Redirecting Comms Options

[Abbandon]

Isnt there/shouldnt there be a way to totally redirect the end point of a communication? It happens all the time in the movies where the bad guys trys to call somebody and he ends up talking to the hacker instead. Now sure you can intercept those calls and even block and insert stuff but that will most likely cause a whole hell of a lot of suspician.

[Nightwalker450]

Could probably do a single Spoof to redirect when the call comes through. (Extended) Threshold based on firewall of the calling party. If you can get it in one pass, then the call never goes through, if you can get it in a single turn, then the receiver won't have time to answer unless he was running VR as well. Longer than that you'll be interrupting the call. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

[deek]

I'd allow this, but the hack would need to be done up front, not on the fly. If the hacker sets up the opponents comm to redirect outbound/inbound calls, then I'd let him do it, but it may take some time.

[Prime Mover]

It would really depend on were your trying to redirect it from and how say a comm is connecting to the node its communicating with. If comm is sending to a 3rd party tower before reaching node its communicating with then sure why not. If its a comm to comm connection you'd have to hack either the sender or the receiver.

[Heath Robinson]

There are two basic ways to handle this but their implementations can vary depending on how invasive and how quickly you need to pull this off. Whilst I know little about the actual system for handling communications over the wireless matrix in SR4 (and I don't think a technical specification has been published), I can provide methods that should work based on sensible assumptions about how it should work.

The first way is to trick the transmission to terminate at your commlink by spoofing the intended destination and by dint of being closer to the sender than the actual recipient. The second is to get the recipient to relay it to your commlink instead of letting the user see it. These are not mutually exclusive.

Depending on how many assets you have lying around, you can deploy a number of spoofers and relay any intercepted communications to your commlink of choice. You could instead push a "patch" to the target's commlink that asks you if you want to relay an incoming call to a commlink of your choice, with caller ID, dynamic redirection and everything! You can shadow the endpoint and rely on faster repsonse or better signal to spoof the call instead. The worst choice is just to rely on spoofing his commlink and hope the call catches you first, but sometimes you don't have the skills or gear to make use of a better choice. One way to guarantee you'll get his calls is to prevent the commlink you're spoofing from receiving any signals whatsoever by frying the aerial or jamming it temporarily.

The way to think about the system is that it basically negotiates a path to the terminus by asking all the nodes nearby if they happen to know where a particular commlink is; they'll look up the commlink's network identifier/address in their routing table and respond to indicate that it has information of a particular recency and with a certain degree of seperation from the target. The transmitter/relayer will determine which has the most up to date information or least number of "hops" (or relays) to reach the intended destination and send it to them. This is done for each small part of the stream that contains the audio, though most nodes will keep recently used routing table fragments in their caches to expedite streaming. Spoofing the terminus means you'll identify yourself as the endpoint and get routed the call instead of the real one, you need to be "closer" or at least better connected than the real endpoint or else it'll get to it anyway because it'll be the faster choice. If you're near to the intended endpoint, you'll have to respond before it and request encrypted transport using one of your keys to ensure that it can't also receive the stream, though it might note that it was being spoofed and flash a warning.

Note: Intercepting is a different kind of attack on the system that would allow you to bug the call but not take the call instead of him.

Disclaimer: This is all based on my education in Comp Sci, the actual game terms and mechanics used for these attacks may be different.

[kzt]

And the best part is that thanks to the wonders of the edit program and decrypt there is no way to tell that they are not talking to the party their thought they called. So is that your fixer calling, or the Star?

[kanislatrans]

I always assume communications are being intercepted. so I randomly make phone calls to random numbers and speak in nonsence code like" Hello, the brown bear likes his ravioli cold" and then hang up. that way any one listening has to wade through all the useless stuff to get my real calls. ( have I mentioned I'm really, really paranoid?) (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wobble.gif) (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wobble.gif)