In this 21st century version of the "Gunfight at the O.K. Corral," two
computer wizards engage in the kind of high-tech combat that only a
hacker could love. Wyatt Gillette, a cybergenius who's never used his
phenomenal talent for evil, is sitting in a California jail doing time
for a few harmless computer capers when he gets a temporary reprieve--a
chance to help the Computer Crimes Unit of the state police nail a
cracker (a criminally inclined hacker) called Phate who's using his
ingenious program, Trapdoor, to lure innocent victims to their death by
infiltrating their computers. Gillette and Phate were once the kings of
cyberspace--the Blue Nowhere of the title--but Phate has gone way past
the mischievous electronic pranks they once pulled and crossed over to
the dark side. While Trapdoor can hack its way into any computer, it's
Phate's skill at "social engineering" as well as his remarkable coding
ability that makes him such a menace to society. As Wyatt explains to
the policeman who springs him from prison so that he can find and stop
Phate before he kills again, "It means conning somebody, pretending
you're someone you're not. Hackers do it to get access to data bases
and phone lines and pass codes. The more facts about somebody you can
feed back to them, the more they believe you and the more they'll do
what you want them to."In the blue nowhere, appearances are deceiving,
and the most powerful can lose their wealth, their minds, their lives
with a hacker's touch of a button.
