Low tier computers are low value, and high tier computers are usually large and virtually unhackable.
So why then would anyone ever attempt to steal a computer in Starfinder? Does your black market contact have a guy capable of making DC 40+ computers checks to unlock the machine? I doubt it. Even if he did, it would probably cost an arm and a leg (maybe literally), thus reducing the overall value of the machine.
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Low tier computers are too low value, and high tier computers are usually too large and virtually unhackable.
....
But the middle tier computers are just right.
Seriously, I think Lady P has some good ideas.
Stealing the computer could be the ultimate denial of service attack.
Or maybe the computer has magic upgrades that let it prophesy.
Are you looking for in-game rationale or just conducting a theoretical cost-benefit analysis?
Sufficiently poor people will steal bread. That's cheaper even than Starfinder tier 1 computers.
There's no market in stealing modern-day servers that I know of. Maybe there isn't in the Pact Worlds either?
Meh, mostly in-game rationale.
Does your black market contact have a guy capable of making DC 40+ computers checks to unlock the machine?
Yes.
To be fair, it may be a small team instead of one person, but yes. A black market contact who has any reason to be involved in illicitly acquired computers should know a person or group that can handle the checks to gain root access. The advantage these black market contacts have is that they can take their time and do it properly rather than hacking under pressure while raiding whatever place it is a computer is being stolen from. This means taking 20, or perhaps just rolling normally until they get a 20 anyway if they have a way to deal with countermeasures. Each attempt is only 6 seconds per tier, so it should normally only take a few minutes if they're going to succeed at all.
Someone who's serious about cracking these things open does need a couple things. They need you to either steal a password or have a way to acquire it themselves; having a Technomancer on a team makes this trivial with Identify, and they are in fact able to root a comm unit on their own; tier 0 is only a base DC of 13, and a CR 1 NPC should have a Master skill modifier of 10. +5 from the password means they crack DC 33 on an 18, so they'll get there eventually. Give them a partner for Aid Another or make them CR 3 and they can root tier 1 (DC 37) computers. CR 3 with two partners roots tier 2 (DC 41). For higher tiers or computers with more security, get better and possibly larger teams.
You might object to having to use a Technomancer, but you can either get any Int focused character with Technomantic Affinity or just substitute three more Aid Another checks for +6 instead of a password's +5. Team effort!
It's not perfect - a Lockout countermeasure will slow this down significantly. But if you're worried about that, you pay more.
What all this means pragmatically is that you're probably not dealing with an individual so much as a small group. There's also not much motive to go swiping comm units, wiping them, and reselling them without some other factors in play. Information is going to be the main motive, and you can get a lot of that just by stealing tier 0 comm units. Just think about everything you might learn if you had free access to someone's cell phone or tablet.
This is more true with higher tier computers. Certainly, you're not stealing that 1000 bulk tier 10 computer without a dedicated adventure, but remember that miniaturization exists. Not every high tier computer is going to be massive and bulky; some people are going to be entirely willing to pay the money to have them shrunken down, maybe even enough to cram into a high-end comm unit.
Corporate secrets? Sure. Security-conscious executive's comm unit? That'll work. Secretive research, or maybe just proprietary? Plausible. Rich people paying more than they need just because they have the money? Take it, and a few more things while you're at it. Just want to ruin someone's life? Grab it and learn all their dirty little secrets.
This approach isn't even that expensive. 100 credits for a level 1 spell Identify and then 2*skill bonus credits per person on the team per day. Even if they charge the price of a full day's work for just a few minutes, which they probably are, that's just 120 credits to get a CR 1 Technomancer to crack someone's comm unit, and still under 200 for the 3 person team headed by a CR 3 NPC to crack up to tier 2.
Conceptually speaking, how would someone aid another while hacking a computer?
Isn't hacking generally a solo endeavor? Even if you have multiple people interfacing with the same computer simultaneously, the computer is likely treating them as different users (meaning one person getting past a firewall doesn't necessarily help the others get past it, for example).
In short, it wouldn't be aid another, it'd be a bunch of people making independent checks.
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Conceptually, how does a character with a +23 Computers modifier take 10 and force a stolen comm unit to acknowledge them as a root user in 6 seconds?
Conceptually, how does an Exocortex help the Mechanic hack faster by contributing its own actions instead of just giving a static boost earlier than level 11, when you get Coordinated Assault? What is it doing that another hacker could not do with some effort, represented by nominally having to roll?
If you need concepts, don't think about it as anything resembling real hacking except superficially; this is a ruleset where your smart phone equivalent can have an arbitrarily large number of memory modules but cannot have both an alarm and a lockout screen without upgrading it. Go full Hollywood technobabble nonsense if you have to. Aid Another? They hook their hacking kits together and the secondary hacker(s) adjust what their computers are doing on the fly to maximize the collective processing power. Or they come in with some alternate plan of attack that's simply meant to compromise some sort of defect in the code and expose a weakness that requires a different computer to properly exploit. Or they bang on their keyboards, and with the collective power of multiple users typing they make more text appear on the monitor and therefore get more hacking done.
Or you can say Aid Another simply isn't applicable to hacking computers, because none of those are satisfactory, though this will mean it becomes nearly impossible to gain root access to a computer of a tier appropriate for your level or CR. At quite a few levels, it will in fact be completely impossible without both a password and a physical key, save for an Envoy getting lucky with their Expertise die, or a Lashunta ExoMech taking advantage of Coordinated Assault. And even that will only succeed by the narrowest of margins at some levels.
Which I suppose is fine if you want your game to be like that, though I am skeptical of that actually being the case.
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Conceptually speaking, how would someone aid another while hacking a computer?
Isn't hacking generally a solo endeavor? Even if you have multiple people interfacing with the same computer simultaneously, the computer is likely treating them as different users (meaning one person getting past a firewall doesn't necessarily help the others get past it, for example).
In short, it wouldn't be aid another, it'd be a bunch of people making independent checks.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Conceptually speaking, how would someone aid another while hacking a computer?
Isn't hacking generally a solo endeavor? Even if you have multiple people interfacing with the same computer simultaneously, the computer is likely treating them as different users (meaning one person getting past a firewall doesn't necessarily help the others get past it, for example).
In short, it wouldn't be aid another, it'd be a bunch of people making independent checks.
^They forgot pizza and/or hot pockets.
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I'm an IT person, not a hacker by any streach, but far closer to it than most people get. Group hacking would probably look a lot like any group research. Maybe one is searching the web for information to use to unlock user accounts, another might be looking around for programs on the computer with known vulnerabilities that can be used as a method of entry, using some external device to read through whatever data they can access that way that'd help other attempts, running a password cracker on several different user accounts, using some social engineering to find information they couldn't get some other way. While they all have ranks in computer, in real life that could refer to various different specialisations within that range, and by working in tandem and sharing whatever they uncover they can each be more effective than any would've been on their own.
Low tier computers are low value, and high tier computers are usually large and virtually unhackable.
So why then would anyone ever attempt to steal a computer in Starfinder? Does your black market contact have a guy capable of making DC 40+ computers checks to unlock the machine? I doubt it. Even if he did, it would probably cost an arm and a leg (maybe literally), thus reducing the overall value of the machine.
1. I want that computer. Just to have.
2. I want to steal something.. Oh look, a computer.3. I want the computer to use it.
4. I want something on the computer.
5. I want to sell the computer.
6. I want you to not have that computer.
7. A skittermander decided someone needs that computer more than you do.
ect.
You wouldn't steal a computer.
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Like this.Conceptually speaking, how would someone aid another while hacking a computer?
Isn't hacking generally a solo endeavor? Even if you have multiple people interfacing with the same computer simultaneously, the computer is likely treating them as different users (meaning one person getting past a firewall doesn't necessarily help the others get past it, for example).
In short, it wouldn't be aid another, it'd be a bunch of people making independent checks.
... and I'm dead.
... and I'm dead.Like this.Conceptually speaking, how would someone aid another while hacking a computer?
Isn't hacking generally a solo endeavor? Even if you have multiple people interfacing with the same computer simultaneously, the computer is likely treating them as different users (meaning one person getting past a firewall doesn't necessarily help the others get past it, for example).
In short, it wouldn't be aid another, it'd be a bunch of people making independent checks.
Bwahahaha! That's so awful it hurts!
What about devices (like smartphones today) that erase themselves if you try to get in a certain number of times and fail?
What about devices (like smartphones today) that erase themselves if you try to get in a certain number of times and fail?
That would be the Wipe countermeasure (pg. 217) listed in the computer rules.
As for why steal one, the most likely reasons I see are for the information on it or access to another device (Control, pg. 215).
I would expect the resale value of a computer itself to be very low.
Conceptually speaking, how would someone aid another while hacking a computer?
Isn't hacking generally a solo endeavor? Even if you have multiple people interfacing with the same computer simultaneously, the computer is likely treating them as different users (meaning one person getting past a firewall doesn't necessarily help the others get past it, for example).
In short, it wouldn't be aid another, it'd be a bunch of people making independent checks.
It’s like paired programming, but black hat. You’ve got people checking your work, correcting mistakes that could trip countermeasures, doing research into possible unpatched exploits, and monitoring diagnostic tools for you while you do the actual hacking.
Heck, if the 8-Int vesk soldier with one rank in Computers makes their aid another check, I’d have them on rubber duck duty, or providing some mechanical assistance like using upside-down cans of compressed air to cool the RAM down and slow state decay (or some sci-fi equivalent).
QuidEst, do you know of any examples in media or literature of hackers aiding one another against the same device, simultaneously, in a somewhat sensible/realistic fashion?
QuidEst, do you know of any examples in media or literature of hackers aiding one another against the same device, simultaneously, in a somewhat sensible/realistic fashion?
“In a somewhat sensible/realistic fashion” is an unreasonable standard. Almost no portrayals of hacking at all come anywhere close to realistic. But how many times has somebody in a show been trying passwords with someone looking over their shoulder making suggestions? That’s a hacking aid another check.
Plus, we’re talking about contacts doing something off-screen. “I’ll have a team of experts look it over and get back to you” is pretty common.
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I don't know about fictional hackers, but I do know about real-life computer programming, and having a second person looking over your shoulder, making suggestions and spotting mistakes before they lead to complicated bugs, can be really useful.
Or really annoying.
Or both.
QuidEst, do you know of any examples in media or literature of hackers aiding one another against the same device, simultaneously, in a somewhat sensible/realistic fashion?
Perhaps not that realistic and not really aiding exactly but the Chaos/Hardisson duel over control of a target building's security systems might be applicable. This was mainly in "The two live crew job". Either that or "The ho ho ho job" it has been a while.
Steal the computer with all the data the guy who owns it needs, then sell it back to him. Or have him hire you to steal it back
Though not a professional pen-tester (what they call the white-hat hacker-types), The_Defiant would have an accurate portrayal of what a "coordinated" attempt would likely look like -- I would even say if you wanted to make it even better, you could adapt the rules from Ultimate Intrigue on group research attempts vs. the knowledge points of a research task (the "hacking points") to represent a complex hack.
Ignoring that for a moment, I also agree that "real-world" examples aren't the gauge -- cinematic and literary examples of "group hacking" abound, from the old and laughable but fun movie Hackers, to Sneakers, to the venerable Neuromancer (the Panther Moderns causing a diversion for Molly Millions). So, precedent enough, in my view to allow it.
Because the Ysoki mechanic just had to take it apart, because "reasons".
Thanks Legion42.