciate the hard-core stuff yet. Just keep this on the down-low, okay?”
“Sure,” he said hurriedly as he fumbled for the door. I popped another diet Mountain Dew and relaxed on the velvet-covered couch. The NIST folks would be getting out of session soon and then we were going to be REALLY busy.
Thanks to Simon Travaglia, as always.
on 11/23 at 06:40 AM:
on 11/23 at 08:52 AM:
on 12/01 at 07:43 PM:
Nice! (and/or creepy)
Just a bug report about your RSS feed, it doesn’t have line breaks. Impossible to read!