Everything

Before a hacker can access any system, she has to first reverse it to find its vulnerabilities, or cracks. Once she finds a crack – say, in an application that a particular network uses – the hacker can then write a clever piece of code that uses the crack to break into the system so she can play with its contents. Reversing a system to spot weaknesses is really an exercise in digital lock-picking. In game terms, finding and exploiting these cracks makes hacking more effective, and doing so lowers the difficulty of rolls within the system.

Reversing a system or an application takes weeks of work downtime – often with additional materials like passwords gained from the Social Engineering described above. To create effective crack-exploitation code, the player makes a single Intelligence + Computer roll, difficulty 8. If that code has been created to access a specific system and do specific things, the difficulty is only 6, but the code will work only within the system for which it was designed. Each success on the roll lowers the hacker’s difficulty by -1.

The character can also write security software to protect her own system. In this case, the rules are the same, the roll is the same, the difficulty is 7, and each success rolled by the software designer raises the difficulty of other hackers by +1 difficulty (again, per success) when they try to access her system.