Hacking is generally handle to lightly. Hacking, depending on what, should incur very hard deterrence in physical and mesh space for days, or even years after the attack. Hacking should have later game consequences. Just because you arent caught in the moment, doesnt mean you cant be caught after the fact. And the tracking wouldnt impact a lag to the Defenders. The Defenders arent going through various devices to defend from the attack, where as the attacker is. The time allowance that the proxy give to the attacker, is that the defender have to defeat each proxy. So I the attacker, have Six Proxies, for a -60 penalty. Fine whatever, I am an awesome 1337 hacker and take the penality. My actions are taking microseconds longer to do what I want in the system I am attacking, as its being bounce by all the proxies. The Defenders have no penalties, for attacking any of the Proxies. They do the Trace counter. They roll successfully find my first proxy. They then do a further trace, I would say at a bonus, because, hey whats that high amount of through traffic coming from? OH! His other fucking proxies. That proxy isnt shouldnt down. So the attacker still at his -60, where as the Defenders are getting a +10 to a max of +50 to find where they really are, and heck with these buffs the defenders can start to do a rush job, doing the trace even faster. This is all semi blind to the Attacker. There no Trace Alert program in EP. What the IC action that character can take, is take a peek into each of his proxy, at the cost of one mental action per speed. With six, the Hacker working alone can check 3, and use the last one to do the hacking with. Lets be nice and say that with the Hacker Muse they can check four. Thats an interface check, which again the Attacker shouldnt know if they pass or fail. And it suffer the same penalties as the hacking. If they're checking the last one, is -60 for the interfacing. Now the Hacker could spend even more prep time, and create delta forks to sit in ever proxy to do this watching for them or write a program to do the watching. The program can do nastier things max out the bandwidth of the proxy, to hide the through traffic when it gets traced, making it an opposed infosec or interface roll verse their infosec roll. The program could even provide false leads, or back trace the defenders, and DDOS their mesh connections. But if this harden system feels like it cant take on this attack alone then for me realistically, it should be able to rely on hab resources to defend itself. Depending on the hab, that means better programs, cpu cycles (EG, more actions per speed more buffs per roll), or have folks just look through the cameras to see who could be hacking, who is new, and do the same for the cyberspace of the hab as well. And just isolate the mesh of anyone who is new enough or acting weird. Depending on the Hab. Depending on how harden the target is. Through all this, Hacking is a pain in the fucking ass, even at the abstracted level that EP does it. Its as time consuming as you want it to be. How much table time you want to give the hacker per game. As actual real life hacking, is super fucking boring and tedious and would be equally time consuming but worse, devastatingly boring. Which by the way, actual real world hacking techniques should still mostly work in EP, so you can do that to. If you just want to run the proxies with a quick and dirty role, then every -10 in proxies he takes, he gets task action (min. of 10 minuets) of time. He cant rush the job with proxies. Even Proxy he uses, is a -10 to a Luck Check (Full Moxy time 10) to see if any of them lead back to his hack over a dramatic enough time period.

I have a question about hacking and counter hacking back at same time. There are couple complex actions but for most part subversion actions don't have time frame for them. How do others track how far each hacker has gone with the thing he wants to do? Maybe there is some table with suggested time frames for subversion tasks?

kurrata wrote:

I am the proxy hacker. The proxy chain looks like this generally I send over mesh to my delta controlled case to press buttons on 1 of my 4 ectos he has. Pressing buttons is 25% slower then using ecto over mesh from what i remember The ectos mesh id now tries to get past my target systems defenses.

Source? I am pretty sure its all complex actions. One of the simplifications the devs made over SR4e, which allowed Physical Adepts from being better hackers in space then jacked in cyberdeck hackers. Also that is a curious unconventional set up. I would have the delta fork, make an interface check to implement any of the strings you give it to type out. Delta Forks aren't sapient. They're a structure to build sapience on. The max skill that the Delta can have on Interface skill is 40. Mecahnically it would feel like their should be an impact of call and response, since you have to read what the Case is seeing, then have the case type it out. Thats not miliseconds of delay, thats actual seconds of delay, and one full around is just 3 seconds. And you are hacking the same target with 4 different ectos? The Delta can't do Physical or Mental Speed, pretty sure. So they can only operate one echo per task action. Or does the Case just have 4 ectos you randomly used to hack into stuff? The latter sounds more reasonable. I would say that doesn't buy you much. The case itself I would say something buy you much either as its covered in delicious forensic evidence. Depending on the polity, lots of potential information from the Delta. That depends where you are. Most habs are pretty small. But I find it doubtful if it happens a lot in Commonwealth cities or Jovian. I bet it happens all the time on Extropia, and on Mars and Luna. The amount of 'background hacking' is gm fait. If you're on a hab of a dozen or score, you can't really argue that you're masking your hacking with the ambient noise of traffic. As for folks being unaware they were hacked, thats more a now thing. It can be a thing in EP. Thats up to your gaming group, if that a thing. I mean sure, if you manage to get admin privs, get in unnoticed, and dont get notice you could possibly go unnoticed for some amount of time, but you cant really get rid of access logs. Even if you leave in a program to delete your disconnect logs or edit them, you're still leaving the program in there. Depending how much of a pain in the ass you were, and or what the target was, it could be years before they figure it out, or hours. System Admins, and white hats have Rep as well can ask for favors to. There no honor among the g-rep, but there bonuses in c-rep. They can have way more resources at their disposable then the PC can. Their can be more then you, and they can as equally skilled.

Quote:

And the tracking wouldnt impact a lag to the Defenders. The Defenders arent going through various devices to defend from the attack, where as the attacker is. The time allowance that the proxy give to the attacker, is that the defender have to defeat each proxy. So I the attacker, have Six Proxies, for a -60 penalty. Fine whatever, I am an awesome 1337 hacker and take the penality. My actions are taking microseconds longer to do what I want in the system I am attacking, as its being bounce by all the proxies. The Defenders have no penalties, for attacking any of the Proxies. They do the Trace counter. They roll successfully find my first proxy. They then do a further trace, I would say at a bonus, because, hey whats that high amount of through traffic coming from? OH! His other fucking proxies. That proxy isnt shouldnt down. So the attacker still at his -60, where as the Defenders are getting a +10 to a max of +50 to find where they really are, and heck with these buffs the defenders can start to do a rush job, doing the trace even faster.

Proxies are fast they do pretty much the same thing switches and routers do. Making penalties for them is stupid unless they are located off site or they do something really strange to your trafick. And then there are rules for lag in game if they are at far off location. Solution here is to make agreement at table don't use stupid long proxy chains because it goes both ways. Unless you are downloading something huge thought them there is almost no trafick on them. After 1st trace they have to do normal hacking sequence to get inside proxy to keep following the chain. Trace doesn't give you free access to device. It gives you its location and ability to counter hack. Hacking and counter hacking rules are same as far as i can tell.[/quote] If the proxies are equally fast to you, then they're equally to the defenders. And Defenders would only need to hack into proxies, if they dont have permission. Depending on the hab, depending on the target, and remembering that the panopticon is a thing in EP, its not unreasable to assume that the defender has or can trivially get permission to enter proxies without hacking. There no reason on a hab, or in a city to not assume good faith with the right handshake. Jovians may be super compartmentalize. Extropians are defiantly. For a price. PC? You're in a corp city or hacked in a corp hab, of course the corp can access any mesh node. If you're an anhab, then depending on flavor, everyone is assumed admin on any device. These would be the user agreement for being in these places. In exchange you get air, heat, food and depending on the anhab, drugs and sex.

Remember that proxies makes Tracking actions harder, as well as attacks directly against the attacker's computer. But it will also make the attacker slower, and it can be circumvented. IRL, we've seen websites that place a discreet image request framed so that browsers process outside of the VPN which has been successfully used to track users using Tor. Similarly, a smart security blue team anticipating proxy-use can plant tools to track and capture attacker information (but they'd have to be really sharp!)