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Hacker on the Run (Fiction)

Posted: April 24th, 2010, 4:48 pm
by Flack
About a year ago I had three unrelated people all ask me if I had ever considered writing fiction. Actually, one of them was my doctor, who said, "it's too bad you don't write fiction, because that's where the money's at." So, I decided to try my hand at it.

This project is called "Hacker on the Run" -- that's not the title, but that was the idea. The general plot involved a guy who was a "good" white hat hacker, who got caught up in a hacker battle and ended up going on the lamb. Throughout the book the guy would have to use his hacker skills to avoid being captured and eventually he would have to change his tactics from "defense to offense" in order to crush his attackers.

I would say the odds of this one getting finished are 50/50.

Re: Hacker on the Run (Fiction)

Posted: May 6th, 2010, 11:33 am
by dilbert
Nice: :-)
Who are the Black Hats and why would they need to ------- get --- the white hat??

dilbert

Re: Hacker on the Run (Fiction)

Posted: May 6th, 2010, 11:45 am
by Flack
I wrote about 1/3 of this book, stopped, then started over and wrote about 1/100th of it.

In the first version, the good hacker was a network administrator at a hospital and the bad hackers attacked his network. In the ensuing "network battle", the bad hackers cut power to the hospital which turned off the ICU machines and a patient died. At that point the FBI came after the white hacker, and that's why he went on the run. The reason I stopped this draft was because the white hacker went on the run alone and after two chapters with no dialog I realized I had messed up and didn't know how to recover.

The second version was similar, except the white hacker had a gray hat hacker friend. The two of them went on the run together, which gave me an excuse to write dialog. The rest of the story was similar. At some point the gray hat hacker was going to get killed, which would be the turning point at which the white hat hacker would go from defense to offense.

There was, of course, a bigger plot that later explained why the black hat hackers were attacking the hospital in the first place. In the first draft, it was more personal (the black hat hackers knew the white hat hacker personally). In the second draft it was more about getting privacy information from the hospital.

Re: Hacker on the Run (Fiction)

Posted: May 16th, 2010, 8:19 pm
by dilbert
Flack wrote: In the second draft it was more about getting privacy information from the hospital.

:shock: Very GOOD! because now you have all this Big Brother H.I.M. (Health Information Management) stuff building out as they say. I see it as a tangle of government/hospital types that wants to run IT out of the business of running the computer network. hmmmmmm........ :ugeek:

Re: Hacker on the Run (Fiction)

Posted: May 16th, 2010, 8:41 pm
by Flack
That was kind of it, actually. In one outline, a foreign government was behind the attacks, but I never really came up with a good motive. In another outline, it was our own government behind the attacks, with the purpose of exposing the data breach so that they could take over the healthcare IT industry. I wasn't sure if it made sense or not so I never really developed it past that. I suppose the idea could be that a senator or somebody had share in a government-approved IT entity that would run healthcare, but, that scenario is barely fiction these days. :)

Re: Hacker on the Run (Fiction)

Posted: May 16th, 2010, 8:58 pm
by dilbert
Flack wrote:That was kind of it, actually. ......., but, that scenario is barely fiction these days. :)

:lol: :lol:

Re: Hacker on the Run (Fiction)

Posted: November 6th, 2010, 10:44 am
by Flack
I am going to try and finish this for NaNoWriMo.

Re: Hacker on the Run (Fiction)

Posted: November 7th, 2010, 5:48 pm
by Felix
Good luck! You can do it!