How to be a Decker including Dumb Matrix Tricks
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- 7 minutes read - 1483 wordsBooks Used in this article.
When you have a decker in the group, a lot of people miss some golden opportunities. Deckers can add great resources outside of opening security doors and stopping poison gas from geeking your team. Part of it is realizing how much cyber crime your decker can do for you. This usually comes in the form of a few common decking activites.
Decker Actions
Decking is an art form. There are a few things every decker needs to know how to do. These are a good starting point!
Matrix Searching
Almost everything important enough to remember is recorded on the matrix. When you need to know it, you just need to know where to look. In Matrix 3 (pg 129), the discussion begins with where to search. One of the most common things folks miss as a decker is buying Databases for research as contacts!
Lone Star Criminal Archives
Lone Star keeps extensive records for people they arrest or interact with. Some of these are sealed, some of them become public record. Lone Star also keeps a extensive informant networks, surveillance photos, psychological profiles, vehicle registration records, phone tap recordings, medical histories and so on. Lone Star restricts access to this database to a limited pool of clientele and charges exorbitant fees for search requests. Most shadowrunners will have to bribe someone to gain access to these archives, so double the usual contact upkeep costs for this database. Bribes make the shadows go round.
City Records
In every crime movie the crooks get their hands on the blueprints to the building. Where does that happen? It happens in City Hall, City Records! Movies like Sneakers, this is pivotal to the final sneak. Shadowrun often has these moments, let your decker be the hero that recovers it.
Memory Well
The Memory Well archives contain public postings from an extensive range of newsgroups, mailing lists, newsfeeds, e-zines, message boards and chat rooms. This is like Reddit and the Wayback Machine slammed together. A great place to find old new posts. One of the classics of Shadowrun is the street prophet. Max Headroom has a great representation of those hard on the street reporters. This is what Shadowbeat was all about!
Dun & Bradstreet’s Index
When it comes to the shell games that corps use to hide their trail, everything has to be recorded some place. Dun and Bradstreet have been around since the early 1800s and in general is the most common place people go to research companies and the likes. This is alive and well in the 2060s. Some of the individual entries also include the corp’s contact info, number of employees, founding date, sales volume, main products or services, primary accounts and the names of top executives,
Department of Motor Vehicles
A nightmare for some, a treasure trove for others. Records can include the name, SIN, date of birth, photo, vision correction and fingerprint of all legally registered drivers in the state. DMV records also include vehicle registrations and SINs, driving histories and occupational licensing data (auto dealers, junkyards and so on).
Phone Calls
The Commlink utility is one of the most useful and underrated program a decker can own. While logged into an RTG, a decker can start, tap and reroute comm calls. Something folks forgot is that when you make a phone call, it’s routed through the Matrix. Along with creating fake MSP accounts (more in Information Falsification below), when you need to make a call, and you NEED that call not to come back to you. You need to hire a decker.
When a phone call is made, the call itself starts in the LTG of provider service (Think AT&T, Verizon, but in this case it might be Ares, Renraku or who knows!). After that, it moves into the RTG that LTG is connected too in order to reach out to the callers LTG. The phone call itself can be tapped and recorded, cut off, redirected to the wrong party, etc. All of this is trivial for a decker worth their salt (It’s Commlink vs Index or Control depending on if you’re looking or effecting the call). If however a Decker made the Commlink patch (such as grabbing your face’s Commlink number then making the call from it for them.), then all Commlink tests made to sniff on the call have to go through the decker in question. This is detailed on pg. 216 of SR3.
Information Falsification and Boosting Matrix Services
Every legal user of the Matrix has an account with a Matrix Service Provider (MSP). This is the basis for how people are connected to the Matrix. This is the account where you get your email, phone number, etc. You also register your serial numbers of your phone, pagers, etc that you want to connect to this account. All of these devices can be reached by a “CommCode”. This is an email and phone number rolled altogether.
Creating fake accounts
When you need to get a drop account for business or need something that can’t be traced back to you. You need a Fake MSP. This starts with hacking the local Telco (Orange-Average systems). Then you must make a successful Locate File operation to find the account listings and a Validate Passcode operation to input the new account passcode. If the decker wants to link the account to a jackpoint (A phone, cyberterminal, page, etc) and activate it, you must also make a Control Slave operation. This gives you a shiny new passcode and MSP account you can use until its shutdown for lack of payment. Though even that can be undone if you make a successful Edit File operation monthly or Yearly to spoof payment information.
Boosting Subscriptions
When the team needs to blow off steam or just needs to see the big game, your decker can come to the rescue to crack that channel subscription or edit their account to include this fine Pay Per View entertainment! Typically, these systems are Green-Hard (Legit systems with good security) or Orange-Easy systems (sleazy quick to setup systems for often barely legal content).
Overwatch
When it comes to playing a decker, nothing is quite as iconic as running overwatch for your team. This is where the real fun gets set. You need to either hack your way into the system from the Matrix (Which in and of itself requires you to learn the SAN’s LTG and might wrack up some security tally). An alternative is to skip passed all of that and connect internally. Often large or dangerous systems have a choke point or REALLY nasty system to keep lookie lous out of the system. Once you are in the system, your team and make a commcall to the decker in order to keep them in the loop for opening
Decking Locations
Where you connect from is one of the great questions of decking. Connecting from home is of course very easy and convenient, while being the most dangerous thing you can do. Breaking in is the most dangerous physically, but when it comes to being traced, few system ops feel more powerless than when they track down the connection and its coming from inside the house. Instead of some geeks house they can send to the cops too.
Finally, not every decker NEEDS to get into the building. However, someone who knows how to splice a matrix line does. Radio controlled (what the common man knows as Wireless) data line taps allow a decker to be near (withing a few kilometers really, depending on the device rating of the wireless dataline tap) hidden away with a power source for his deck. This gives you the traditional hacker in the nondescript van scene you’ve always been waiting for. If you want some more information or understanding on this. Do some research on “Rogue Devices”.
For GMs, this also gives you excellent ghost stories of vans with piled up parking tickets which when finally broken into, you can find a dead decker who hit IC they just couldn’t hack.
Obvious Connection Places
Wifi routers and connection points, any computer setup for people to work at, server wracks, etc. There are plenty of things to connect too if you need a way in. Outside cameras are good too. Crawl over the roof and splice your way into the camera from behind!
Crazy and Fun Locations
Anything that feeds something back to the Matrix is open to a deckers attack. Vending machines, copy machines, cameras, system monitored panels, fire alarms, etc. All of it is routed in some capacity. That means if you can get to it, then you can hack from it. It does potentially increase the TNs while using that device to hack from, but posing as a copier repair guy means you can really get into the guts of something.