CHAPTER
25
WHEN DEVINE GOT BACK TO the house, Valentine was waiting for him in the living room, excitement and concern competing for equal time on his features.
“What’s up, Will?”
“Dude, the email?”
“What about it? Did you find out who sent it?”
“No. It’s untraceable.”
“Well, thanks for trying. It’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen. I mean, it doesn’t even look like an email address.”
“No, Travis, is not that easy. I mean, I could not trace it. People I work with, they cannot trace it, either. At first, I think it is some kind of weird spoofing email or maybe hexadecimal.”
“What?” exclaimed Devine.
“Hexadecimal. A base system to simplify binary language computers use. But I dig deeper and it is not that either.”
“Okay, but people send anonymous emails all the time,” said Devine. “Don’t they?”
“There are many ways to sending such messages on internet,” said Valentine. “Cheap, not so cheap, hard, not so hard.”
Devine leaned against the wall. “You’re going to need to explain that.”
“New phone number, preferably burner or prepaid with cash or cloned credit card, fake name and info, new email account, Hotmail, Gmail. Different browser, use incognito mode, and off goes mail. Russia has Yandex webmail, no phone verification needed. Hotmail and Gmail require phone number, but that is bypassed with burner phone. Incognito mode still has location IP address sent with email. But this email has none of that.”
“So then it’s untraceable, you mean?”
“Not if person you send it to has resources. And by being cheap you create big problem.”
“What are the more expensive and better ways?”
“Use special service to do just what you want, send anonymous email. Built-in premier encryption, spoofed IP address, auto deletion from whatever server is used, password protect, no personal info required. Good shit like that.”
“Who does that?” asked Devine.
“Many platforms do proxy email. Some legit and reputable, others not so much. They all do that and do it good. Or you can jump over them and use VPN platform. But don’t do free service, they sell data to third party. Use premium service and your IP address goes poof.”
“Well, whoever sent that email must have used one of those services or the VPN method.”
When Devine eyed the Russian, the man seemed more serious than Devine had ever seen him. Gone was the pizza-and-beer caricature of a Russian hacker.
“Even with that, you can’t hide the computer’s MAC address. Every device has MAC address attached to network card. Is like fingerprint.”
“But this one doesn’t?”
“I think maybe they spoof address, make it invisible.”
“I thought you said it wasn’t a spoofing email?”
“Does not matter. We can break those systems, no matter which method used,” he said quite confidently. “No matter if MAC address spoofed. That is what we do! But this email was not sent on one of those platforms. It could not be. It has none of protocols required to send message over broadband, including an IP, or Internet Protocol, address.”
“So I guess it has to have all that stuff?”
“Of course, Travis, get with fuckin’ program.” Valentine sighed and sat back on the couch. “When you send email, sender and recipient IP addresses are in packet. Then it is directed to gateway or router. Then on to higher-level network. It does this over and over, until it gets to destination email address.”