Interest Piqued: The Fire Is Started

Saul soon graduated high school, with only mediocre grades and a limited interest in continuing on to college. But with the help of a school counselor who believed in Saul s ability, he was able to apply for the appropriate student grants and began his first semester at the local community college.

College wasn t too much different for Saul until he met a friend by the name of Beaker in a C++ programming course. The two were eventually paired up for a project by the instructor. They soon became close friends , and when Beaker eventually invited Saul to a local hacker meeting, it piqued his curiosity and he decided to see what it was all about. That first meeting was the spark that got Saul started on wireless security. It was called wardriving, and it fascinated him. The idea of these invisible packets flying over everyone s heads, constantly and at incredible speeds, was enough to give birth to his fascination with the medium. Saul began researching wireless networking and soon had his own network at home. Okay, so it wasn t that big of a deal at the time. Lots of people were getting into wireless networking. In the end, maybe it was the simple fact that Saul had indeed inherited his parent s addictive behavior.

About six months after this first meeting, Saul had become the resident expert on the topic, already writing several applications for wardriving, area mapping, and encryption key cracking programs. He had also created the largest database in the city of all known access points, and had a habit of taking advantage of the free wireless access throughout the various parts of town. His Web site served as Saul s journal, cataloging all of his activities, notes, and discoveries. Though he didn t know it at the time, it would also serve as the initial point of attraction for an unknown man who desperately needed someone with Saul s skills in wireless networking.

One day the e-mails started arriving. Someone, his name unknown to Saul, had been monitoring the hacking group and watching Saul s progress on the Web site. The e- mails came in with seemingly corrupt headers and commented on the skill with which Saul understood the wireless world. Each and every reply that Saul sent back would come back with a User Unknown error.