Underground
By Suelette Dreyfus with
Research by Julian Assange
Chapter 4
The Fugitive
There’s one gun, probably more
and the others are pointing at our backdoor
from ‘Knife’s Edge’, on Bird Noises by Midnight Oil
When Par failed to show up for his hearing on 10 July 1989 in the
Monterey County Juvenile Court in Salinas, he officially became a
fugitive. He had, in fact, already been on the run for some weeks. But
no-one knew. Not even his lawyer.
Richard Rosen had an idea something was wrong when Par didn’t show up
for a meeting some ten days before the hearing, but he kept hoping his
client would come good. Rosen had negotiated a deal for Par:
reparations plus fifteen days or less in juvenile prison in exchange
for Par’s full cooperation with the Secret Service.
Par had appeared deeply troubled over the matter for weeks. He didn’t
seem to mind telling the Feds how he had broken into various
computers, but that’s not what they were really looking for. They
wanted him to rat. And to rat on everyone. They knew Par was a kingpin
and, as such, he knew all the important players in the underground.
The perfect stooge. But Par couldn’t bring himself to narc. Even if he
did spill his guts, there was still the question of what the
authorities would do to him in prison. The question of elimination
loomed large in his mind.
So, one morning, Par simply disappeared. He had planned it carefully,
packed his bags discreetly and made arrangements with a trusted friend
outside the circle which included his room-mates. The friend drove
around to pick Par up when the
room-mates were out. They never had an inkling that the now
eighteen-year-old Par was about to vanish for a very long time.
First, Par headed to San Diego. Then LA. Then he made his way to New
Jersey. After that, he disappeared from the radar screen completely.
Life on the run was hard. For the first few months, Par carried around
two prized possessions; an inexpensive laptop computer and photos of
Theorem taken during her visit. They were his lifeline to a different
world and he clutched them in his bag as he moved from one city to
another, often staying with his friends from the computer underground.
The loose-knit network of hackers worked a bit like the
nineteenth-century American ‘underground railroad’ used by escaped
slaves to flee from the South to the safety of the northern states.
Except that, for Par, there was never a safe haven.
Par crisscrossed the continent, always on the move. A week in one
place. A few nights in another. Sometimes there were breaks in the
electronic underground railroad, spaces between the place where one
line ended and another began. Those breaks were the hardest. They
meant sleeping out in the open, sometimes in the cold, going without
food and being without anyone to talk to.
He continued hacking, with new-found frenzy, because he was
invincible. What were the law enforcement agencies going to do? Come
and arrest him? He was already a fugitive and he figured things
couldn’t get much worse. He felt as though he would be on the run
forever, and as if he had already been on the run for a lifetime,
though it was only a few months.
When he was staying with people from the computer underground, Par was
careful. But when he was alone in a dingy motel room, or with people
completely outside that world, he hacked without fear. Blatant,
in-your-face feats. Things he knew the Secret Service would see. Even
his illicit voice mailbox had words for his pursuers:
Yeah, this is Par. And to all those faggots from the Secret Service
who keep calling and hanging up, well, lots of luck. ’Cause, I mean,
you’re so fucking stupid, it’s not even funny.
I mean, if you had to send my shit to Apple Computers [for analysis],
you must be so stupid, it’s pitiful. You also thought I had
blue-boxing equipment [for phreaking]. I’m just laughing trying to
think what you thought was a blue box. You are so lame.
Oh well. And anyone else who needs to leave me a message, go ahead.
And everyone take it easy and leave me some shit. Alright. Later.
Despite the bravado, paranoia took hold of Par as it never had before.
If he saw a cop across the street, his breath would quicken and he
would turn and walk in the opposite direction. If the cop was heading
toward him, Par crossed the street and turned down the nearest alley.
Police of any type made him very nervous.
By the autumn of 1989, Par had made his way to a small town in North
Carolina. He found a place to stop and rest with a friend who used the
handle The Nibbler and whose family owned a motel. A couple of weeks
in one place, in one bed, was paradise. It was also free, which meant
he didn’t have to borrow money from Theorem, who helped him out while
he was on the run.
Par slept in whatever room happened to be available that night, but he
spent most of his time in one of the motel chalets Nibbler used in the
off-season as a computer room. They spent days hacking from Nibbler’s
computer. The fugitive had been forced to sell off his inexpensive
laptop before arriving in North Carolina.
After a few weeks at the motel, however, he couldn’t shake the feeling
that he was being watched. There were too many strangers coming and
going. He wondered if the hotel guests waiting in their cars were
spying on him, and he soon began jumping at shadows. Perhaps, he
thought, the Secret Service had found him after all.
Par thought about how he could investigate the matter in more depth.
One of The Atlanta Three hackers, The Prophet, called Nibbler
occasionally to exchange hacking information, particularly security
bugs in Unix systems. During one of their talks, Prophet told Par
about a new security flaw he’d been experimenting with on a network
that belonged to the phone company.
The Atlanta Three, a Georgia-based wing of The Legion of Doom, spent a
good deal of time weaving their way through BellSouth, the phone
company covering the south-eastern US. They knew about phone switching
stations the way Par knew about Tymnet. The Secret Service had raided
the hackers in July 1989 but had not arrested them yet, so in
September The Prophet continued to maintain an interest in his
favourite target.
Par thought the flaw in Bell South’s network sounded very cool and
began playing around in the company’s systems. Dial up the company’s
computer network, poke around, look at things. The usual stuff.
It occurred to Par that he could check out the phone company’s records
of the motel to see if there was anything unusual going on. He typed
in the motel’s main phone number and the system fed back the motel’s
address, name and some detailed technical information, such as the
exact cable and pair attached to the phone number. Then he looked up
the phone line of the computer chalet. Things looked odd on that line.
The line which he and Nibbler used for most of their hacking showed a
special status: ‘maintenance unit on line’.
What maintenance unit? Nibbler hadn’t mentioned any problems with any
of the motel’s lines, but Par checked with him. No problems with the
telephones.
Par felt nervous. In addition to messing around with the phone
company’s networks, he had been hacking into a Russian computer
network from the computer chalet. The Soviet network was a shiny new
toy. It had only been connected to the rest of the world’s global
packet-switched network for about a month, which made it particularly
attractive virgin territory.
Nibbler called in a friend to check the motel’s phones. The friend, a
former telephone company technician turned freelancer, came over to
look at the equipment. He told Nibbler and Par that something weird
was happening in the motel’s phone system. The line voltages were way
off.
Par realised instantly what was going on. The system was being
monitored. Every line coming in and going out was probably being
tapped, which meant only one thing. Someone--the phone company, the
local police, the FBI or the Secret Service--was onto him.
Nibbler and Par quickly packed up all Nibbler’s computer gear, along
with Par’s hacking notes, and moved to another motel across town. They
had to shut down all their hacking activities and cover their tracks.
Par had left programs running which sniffed people’s passwords and
login names on a continual basis as they logged in, then dumped all
the information into a file on the hacked machine. He checked that
file every day or so. If he didn’t shut the programs down, the log
file would grow until it was so big the system administrator would
become curious and have a look. When he discovered that his system had
been hacked he would close the security holes. Par would have problems
getting back into that system.
After they finished tidying up the hacked systems, they gathered up
all Par’s notes and Nibbler’s computer equipment once again and
stashed them in a rented storage space. Then they drove back to the
motel.
Par couldn’t afford to move on just yet. Besides, maybe only the
telephone company had taken an interest in the motel’s phone system.
Par had done a lot of poking and prodding of the telecommunications
companies’ computer systems from the motel phone, but he had done it
anonymously. Perhaps BellSouth felt a little curious and just wanted
to sniff about for more information. If that was the case, the law
enforcement agencies probably didn’t know that Par, the fugitive, was
hiding in the motel.
The atmosphere was becoming oppressive in the motel. Par became even
more watchful of the people coming and going. He glanced out the front
window a little more often, and he listened a little more carefully to
the footsteps coming and going. How many of the guests were really
just tourists? Par went through the guest list and found a man
registered as being from New Jersey. He was from one of the AT&T
corporations left after the break-up of Bell Systems. Why on earth
would an AT&T guy be staying in a tiny hick town in North Carolina?
Maybe a few Secret Service agents had snuck into the motel and were
watching the chalet.
Par needed to bring the paranoia under control. He needed some fresh
air, so he went out for a walk. The weather was bad and the wind blew
hard, whipping up small tornadoes of autumn leaves. Soon it began
raining and Par sought cover in the pay phone across the street.
Despite having been on the run for a few months, Par still called
Theorem almost every day, mostly by phreaking calls through bulk
telecommunications companies. He dialled her number and they talked
for a bit. He told her about how the voltage was way off on the
motel’s PABX and how the phone might be tapped. She asked how he was
holding up. Then they spoke softly about when they might see each
other again.
Outside the phone box, the storm worsened. The rain hammered the roof
from one side and then another as the wind jammed it in at strange
angles. The darkened street was deserted. Tree branches creaked under
the strain of the wind. Rivulets rushed down the leeward side of the
booth and formed a wall of water outside the glass. Then a trash bin
toppled over and its contents flew onto the road.
Trying to ignore to the havoc around him, Par curled the phone handset
into a small protected space, cupped between his hand, his chest and a
corner of the phone booth. He reminded Theorem of their time together
in California, of two and a half weeks, and they laughed gently over
intimate secrets.
A tree branch groaned and then broke under the force of the wind. When
it crashed on the pavement near the phone booth, Theorem asked Par
what the noise was.
‘There’s a hurricane coming,’ he told her. ‘Hurricane Hugo. It was
supposed to hit tonight. I guess it’s arrived.’
Theorem sounded horrified and insisted Par go back to the safety of
the motel immediately.
When Par opened the booth door, he was deluged by water. He dashed
across the road, fighting the wind of the hurricane, staggered into his
motel room and jumped into bed to warm up. He fell asleep listening to
the storm, and he dreamed of Theorem.
Hurricane Hugo lasted more than three days, but they felt like the
safest three days Par had spent in weeks. It was a good bet that the
Secret Service wouldn’t be conducting any raids during a hurricane.
South Carolina took the brunt of Hugo but North Carolina also suffered
massive damage. It was one of the worst hurricanes to hit the area in
decades. Winds near its centre reached more than 240 kilometres per
hour, causing 60 deaths and $7 billion in damages as it made its way
up the coast from the West Indies to the Carolinas.
When Par stepped outside his motel room one afternoon a few days after
the storm, the air was fresh and clean. He walked to the railing
outside his second-storey perch and found himself looking down on a
hive of activity in the car park. There were cars. There was a van.
There was a collection of spectators.
And there was the Secret Service.
At least eight agents wearing blue jackets with the Secret Service
emblem on the back.
Par froze. He stopped breathing. Everything began to move in slow
motion. A few of the agents formed a circle around one of the guys
from the motel, a maintenance worker named John, who looked vaguely
like Par. They seemed to be hauling John over the coals, searching his
wallet for identification and quizzing him. Then they escorted him to
the van, presumably to run his prints.
Par’s mind began moving again. He tried to think clearly. What was the
best way out? He had to get back into his room. It would give him some
cover while he figured out what to do next. The photos of Theorem
flashed through his mind. No way was he going to let the Secret
Service get hold of those. He needed to stash them and fast.
He could see the Secret Service agents searching the computer chalet.
Thank God he and Nibbler had moved all the equipment. At least there
was nothing incriminating in there and they wouldn’t be able to seize
all their gear.
Par breathed deeply, deliberately, and forced himself to back away
from the railing toward the door to his room. He resisted the urge to
dash into his room, to recoil from the scene being played out below
him. Abrupt movements would draw the agents’ attention.
Just as Par began to move, one of the agents turned around. He scanned
the two-storey motel complex and his gaze quickly came to rest on Par.
He looked Par dead in the eye.
This is it, Par thought. I’m screwed. No way out of here now. Months
on the run only to get done in a hick town in North Carolina. These
guys are gonna haul my ass away for good. I’ll never see the light of
day again. Elimination is the only option.
While these thoughts raced through Par’s mind, he stood rigid, his
feet glued to the cement floor, his face locked into the probing gaze
of the Secret Service agent. He felt like they were the only two
people who existed in the universe.
Then, inexplicably, the agent looked away. He swivelled around to
finish his conversation with another agent. It was as if he had never
even seen the fugitive.
Par stood, suspended and unbelieving. Somehow it seemed impossible. He
began to edge the rest of the way to his motel room. Slowly, casually,
he slid inside and shut the door behind him.
His mind raced back to the photos of Theorem and he searched the room
for a safe hiding place. There wasn’t one. The best option was
something above eye-level. He pulled a chair across the room, climbed
on it and pressed on the ceiling. The rectangular panel of
plasterboard lifted easily and Par slipped the photos in the space,
then replaced the panel. If the agents tore the room apart, they would
likely find the pictures. But the photos would probably escape a quick
search, which was the best he could hope for at this stage.
Next, he turned his mind to escaping. The locals were pretty cool
about everything, and Par thought he could count on the staff not to
mention his presence to the Secret Service. That bought him some time,
but he couldn’t get out of the room without being seen. Besides, if he
was spotted walking off the property, he would certainly be stopped
and questioned.
Even if he did manage to get out of the motel grounds, it wouldn’t
help much. The town wasn’t big enough to shield him from a thorough
search and there was no-one there he trusted enough to hide him. It
might look a little suspicious, this young man running away from the
motel on foot in a part of the world where everyone travelled by car.
Hitchhiking was out of the question. With his luck, he’d probably get
picked up by one of the agents leaving the raid. No, he wanted a more
viable plan. What he really needed was to get out of the area
altogether, to flee the state.
Par knew that John travelled to Asheville to attend classes and that
he left very early. If the authorities had been watching the motel for
a while, they would know that his 5 a.m. departure was normal. And
there was one other thing about the early departure which seemed
promising. It was still dark at that hour.
If Par could get as far as Asheville, he might be able to get a lift
to Charlotte, and from there he could fly somewhere far away.
Par considered the options again and again. Hiding out in the motel
room seemed the most sensible thing to do. He had been moving rooms
around the motel pretty regularly, so he might have appeared to be
just another traveller to anyone watching the motel. With any luck the
Secret Service would be concentrating their search on the chalet,
ripping the place apart in a vain hunt for the computer equipment. As
these thoughts went through his head, the phone rang, making Par jump.
He stared at it, wondering whether to answer.
He picked it up.
‘It’s Nibbler,’ a voice whispered.
‘Yeah,’ Par whispered back.
‘Par, the Secret Service is here, searching the motel.’
‘I know. I saw them.’
‘They’ve already searched the room next to yours.’
Par nearly died.
The agents had been less than two metres from where he was standing
and he hadn’t even known it. That room was where John stayed. It was
connected to his by an inner door, but both sides were locked.
‘Move into John’s room and lay low. Gotta go.’ Nibbler hung up
abruptly.
Par put his ear to the wall and listened. Nothing. He unlocked the
connecting inner door, turned the knob and pressed lightly. It gave.
Someone had unlocked the other side after the search. Par squinted
through the crack in the door. The room was silent and still. He
opened it--no-one home. Scooping up his things, he quickly moved into
John’s room.
Then he waited. Pacing and fidgeting, he strained his ears to catch
the sounds outside. Every bang and creak of a door opening and closing
set him on edge. Late that night, after the law enforcement officials
had left, Nibbler called him on the house phone and told him what had
happened.
Nibbler had been inside the computer chalet when the Secret Service
showed up with a search warrant. The agents took names, numbers, every
detail they could, but they had trouble finding any evidence of
hacking. Finally, one of them emerged from the chalet triumphantly
waving a single computer disk in the air. The law enforcement
entourage hanging around in front of the chalet let out a little
cheer, but Nibbler could hardly keep a straight face. His younger
brother had been learning the basics of computer graphics with a
program called Logo. The United States Secret Service would soon be
uncovering the secret drawings of a primary school student.
Par laughed. It helped relieve the stress. Then he told Nibbler his
escape plan, and Nibbler agreed to arrange matters. His parents didn’t
know the whole story, but they liked Par and wanted to help him. Then
Nibbler wished his friend well.
Par didn’t even try to rest before his big escape. He was as highly
strung as a racehorse at the gate. What if the Secret Service was
still watching the place? There was no garage attached to the main
motel building which he could access from the inside. He would be
exposed, even though it would only be for a minute or so. The night
would provide reasonable cover, but the escape plan wasn’t fool-proof.
If agents were keeping the motel under observation from a distance
they might miss him taking off from his room. On the other hand, there
could be undercover agents posing as guests watching the entire
complex from inside their room.
Paranoid thoughts stewed in Par’s mind throughout the night. Just
before 5 a.m., he heard John’s car pull up outside. Par flicked off
the light in his room, opened his door a crack and scanned the motel
grounds. All quiet, bar the single car, which puffed and grunted in
the still, cold air. The windows in most of the buildings were dark.
It was now or never.
Par opened the door all the way and slipped down the hallway. As he
crept downstairs, the pre-dawn chill sent a shiver down his spine.
Glancing quickly from side to side, he hurried toward the waiting car,
pulled the back door open and dove onto the seat. Keeping his head
down, he twisted around, rolled onto the floor and closed the door
with little more than a soft click.
As the car began to move. Par reached for a blanket which had been
tossed on the floor and pulled it over himself. After a while, when
John told him they were safely out of the town, Par slipped the
blanket off his face and he looked up at the early morning sky. He
tried to get comfortable on the floor. It was going to be a long ride.
At Asheville, John dropped Par off at an agreed location. Par thanked
him and hopped into a waiting car. Someone else from his extensive
network of friends and acquaintances took him to Charlotte.
This time Par rode in the front passenger seat. For the first time, he
saw the true extent of the damage wreaked by Hurricane Hugo. The small
town where he had been staying had been slashed by rain and high
winds, but on the way to the Charlotte airport, where he would pick up
a flight to New York, Par watched the devastation with amazement. He
stared out the car window, unable to take his eyes off the storm’s
trail of havoc.
The hurricane had swept up anything loose or fragile and turned it
into a missile on a suicide mission. Whatever mangled, broken
fragments remained after the turbulent winds had passed would have
been almost unrecognisable to those who had seen them before.
Theorem worried about Par as he staggered from corner to corner of the
continent. In fact, she had often asked him to consider giving himself
up. Moving from town to town was taking its toll on Par, and it wasn’t
that much easier on Theorem. She hadn’t thought going on the lam was
such a great idea in the first place, and she offered to pay for his
lawyer so he could stop running. Par declined. How could he hand
himself in when he believed elimination was a real possibility?
Theorem sent him money, since he had no way of earning a living and he
needed to eat. The worst parts, though, were the dark thoughts that
kept crossing her mind. Anything could happen to Par between phone
calls. Was he alive? In prison? Had he been raided, even accidentally
shot during a raid?
The Secret Service and the private security people seemed to want him
so badly. It was worrying, but hardly surprising. Par had embarrassed
them. He had broken into their machines and passed their private
information around in the underground. They had raided his home when
he wasn’t even home. Then he had escaped a second raid, in North
Carolina, slipping between their fingers. He was constantly in their
face, continuing to hack blatantly and to show them contempt in things
such as his voicemail message. He figured they were probably
exasperated from chasing all sorts of false leads as well, since he
was perpetually spreading fake rumours about his whereabouts. Most of
all, he thought they knew what he had seen inside the TRW system. He
was a risk.
Par became more and more paranoid, always watching over his shoulder
as he moved from city to city. He was always tired. He could never
sleep properly, worrying about the knock on the door. Some mornings,
after a fitful few hours of rest, he woke with a start, unable to
remember where he was. Which house or motel, which friends, which
city.
He still hacked all the time, borrowing machines where he could. He
posted messages frequently on The Phoenix Project, an exclusive BBS
run by The Mentor and Erik Bloodaxe and frequented by LOD members and
the Australian hackers. Some well-known computer security people were
also invited onto certain, limited areas of the Texas-based board,
which immediately elevated the status of The Phoenix Project in the
computer underground. Hackers were as curious about the security
people as the security people were about their prey. The Phoenix
Project was special because it provided neutral ground, where both
sides could meet to exchange ideas.
Via the messages, Par continued to improve his hacking skills while
also talking with his friends, people like Erik Bloodaxe, from Texas,
and Phoenix, from The Realm in Melbourne. Electron also frequented The
Phoenix Project. These hackers knew Par was on the run, and sometimes
they joked with him about it. The humour made the stark reality of
Par’s situation bearable. All the hackers on The Phoenix Project had
considered the prospect of being caught. But the presence of Par, and
his tortured existence on the run, hammered the implications home with
some regularity.
As Par’s messages became depressed and paranoid, other hackers tried
to do what they could to help him. Elite US and foreign hackers who
had access to the private sections of The Phoenix Project saw his
messages and they felt for him. Yet Par continued to slide deeper and
deeper into his own strange world.
Subject: DAMN !!!
From: The Parmaster
Date: Sat Jan 13 08:40:17 1990
Shit, i got drunk last night and went onto that Philippine system...
Stupid Admin comes on and asks who i am ...
Next thing i know, i’m booted off and both accounts on the system are gone.
Not only this .. but the
whole fucking Philippine Net isn’t accepting collect calls anymore. (The thing
went down completely after i was booted off!)
Apparently someone there
had enough of me.
By the way, kids, never
drink and hack!
- Par
Subject: gawd
From: The Parmaster
Date: Sat Jan 13 09:07:06 1990
Those SS boys and NSA boys think i’m a COMRADE .. hehehe i’m just glad
i’m still fucking free.
Bahahaha
Except for the serial killer, the north infirmary at Rikers Island was
a considerable improvement on the Tombs. Par was only locked in his
cell at night. During the day he was free to roam inside the infirmary
area with other prisoners. Some of them were there because the
authorities didn’t want to put them in with the hardened criminals,
and some of them were there because they were probably criminally
insane.
It was an eclectic bunch. A fireman turned jewellery heister. A
Colombian drug lord. A chop-shop ringleader, who collected more than
300 stolen cars, chopped them up, reassembled them as new and then
sold them off. A man who killed a homosexual for coming onto him.
‘Faggot Killer’, as he was known inside, hadn’t meant to kill anyone:
things had gotten a little out of hand; next thing he knew, he was
facing ten to twelve on a murder rap.
Par wasn’t wild about the idea of hanging out with a murderer, but he
was nervous about what could happened to a young man in jail. Forging
a friendship with Faggot Killer would send the right message. Besides,
the guy seemed to be OK. Well, as long as you didn’t look at him the
wrong way.
On his first day, Par also met Kentucky, a wild-eyed man who
introduced himself by thrusting a crumpled newspaper article into the
hacker’s hand and saying, ‘That’s me’. The article, titled ‘Voices
Told Him to Kill’, described how police had apprehended a serial
killer believed to be responsible for a dozen murders, maybe more.
During his last murder, Kentucky told Par he had killed a woman--and
then written the names of the aliens who had commanded him to do it on
the walls of her apartment in her blood.
The jewellery heister tried to warn Par to stay away from Kentucky,
who continued to liaise with the aliens on a regular basis. But it was
too late. Kentucky decided that he didn’t like the young hacker. He
started shouting at Par, picking a fight. Par stood there, stunned and
confused. How should he deal with an aggravated serial killer? And
what the hell was he doing in jail with a serial killer raving at him
anyway? It was all too much.
The jewellery heister rushed over to Kentucky and tried to calm him
down, speaking in soothing tones. Kentucky glowered at Par, but he
stopped yelling.
A few days into his stay at Rikers, Faggot Killer invited Par to join
in a game of Dungeons and Dragons. It beat watching TV talk shows all
day, so Par agreed. He sat down at the metal picnic table where Faggot
Killer had laid out the board.
So it was that Par, the twenty-year-old computer hacker from
California, the X.25 network whiz kid, came to play Dungeons and
Dragons with a jewellery thief, a homophobic murderer and a mad serial
killer in Rikers Island. Par found himself marvelling at the
surrealism of the situation.
Kentucky threw himself into the game. He seemed to get off on killing
hobgoblins.
‘I’ll take my halberd,’ Kentucky began with a smile, ‘and I stab this
goblin.’ The next player began to make his move, but Kentucky
interrupted. ‘I’m not done,’ he said slowly, as a demonic grin spread
across his face. ‘And I slice it. And cut it. It bleeds everywhere.’
Kentucky’s face tensed with pleasure.
The other three players shifted uncomfortably in their seats. Par
looked at Faggot Killer with nervous eyes.
‘And I thrust a knife into its heart,’ Kentucky continued, the volume
of his voice rising with excitement. ‘Blood, blood, everywhere blood.
And I take the knife and hack him. And I hack and hack and hack.’
Kentucky jumped up from the table and began shouting, thrusting one
arm downward through the air with an imaginary dagger, ‘And I hack and
I hack and I hack!’
Then Kentucky went suddenly still. Everyone at the table froze. No-one
dared move for fear of driving him over the edge. Par’s stomach had
jumped into his throat. He tried to gauge how many seconds it would
take to extricate himself from the picnic table and make a break for
the far side of the room.
In a daze, Kentucky walked away from the table, leaned his forehead
against the wall and began mumbling quietly. The jewellery heister
slowly followed and spoke to him briefly in hushed tones before
returning to the table.
One of the guards had heard the ruckus and came up to the table.
‘Is that guy OK?’ he asked the jewellery heister while pointing to
Kentucky.
Not even if you used that term loosely, Par thought.
‘Leave him alone,’ the heister told the guard. ‘He’s talking to the
aliens.’
‘Right.’ The guard turned around and left.
Every day, a nurse brought around special medicine for Kentucky. In
fact, Kentucky was zonked out most of the time on a cup of horrible,
smelly liquid. Sometimes, though, Kentucky secreted his medicine away
and traded it with another prisoner who wanted to get zonked out for a
day or so.
Those were bad days, the days when Kentucky had sold his medication.
It was on one of those days that he tried to kill Par.
Par sat on a metal bench, talking to other prisoners, when suddenly he
felt an arm wrap around his neck. He tried to turn around, but
couldn’t.
‘Here. I’ll show you how I killed this one guy,’ Kentucky whispered to
Par.
‘No--No--’ Par started to say, but Kentucky’s biceps began pressing
against Par’s Adam’s apple. It was a vice-like grip.
‘Yeah. Like this. I did it like this,’ Kentucky said as he tensed his
muscle and pulled backward.
‘No! Really, you don’t need to. It’s OK,’ Par gasped. No air. His arms
flailing in front of him.
I’m done for, Par thought. My life is over. Hacker Murdered by Serial
Killer in Rikers Island. ‘Aliens Told Me to Do It.’
The omnipresent jewellery heister came up to Kentucky and started
cooing in his ear to let Par go. Then, just when Par thought he was
about to pass out, the jewellery heister pulled Kentucky off him.
Par reminded himself to always sit with his back against the wall.
Finally, after almost a month behind bars, Par was informed that an
officer from the Monterey County sheriff’s office was coming to take
him back to California. Par had agreed to be extradited to California
after seeing the inside of New York’s jails. Dealing with the federal
prosecutor in New York had also helped make up his mind.
The US Attorney’s Office in New York gave Richard Rosen, who had taken
the case on again, a real headache. They didn’t play ball. They played
‘Queen for a Day’.
The way they negotiated reminded Rosen of an old American television
game of that name. The show’s host pulled some innocent soul off the
street, seated her on a garish throne, asked her questions and then
gave her prizes. The US Attorney’s Office in New York wanted to seat
Par on a throne, of sorts, to ask him lots of questions. At the end of
the unfettered interrogation, they would hand out prizes. Prison
terms. Fines. Convictions. As they saw fit. No guaranteed sentences.
They would decide what leniency, if any, he would get at the end of
the game.
Par knew what they were looking for: evidence against the MOD boys. He
wasn’t having a bar of that. The situation stank, so Par decided not to
fight the extradition to California. Anything had to be better than New
York, with its crazy jail inmates and arrogant federal prosecutors.
The officer from the Monterey sheriff’s office picked Par up on 17
December 1991.
Par spent the next few weeks in jail in California, but this time he
wasn’t in any sort of protective custody. He had to share a cell with
Mexican drug dealers and other mafia, but at least he knew his way
around these people. And unlike the some of the people at Rikers, they
weren’t stark raving lunatics.
Richard Rosen took the case back, despite Par’s having skipped town
the first time, which Par thought was pretty good of the lawyer. But
Par had no idea how good it would be for him until it came to his
court date.
Par called Rosen from the jail, to talk about the case. Rosen had some
big news for him.
‘Plead guilty. You’re going to plead guilty to everything,’ he told
Par.
Par thought Rosen had lost his marbles.
‘No. We can win this case if you plead guilty,’ Rosen assured him.
Par sat dumbfounded at the other end of the phone.
‘Trust me,’ the lawyer said.
The meticulous Richard Rosen had found a devastating weapon.
On 23 December 1991, Par pleaded guilty to two charges in Monterey
County Juvenile Court. He admitted everything. The whole nine yards.
Yes, I am The Parmaster. Yes, I broke into computers. Yes, I took
thousands of credit card details from a Citibank machine. Yes, yes,
yes.
In some way, the experience was cathartic, but only because Par knew
Rosen had a brilliant ace up his sleeve.
Rosen had rushed the case to be sure it would be heard in juvenile
court, where Par would get a more lenient sentence. But just because
Rosen was in a hurry didn’t mean he was sloppy. When he went through
Par’s file with a fine-toothed comb he discovered the official papers
declared Par’s birthday to be 15 January 1971. In fact, Par’s birthday
was some days earlier, but the DA’s office didn’t know that.
Under California law, a juvenile court has jurisdiction over citizens
under the age of 21. You can only be tried and sentenced in a juvenile
court if you committed the crimes in question while under the age of
eighteen and you are still under the age of 21 when you plead and are
sentenced.
Par was due to be sentenced on 13 January but on 8 January Rosen
applied for the case to be thrown out. When Deputy DA David Schott
asked why, Rosen dropped his bomb.
Par had already turned 21 and the juvenile court had no authority to
pass sentence over him. Further, in California, a case cannot be moved
into an adult court if the defendant has already entered a plea in a
juvenile one. Because Par had already done that, his case couldn’t be
moved. The matter was considered ‘dealt with’ in the eyes of the law.
The Deputy DA was flabbergasted. He spluttered and spewed. The DA’s
office had dropped the original charges from a felony to a
misdemeanour. They had come to the table. How could this happen? Par
was a fugitive. He had been on the run for more than two years from
the frigging Secret Service, for Christ’s sake. There was no way--NO
WAY--he was going to walk out of that courtroom scot-free.
The court asked Par to prove his birthday. A quick driver’s licence
search at the department of motor vehicles showed Par and his lawyer
were telling the truth. So Par walked free.
When he stepped outside the courthouse, Par turned his face toward the
sun. After almost two months in three different jails on two sides of
the continent, the sun felt magnificent. Walking around felt
wonderful. Just wandering down the street made him happy.
However, Par never really got over being on the run.
From the time he walked free from the County Jail in Salinas,
California, he continued to move around the country, picking up
temporary work here and there. But he found it hard to settle in one
place. Worst of all, strange things began happening to him. Well, they
had always happened to him, but they were getting stranger by the
month. His perception of reality was changing.
There was the incident in the motel room. As Par sat in the Las Vegas
Travelodge on one if his cross-country treks, he perceived someone
moving around in the room below his. Par strained to hear. It seemed
like the man was talking to him. What was the man trying to tell him?
Par couldn’t quite catch the words, but the more he listened, the more
Par was sure he had a message for him which he didn’t want anyone else
to hear. It was very frustrating. No matter how hard he tried, no
matter how he put his ear down to the floor or against the wall, Par
couldn’t make it out.
The surreal experiences continued. As Par described it, on a trip down
to Mexico, he began feeling quite strange, so he went to the US
consulate late one afternoon to get some help. But everyone in the
consulate behaved bizarrely.
They asked him for some identification, and he gave them his wallet.
They took his Social Security card and his California identification
card and told him to wait. Par believed they were going to pull up
information about him on a computer out the back. While waiting, his
legs began to tremble and a continuous shiver rolled up and down his
spine. It wasn’t a smooth, fluid shiver, it was jerky. He felt like he
was sitting at the epicentre of an earthquake and it frightened him.
The consulate staff just stared
at him.
Finally Par stopped shaking. The other staff member returned and asked
him to leave.
‘No-one can help you here,’ he told Par.
Why was the consular official talking to him like that? What did he
mean--Par had to leave? What was he really trying to say? Par couldn’t
understand him. Another consular officer came around to Par, carrying
handcuffs. Why was everyone behaving in such a weird way? That
computer. Maybe they had found some special message next to his name
on that computer.
Par tried to explain the situation, but the consulate staff didn’t
seem to understand. He told them about how he had been on the run from
the Secret Service for two and a half years, but that just got him
queer looks. Blank faces. No comprende. The more he explained, the
blanker the faces became.
The consular officials told him that the office was closing for the
day. He would have to leave the building. But Par suspected that was
just an excuse. A few minutes later, a Mexican policeman showed up. He
talked with one of the consular officials, who subsequently handed him
what Par perceived to be a slip of paper wrapped around a wad of peso
notes.
Two more policemen came into the consulate. One of them turned to Par
and said, ‘Leave!’ but Par didn’t answer. So the Mexican police
grabbed Par by the arms and legs and carried him out of the consulate.
Par felt agitated and confused and, as they crossed the threshold out
of the consulate, he screamed.
They put him in a police car and took him to a jail, where they kept
him overnight.
The next day, they released Par and he wandered the city aimlessly
before ending up back at the US consulate. The same consular officer
came up to him and asked how he was feeling.
Par said, ‘OK.’
Then Par asked if the official could help him get back to the border,
and he said he could. A few minutes later a white van picked up Par
and took him to the border crossing. When they arrived, Par asked the
driver if he could have $2 so he could buy a ticket for the train. The
driver gave it to him.
Par boarded the train with no idea of where he was headed.
Theorem visited Par in California twice in 1992 and the relationship
continued to blossom. Par tried to find work so he could pay her back
the $20000 she had lent him during his years on the run and during his
court case, but it was hard going. People didn’t seem to want to hire
him.
‘You don’t have any computer skills,’ they told him. He calmly
explained that, yes, he did indeed have computer skills.
‘Well, which university did you get your degree from?’ they asked.
No, he hadn’t got his skills at any university.
‘Well, which companies did you get your work experience from?’
No, he hadn’t learned his skills while working for a company.
‘Well, what did you do from 1989 to 1992?’ the temp agency staffer
inevitably asked in an exasperated voice.
‘I ... ah ... travelled around the country.’ What else was Par going
to say? How could he possibly answer that question?
If he was lucky, the agency might land him a data-entry job at $8 per
hour. If he was less fortunate, he might end up doing clerical work
for less than that.
By 1993, things had become a little rocky with Theorem. After four and
a half years together, they broke up. The distance was too great, in
every sense. Theorem wanted a more stable life--maybe not a
traditional Swiss family with three children and a pretty chalet in
the Alps, but something more than Par’s transient life on the road.
The separation was excruciatingly painful for both of them.
Conversation was strained for weeks after the decision. Theorem kept
thinking she had made a mistake. She kept wanting to ask Par to come
back. But she didn’t.
Par drowned himself in alcohol. Shots of tequila, one after the other.
Scull it. Slam the glass down. Fill it to the top. Throw back another.
After a while, he passed out. Then he was violently ill for days, but
somehow he didn’t mind. It was cleansing to be so ill.
Somewhere along the way, Rosen managed to get Par’s things returned
from the Secret Service raids. He passed the outdated computer and
other equipment back to Par, along with disks, print-outs and notes.
Par gathered up every shred of evidence from his case, along with a
bottle of Jack Daniels, and made a bonfire. He shredded print-outs,
doused them in lighter fluid and set them alight. He fed the disks
into the fire and watched them melt in the flames. He flipped through
the pages and pages of notes and official reports and let them pull
out particular memories. Then he crumpled up each one and tossed it in
the fire. He even sprinkled a little Jack Daniels across the top for
good measure.
As he pulled the pages from a Secret Service report, making them into
tight paper balls, something caught his eye and made him wonder. Many
hackers around the world had been busted in a series of raids
following the first Thanksgiving raid at Par’s house back in 1988.
Erik Bloodaxe, the MOD boys, the LOD boys, The Atlanta Three, Pad and
Gandalf, the Australians--they had all been either busted or raided
during 1989, 1990 and 1991.
How were the raids connected? Were the law-enforcement agencies on
three different continents really organised enough to coordinate
worldwide attacks on hackers?
The Secret Service report gave him a clue. It said that in December
1988, two informants had called Secret Service special agents in
separate divisions with information about Par. The informants--both
hackers--told the Secret Service that Par was not the ‘Citibank
hacker’ the agency was looking for. They said the real ‘Citibank
hacker’ was named Phoenix.
Phoenix from Australia.
Chapter 5
The Holy Grail
So we came and conquered and found
riches of Commons and Kings
-- from ‘River Runs Red’, on Blue Sky Mining by Midnight Oil
There it was, in black and white. Two articles by Helen Meredith in
The Australian in January 1989. The whole Australian computer
underground was buzzing with the news. 2
The first article appeared on 14 January:
Citibank hackers score $500,000
An elite group of Australian hackers has lifted more than
$US500,000 ($580,000) out of America’s Citibank in one of the more
daring hacking crimes in Australia’s history.
Australian federal authorities were reported late yesterday to be
working with American authorities to pin down the Australian
connection involving hackers in Melbourne and Sydney.
These are the elite ‘freekers’ of white collar crime ...
The Australian connection is reported to have used a telephone in
the foyer of Telecom’s headquarters at 199 William Street in
Melbourne to send a 2600-hertz signal giving them access to a trunk
line and ultimately to a managerial access code for Citibank.
Sources said last night the hackers had lifted $US563,000 from the
US bank and transferred it into several accounts. The money has now
been withdrawn ...
Meanwhile, Victorian police were reported yesterday to be
systematically searching the homes of dozens of suspects in a
crackdown on computer hackers ...
An informed source said Criminal Investigation Bureau officers
armed with search warrants were now searching through the
belongings of the hacking community and expected to find hundreds
of thousands of dollars of goods.
An informed source said Criminal Investigation Bureau officers
armed with search warrants were now searching through the
belongings of the hacking community and expected to find hundreds
of thousands of dollars of goods.
The second article was published ten days later:
Hackers list card hauls on boards
Authorities remain sceptical of the latest reports of an
international hacking and phreaking ring and its Australian
connection.
Yesterday, however, evidence continued to stream into the Melbourne
based bulletin boards under suspicion ...
In the latest round of bulletin board activity, a message from a
United States hacker known as Captain Cash provided the Australian
connection with the latest news on Australian credit cards,
provided by local hackers, and their illegal use by US hackers to
the value of $US362 018 ($416112).
The information was taken from a computer bulletin board system
known as Pacific Island and used actively by the Australian
connection.
The message read: ‘OK on the 5353 series which we are closing
today--Mastercard $109 400.50. On the 4564 series--Visa which I’ll
leave open for a week
$209417.90. And on good old don’t leave home without someone
else’s: $43 200.
‘Making a grand total of
$362018.40!
‘Let’s hear it for our Aussie friends!
‘I hear they are doing just as well!
‘They are sending more numbers on the 23rd! Great!
‘They will be getting 10%
as usual...
a nice bonus of
$36 200.00!’
The bulletin board also contained advice for phreakers on using
telephones in Telecom’s 199 William Street headquarters and the
green phones at Spencer Street Station in Melbourne--to make free
international calls ...
Phoenix, another local bulletin board user, listed prices for
‘EXTC’- tablets ...
Late Friday, The Australian received evidence suggesting a break-in
of the US Citibank network by Australian hackers known as The Realm
...
The gang’s US connection is believed to be based in Milwaukee and
Houston. US Federal authorities have already raided US hackers
involved in Citibank break-ins in the US.
A covert operation of the Bureau of Criminal Intelligence has had
the Australian connection under surveillance and last week took
delivery of six months’ of evidence from the Pacific Island board
and associated boards going by the name of Zen and Megaworks ...
The Australian hackers include a number of Melbourne people, some
teenagers, suspected or already convicted of crimes including
fraud, drug use and car theft. Most are considered to be at the
least, digital voyeurs, at worst criminals with a possible big
crime connection.
The information received by The Australian amounts to a confession
on the part of the Australian hackers to involvement in the
break-in of the US Citibank network as well as advice on phreaking
... and bank access.
The following is taken directly from the bulletin board ... It was
stored in a private mailbox on the board and is from a hacker known
as Ivan Trotsky to one who uses the name Killer Tomato:
‘OK this is what’s been happening ...
‘While back a Sysop had a call from the Feds, they wanted Force’s,
Phoenix’s, Nom’s, Brett Macmillan’s and my names in connection with
some hacking The Realm had done and also with some carding meant to
have been done too.
‘Then in the last few days I get info passed to me that the Hack
that was done to the Citibank in the US which has led to arrests
over there also had connections to Force and Electron ...’
DPG monitoring service spokesman, Mr Stuart Gill, said he believed
the Pacific Island material was only the tip of the iceberg.
‘They’re far better organised than the police,’ he said.
‘Unless everyone gets their act together and we legislate against
it, we’ll still be talking about the same things this time next
year.’
Yesterday, the South Australian police started an operation to put
bulletin boards operating in that state under surveillance.
And in Western Australia, both political parties agreed they would
proceed with an inquiry into computer hacking, whoever was in
government.
The Victoria Police fraud squad last week announced it had set up a
computer crime squad that would investigate complaints of computer
fraud.
The articles were painful reading for most in the computer
underground.
Who was this Captain Cash? Who was the Killer Tomato? Many believed
they were either Stuart Gill, or that Gill had forged messages by them
or others on Bowen’s board. Was the underground rife with credit card
frauders? No. They formed only a very small part of that community.
Had the Melbourne hackers stolen half a million dollars from Citibank?
Absolutely not. A subsequent police investigation determined this
allegation to be a complete fabrication.
How had six months’ worth of messages from PI and Zen found their way
into the hands of the Victoria Police Bureau of Criminal Intelligence?
Members of the underground had their suspicions.
To some, Stuart Gill’s role in the underground appeared to be that of
an information trader. He would feed a police agency information, and
garner a little new material from it in exchange. He then amalgamated
the new and old material and delivered the new package to another
police agency, which provided him a little more material to add to the
pot. Gill appeared to play the same game in the underground.
A few members of the underground, particularly PI and Zen regulars
Mentat and Brett MacMillan, suspected chicanery and began fighting a
BBS-based war to prove their point. In early 1989, MacMillan posted a
message stating that Hackwatch was not registered as a business
trading name belonging to Stuart Gill at the Victorian Corporate
Affairs office. Further, he stated, DPG Monitoring Services did not
exist as an official registered business trading name either.
MacMillan then stunned the underground by announcing that he had
registered the name Hackwatch himself, presumably to stop Stuart
Gill’s media appearances as a Hackwatch spokesman.
Many in the underground felt duped by Gill, but they weren’t the only
ones. Soon some journalists and police would feel the same way. Stuart
Gill wasn’t even his real name.
What Gill really wanted, some citizens in the underground came to
believe, was a public platform from which he could whip up hacker hype
and then demand the introduction of tough new anti-hacking laws. In
mid-1989, the Commonwealth Government did just that, enacting the
first federal computer crime laws.
It wasn’t the journalists’ fault. For example, in one case Helen
Meredith had asked Gill for verification and he had referred her to
Superintendent Tony Warren, of the Victoria Police, who had backed him
up. A reporter couldn’t ask for better verification than that.
And why wouldn’t Warren back Gill? A registered ISU informer, Gill
also acted as a consultant, adviser, confidant and friend to various
members of the Victoria Police. He was close to both Warren and,
later, to Inspector Chris Cosgriff. From 1985 to 1987, Warren had
worked at the Bureau of Criminal Intelligence (BCI). After that, he
was transferred to the Internal Investigations Department (IID), where
he worked with Cosgriff who joined IID in 1988.
Over a six-month period in 1992, Tony Warren received more than 200
phone calls from Stuart Gill--45 of them to his home number. Over an
eighteen-month period in 1991-92, Chris Cosgriff made at least 76
personal visits to Gill’s home address and recorded 316 phone calls
with him. 3
The Internal Security Unit (ISU) investigated corruption within the
police force. If you had access to ISU, you knew everything that the
Victoria Police officially knew about corruption within its ranks. Its
information was highly sensitive, particularly since it could involve
one police officer dobbing in another. However, a 1993 Victorian
Ombudsman’s report concluded that Cosgriff leaked a large amount of
confidential ISU material to Gill, and that Warren’s relationship with
Gill was inappropriate.4
When Craig Bowen (aka Thunderbird1) came to believe in 1989 that he
had been duped by Gill, he retreated into a state of denial and
depression. The PI community had trusted him. He entered his
friendship with Gill a bright-eyed, innocent young man looking for
adventure. He left the friendship betrayed and gun-shy.
Sad-eyed and feeling dark on the world, Craig Bowen turned off PI and
Zen forever.
Sitting at his computer sometime in the second half of 1989, Force
stared at his screen without seeing anything, his mind a million miles
away. The situation was bad, very bad, and lost in thought, he toyed
with his mouse absent-mindedly, thinking about how to deal with this
problem.
The problem was that someone in Melbourne was going to be busted.
Force wanted to discount the secret warning, to rack it up as just
another in a long line of rumours which swept through the underground
periodically, but he knew he couldn’t do that. The warning was rock
solid; it had come from Gavin.*
The way Force told it, his friend Gavin worked as a contractor to
Telecom by day and played at hacking at night. He was Force’s little
secret, who he kept from the other members of The Realm. Gavin was
definitely not part of the hacker BBS scene. He was older he didn’t
even have a handle and he hacked alone, or with Force, because he saw
hacking in groups as risky.
As a Telecom contractor, Gavin had the kind of access to computers and
networks which most hackers could only dream about. He also had good
contacts inside Telecom--the kind who might answer a few tactfully
worded questions about telephone taps and line traces, or might know a
bit about police investigations requiring Telecom’s help.
Force had met Gavin while buying some second-hand equipment through
the Trading Post. They hit it off, became friends and soon began
hacking together. Under the cover of darkness, they would creep into
Gavin’s office after everyone else had gone home and hack all night.
At dawn, they tidied up and quietly left the building. Gavin went
home, showered and returned to work as if nothing had happened.
Gavin introduced Force to trashing. When they weren’t spending the
night in front of his terminal, Gavin crawled through Telecom’s
dumpsters looking for pearls of information on crumpled bits of office
paper. Account names, passwords, dial-up modems, NUAs--people wrote
all sorts of things down on scrap paper and then threw it out the next
day when they didn’t need it any more.
According to Force, Gavin moved offices frequently, which made it
easier to muddy the trail. Even better, he worked from offices which
had dozens of employees making hundreds of calls each day. Gavin and
Force’s illicit activities were buried under a mound of daily
legitimate transactions.
The two hackers trusted each other; in fact Gavin was the only person
to whom Force revealed the exact address of the CitiSaudi machine. Not
even Phoenix, rising star of The Realm and Force’s favoured protégé,
was privy to all the secrets of Citibank uncovered during Force’s
network explorations.
Force had shared some of this glittering prize with Phoenix, but not
all of it. Just a few of the Citibank cards--token trophies--and
general information about the Citibank network. Believing the
temptation to collect vast numbers of cards and use them would be too
great for the young Phoenix, Force tried to keep the exact location of
the Citibank machine a secret. He knew that Phoenix might eventually
find the Citibank system on his own, and there was little he could do
to stop him. But Force was determined that he wouldn’t help Phoenix
get himself into trouble.
The Citibank network had been a rich source of systems--something
Force also kept to himself. The more he explored, the more he found in
the network. Soon after his first discovery of the CitiSaudi system,
he found a machine called CitiGreece which was just as willing to dump
card details as its Saudi-American counterpart. Out of fifteen or so
credit cards Force discovered on the system, only two appeared to be
valid. He figured the others were test cards and that this must be a
new site. Not long after the discovery of the CitiGreece machine, he
discovered similar embryonic sites in two other countries.
Force liked Phoenix and was impressed by the new hacker’s enthusiasm
and desire to learn about computer networks.
Force introduced Phoenix to Minerva, just as Craig Bowen had done for
Force some years before. Phoenix learned quickly and came back for
more. He was hungry and, in Force’s discerning opinion, very bright.
Indeed, Force saw a great deal of himself in the young hacker. They
were from a similarly comfortable, educated middle-class background.
They were also both a little outside the mainstream. Force’s family
were migrants to Australia. Some of Phoenix’s family lived in Israel,
and his family was very religious.
Phoenix attended one of the most Orthodox Jewish schools in Victoria,
a place which described itself as a ‘modern orthodox Zionist’
institution. Nearly half the subjects offered in year 9 were in Jewish
Studies, all the boys wore yarmulkes and the school expected students
to be fluent in Hebrew by the time they graduated.
In his first years at the school, Phoenix had acquired the nickname
‘The Egg’. Over the following years he became a master at playing the
game--jumping through hoops to please teachers. He learned that doing
well in religious studies was a good way to ingratiate himself to
teachers, as well as his parents and, in their eyes at least, he
became the golden-haired boy.
Anyone scratching below the surface, however, would find the shine of
the golden-haired boy was merely gilt. Despite his success in school
and his matriculation, Phoenix was having trouble. He had been
profoundly affected by the bitter break-up and divorce of his parents
when he was about fourteen.
After the divorce, Phoenix was sent to boarding school in Israel for
about six months. On his return to Melbourne, he lived with his
younger sister and mother at his maternal grandmother’s house. His
brother, the middle child, lived with his father.
School friends sometimes felt awkward visiting Phoenix at home. One of
his best friends found it difficult dealing with Phoenix’s mother,
whose vivacity sometimes bordered on the neurotic and shrill. His
grandmother was a chronic worrier, who pestered Phoenix about using
the home phone line during thunderstorms for fear he would be
electrocuted. The situation with Phoenix’s father wasn’t much better.
A manager at Telecom, he seemed to waver between appearing
disinterested or emotionally cold and breaking into violent outbursts
of anger.
But it was Phoenix’s younger brother who seemed to be the problem
child. He ran away from home at around seventeen and dealt in drugs
before eventually finding his feet. Yet, unlike Phoenix, his brother’s
problems had been laid bare for all to see. Hitting rock bottom forced
him to take stock of his life and come to terms with his situation.
In contrast, Phoenix found less noticeable ways of expressing his
rebellion. Among them was his enthusiasm for tools of power--the
martial arts, weapons such as swords and staffs, and social
engineering. During his final years of secondary school, while still
living at his grandmother’s home, Phoenix took up hacking. He hung
around various Melbourne BBSes, and then he developed an on-line
friendship with Force.
Force watched Phoenix’s hacking skills develop with interest and after
a couple of months he invited him to join The Realm. It was the
shortest initiation of any Realm member, and the vote to include the
new hacker was unanimous. Phoenix proved to be a valuable member,
collecting information about new systems and networks for The Realm’s
databases. At their peak of hacking activity, Force and Phoenix spoke
on the phone almost every day.
Phoenix’s new-found acceptance contrasted with the position of
Electron, who visited The Realm regularly for a few months in 1988. As
Phoenix basked in the warmth of Force’s approval, the
eighteen-year-old Electron felt the chill of his increasing scorn.
Force eventually turfed Electron and his friend, Powerspike, out of
his exclusive Melbourne club of hackers. Well, that was how Force told
it. He told the other members of The Realm that Electron had committed
two major sins. The first was that he had been wasting resources by
using accounts on OTC’s Minerva system to connect to Altos, which
meant the accounts would be immediately tracked and killed.
Minerva admins such as Michael Rosenberg--sworn enemy of The
Realm--recognised the Altos NUA. Rosenberg was OTC’s best defence
against hackers. He had spent so much time trying to weed them out of
Minerva that he knew their habits by heart: hack, then zoom over to
Altos for a chat with fellow hackers, then hack some more.
Most accounts on Minerva were held by corporations. How many
legitimate users from ANZ Bank would visit Altos? None. So when
Rosenberg saw an account connecting to Altos, he silently observed
what the hacker was doing--in case he bragged on the German chat
board--then changed the password and notified the client, in an effort
to lock the hacker out for good.
Electron’s second sin, according to Force, was that he had been
withholding hacking information from the rest of the group. Force’s
stated view--though it didn’t seem to apply to him personally--was one
in, all in.
It was a very public expulsion. Powerspike and Electron told each
other they didn’t really care. As they saw it, they might have visited
The Realm BBS now and then but they certainly weren’t members of The
Realm. Electron joked with Powerspike, ‘Who would want to be a member
of a no-talent outfit like The Realm?’ Still, it must have hurt.
Hackers in the period 1988-90 depended on each other for information.
They honed their skills in a community which shared intelligence and
they grew to rely on the pool of information.
Months later, Force grudgingly allowing Electron to rejoin The Realm,
but the relationship remained testy. When Electron finally logged in
again, he found a file in the BBS entitled ‘Scanner stolen from the
Electron’. Force had found a copy of Electron’s VMS scanner on an
overseas computer while Electron was in exile and had felt no qualms
about pinching it for The Realm.
Except that it wasn’t a scanner. It was a VMS Trojan. And there was a
big difference. It didn’t scan for the addresses of computers on a
network. It snagged passwords when people connected from their VMS
computers to another machine over an X.25 network. Powerspike cracked
up laughing when Electron told him. ‘Well,’ he told Powerspike, ‘Mr
Bigshot Force might know something about Prime computers, but he
doesn’t know a hell of a lot about VMS.’
Despite Electron’s general fall from grace, Phoenix talked to the
outcast because they shared the obsession. Electron was on a steep
learning curve and, like Phoenix, he was moving fast--much faster than
any of the other Melbourne hackers.
When Phoenix admitted talking to Electron regularly, Force tried to
pull him away, but without luck. Some of the disapproval was born of
Force’s paternalistic attitude toward the Australian hacking scene. He
considered himself to be a sort of godfather in the hacking community.
But Force was also increasingly concerned at Phoenix’s ever more
flagrant taunting of computer security bigwigs and system admins. In
one incident, Phoenix knew a couple of system admins and security
people were waiting on a system to trap him by tracing his network
connections. He responded by sneaking into the computer unnoticed and
quietly logging off each admin. Force laughed about it at the time,
but privately the story made him more than a little nervous.
Phoenix enjoyed pitting himself against the pinnacles of the computer
security industry. He wanted to prove he was better, and he frequently
upset people because often he was. Strangely, though, Force’s protégé
also thought that if he told these experts about a few of the holes in
their systems, he would somehow gain their approval. Maybe they would
even give him inside information, like new penetration techniques,
and, importantly, look after him if things got rough. Force wondered
how Phoenix could hold two such conflicting thoughts in his mind at
the same time without questioning the logic of either.
It was against this backdrop that Gavin came to Force with his urgent
warning in late 1989. Gavin had learned that the Australian Federal
Police were getting complaints about hackers operating out of
Melbourne. The Melbourne hacking community had become very noisy and
was leaving footprints all over the place as its members traversed the
world’s data networks.
There were other active hacking communities outside Australia--in the
north of England, in Texas, in New York. But the Melbourne hackers
weren’t just noisy--they were noisy inside American computers. It
wasn’t just a case of American hackers breaking into American systems.
This was about foreign nationals penetrating American computers. And
there was something else which made the Australian hackers a target.
The US Secret Service knew an Australian named Phoenix had been inside
Citibank, one of the biggest financial institutions in the US.
Gavin didn’t have many details to give Force. All he knew was that an
American law enforcement agency--probably the Secret Service--had been
putting enormous pressure on the Australian government to bust these
people.
What Gavin didn’t know was that the Secret Service wasn’t the only
source of pressure coming from the other side of the Pacific. The FBI
had also approached the Australian Federal Police about the mysterious
but noisy Australian hackers who kept breaking into American systems,5
and the AFP had acted on the information.
In late 1989, Detective Superintendent Ken Hunt of the AFP headed an
investigation into the Melbourne hackers. It was believed to be the
first major investigation of computer crime since the introduction of
Australia’s first federal anti-hacking laws. Like most law enforcement
agencies around the world, the AFP were new players in the field of
computer crime. Few officers had expertise in computers, let alone
computer crime, so this case would prove to be an important proving
ground.6
When Gavin broke the news, Force acted immediately. He called Phoenix
on the phone, insisting on meeting him in person as soon as possible.
As their friendship had progressed, they had moved from talking
on-line to telephone conversations and finally to spending time
together in person. Force sat Phoenix down alone and gave him a stern
warning. He didn’t tell him how he got his information, but he made it
clear the source was reliable.
The word was that the police felt they had to bust someone. It had
come to the point where an American law enforcement officer had
reportedly told his Australian counterpart, ‘If you don’t do something
about it soon, we’ll do something about it ourselves’. The American
hadn’t bothered to elaborate on just how they might do something about
it, but it didn’t matter.
Phoenix looked suddenly pale. He had certainly been very noisy, and
was breaking into systems virtually all the time now. Many of those
systems were in the US.
He certainly didn’t want to end up like the West German hacker
Hagbard, whose petrol-doused, charred remains had been discovered in a
German forest in June 1989.
An associate of Pengo’s, Hagbard had been involved in a ring of German
hackers who sold the information they found in American computers to a
KGB agent in East Germany from 1986 to 1988.
In March 1989, German police raided the homes and offices of the
German hacking group and began arresting people. Like Pengo, Hagbard
had secretly turned himself into the German authorities months before
and given full details of the hacking ring’s activities in the hope of
gaining immunity from prosecution.
American law enforcement agencies and prosecutors had not been
enthusiastic about showing the hackers any leniency. Several US
agencies, including the CIA and the FBI, had been chasing the German
espionage ring and they wanted stiff sentences, preferably served in
an American prison.
German court proceedings were under way when Hagbard’s body was found.
Did he commit suicide or was he murdered? No-one knew for sure, but
the news shook the computer underground around the world. Hackers
discussed the issue in considerable depth. On the one hand, Hagbard
had a long history of mental instability and drug use, having spent
time in psychiatric hospitals and detoxification centres off and on
since the beginning of 1987. On the other hand, if you were going to
kill yourself, would you really want to die in the agony of a petrol
fire? Or would you just take a few too many pills or a quick bullet?
Whether it was murder or suicide, the death of Hagbard loomed large
before Phoenix. Who were the American law enforcement agencies after
in Australia? Did they want him?
No. Force reassured him, they were after Electron. The problem for
Phoenix was that he kept talking to Electron on the phone--in voice
conversations. If Phoenix continued associating with Electron he too
would be scooped up in the AFP’s net.
The message to Phoenix was crystal clear.
Stay away from Electron.
‘Listen, you miserable scum-sucking pig.’
‘Huh?’ Phoenix answered, only half paying attention.
‘Piece of shit machine. I did all this editing and the damn thing
didn’t save the changes,’ Electron growled at the Commodore Amiga,
with its 512 k of memory, sitting on the desk in his bedroom.
It was January 1990 and both Phoenix and Electron were at home on
holidays before the start of university.
‘Yeah. Wish I could get this thing working. Fucking hell. Work you!’
Phoenix yelled. Electron could hear him typing at the other end of the
phone while he talked. He had been struggling to get AUX the Apple
version of Unix, running on his Macintosh SE30 for days.
It was difficult to have an uninterrupted conversation with Phoenix.
If it wasn’t his machine crashing, it was his grandmother asking him
questions from the doorway of his room.
‘You wanna go through the list? How big is your file?’ Phoenix asked,
now more focused on the conversation.
‘Huh? Which file?’
‘The dictionary file. The words to feed into the password cracker,’
Phoenix replied.
Electron pulled up his list of dictionary words and looked
at it. I’m going to have to cut this list down a bit, he thought. The
dictionary was part of the password cracking program.
The larger the dictionary, the longer it took the computer to crack a
list of passwords. If he could weed out obscure words--words that
people were unlikely to pick as passwords--then he could make his
cracker run faster.
An efficient password cracker was a valuable tool. Electron would feed
his home computer a password file from a target computer, say from
Melbourne University, then go to bed. About twelve hours later, he
would check on his machine’s progress.
If he was lucky, he would find six or more accounts--user names and
their passwords--waiting for him in a file. The process was completely
automated. Electron could then log into Melbourne University using the
cracked accounts, all of which could be used as jumping-off points for
hacking into other systems for the price of a local telephone call.
Cracking Unix passwords wasn’t inordinately difficult,
provided the different components of the program, such as the
dictionary, had been set up properly. However, it was time-consuming.
The principle was simple. Passwords, kept in password files with their
corresponding user names, were encrypted. It was as impossible to
reverse the encryption process as it was to unscramble an omelette.
Instead, you needed to recreate the encryption process and compare the
results.
There were three basic steps. First, target a computer and get a copy
of its password file. Second, take a list of commonly used passwords,
such as users’ names from the password file or words from a
dictionary, and encrypt those into a second list. Third, put the two
lists side by side and compare them. When you have a match, you have
found the password.
However, there was one important complication: salts. A salt changed
the way a password was encrypted, subtly modifying the way the DES
encryption algorithm worked. For example, the word ‘Underground’
encrypts two different ways with two different salts: ‘kyvbExMcdAOVM’
or ‘lhFaTmw4Ddrjw’. The first two characters represent the salt, the
others represent the password. The computer chooses a salt randomly
when it encrypts a user’s password. Only one is used, and there are
4096 different salts. All Unix computers use salts in their password
encryption process.
Salts were intended to make password cracking far more difficult, so a
hacker couldn’t just encrypt a dictionary once and then compare it to
every list of encrypted passwords he came across in his hacking
intrusions. The 4096 salts mean that a hacker would have to use 4096
different dictionaries--each encrypted with a different salt--to
discover any dictionary word passwords.
On any one system penetrated by Electron, there might be only 25
users, and therefore only 25 passwords, most likely using 25 different
salts. Since the salt characters were stored immediately before the
encrypted password, he could easily see which salt was being used for
a particular password. He would therefore only have to encrypt a
dictionary 25 different times.
Still, even encrypting a large dictionary 25 times using different
salts took up too much hard-drive space for a basic home computer. And
that was just the dictionary. The most sophisticated cracking programs
also produced ‘intelligent guesses’ of passwords. For example, the
program might take the user’s name and try it in both upper- and
lower-case letters. It might also add a ‘1’ at the end. In short, the
program would create new guesses by permuting, shuffling, reversing
and recombining basic information such as a user’s name into new
‘words’.
‘It’s 24000 words. Too damn big,’ Electron said. Paring down a
dictionary was a game of trade-offs. The fewer words in a cracking
dictionary, the less time it was likely to take a computer to break
the encrypted passwords. A smaller dictionary, however, also meant
fewer guesses and so a reduced chance of cracking the password of any
given account.
‘Hmm. Mine’s 24328. We better pare it down together.’
‘Yeah. OK. Pick a letter.’
‘C. Let’s start with the Cs.’
‘Why C?’
‘C. For my grandmother’s cat, Cocoa.’
‘Yeah. OK. Here goes. Cab, Cabal. Cabala. Cabbala.’ Electron paused.
‘What the fuck is a Cabbala?’
‘Dunno. Yeah. I’ve got those. Not Cabbala. OK, Cabaret. Cabbage. Fuck,
I hate cabbage. Who’d pick Cabbage as their password?’
‘A Pom,’ Electron answered.
‘Yeah,’ Phoenix laughed before continuing.
Phoenix sometimes stopped to think about Force’s warning, but usually
he just pushed it to one side when it crept, unwelcomed, into his
thoughts. Still, it worried him. Force took it seriously enough. Not
only had he stopped associating with Electron, he appeared to have
gone very, very quiet.
In fact, Force had found a new love: music. He was writing and
performing his own songs. By early 1990 he seemed so busy with his
music that he had essentially put The Realm on ice. Its members took
to congregating on a machine owned by another Realm member, Nom, for a
month or so.
Somehow, however, Phoenix knew that wasn’t all of the story. A hacker
didn’t pick up and walk away from hacking just like that. Especially
not Force. Force had been obsessed with hacking. It just didn’t make
sense. There had to be something more. Phoenix comforted himself with
the knowledge that he had followed Force’s advice and had stayed away
from Electron. Well, for a while anyway.
He had backed right off, watched and waited, but nothing happened.
Electron was as active in the underground as ever but he hadn’t been
busted. Nothing had changed. Maybe Force’s information had been wrong.
Surely the feds would have busted Electron by now if they were going
to do anything. So Phoenix began to rebuild his relationship with
Electron. It was just too tempting. Phoenix was determined not to let
Force’s ego impede his own progress.
By January 1990, Electron was hacking almost all the time. The only
time he wasn’t hacking was when he was sleeping, and even then he
often dreamed of hacking. He and Phoenix were sailing past all the
other Melbourne hackers. Electron had grown beyond Powerspike’s
expertise just as Phoenix had accelerated past Force. They were moving
away from X.25 networks and into the embryonic Internet, which was
just as illegal since the universities guarded computer
accounts--Internet access--very closely.
Even Nom, with his growing expertise in the Unix operating system
which formed the basis of many new Internet sites, wasn’t up to
Electron’s standard. He didn’t have the same level of commitment to
hacking, the same obsession necessary to be a truly cutting-edge
hacker. In many ways, the relationship between Nom and Phoenix
mirrored the relationship between Electron and Powerspike: the support
act to the main band.
Electron didn’t consider Phoenix a close friend, but he was a kindred
spirit. In fact he didn’t trust Phoenix, who had a big mouth, a big
ego and a tight friendship with Force--all strikes against him. But
Phoenix was intelligent and he wanted to learn. Most of all, he had
the obsession. Phoenix contributed to a flow of information which
stimulated Electron intellectually, even if more information flowed
toward Phoenix than from him.
Within a month, Phoenix and Electron were in regular contact, and
during the summer holidays they were talking on the phone--voice--all
the time, sometimes three or four times a day. Hack then talk. Compare
notes. Hack some more. Check in again, ask a few questions. Then back
to hacking.
The actual hacking was generally a solo act. For a social animal like
Phoenix, it was a lonely pursuit. While many hackers revelled in the
intense isolation, some, such as Phoenix, also needed to check in with
fellow humanity once in a while. Not just any humanity--those who
understood and shared in the obsession.
‘Caboodle. Caboose, ‘Electron went on, ‘Cabriolet. What the hell is a
Cabriolet? Do you know?’
‘Yeah,’ Phoenix answered, then rushed on. ‘OK. Cacao. Cache. Cachet
...’
‘Tell us. What is it?’ Electron cut Phoenix off.
‘Cachinnation. Cachou ...’
‘Do you know?’ Electron asked again, slightly irritated. As usual,
Phoenix was claiming to know things he probably didn’t.
‘Hmm? Uh, yeah,’ Phoenix answered weakly. ‘Cackle. Cacophony ...’
Electron knew that particular Phoenix ‘yeah’--the one which said ‘yes’
but meant ‘no, and I don’t want to own up to it either so let’s drop
it’.
Electron made it a habit not to believe most of the things Phoenix
told him. Unless there was some solid proof, Electron figured it was
just hot air. He didn’t actually like Phoenix much as a person, and
found talking to him difficult at times. He preferred the company of
his fellow hacker Powerspike.
Powerspike was both bright and creative. Electron clicked with him.
They often joked about the other’s bad taste in music. Powerspike
liked heavy metal, and Electron liked indie music. They shared a
healthy disrespect for authority. Not just the authority of places
they hacked into, like the US Naval Research Laboratories or NASA, but
the authority of The Realm. When it came to politics, they both leaned
to the left. However, their interest tended more toward
anarchy--opposing symbols of the military-industrial complex--than to
joining a political party.
After their expulsion from The Realm, Electron had been a little
isolated for a time. The tragedy of his personal life had contributed
to the isolation. At the age of eight, he had seen his mother die of
lung cancer. He hadn’t witnessed the worst parts of her dying over two
years, as she had spent some time in a German cancer clinic hoping for
a reprieve. She had, however, come home to die, and Electron had
watched her fade away.
When the phone call from hospital came one night, Electron could tell
what had happened from the serious tones of the adults. He burst into
tears. He could hear his father answering questions on the phone. Yes,
the boy had taken it hard. No, his sister seemed to be OK. Two years
younger than Electron, she was too young to understand.
Electron had never been particularly close to his sister. He viewed
her as an unfeeling, shallow person--someone who simply skimmed along
the surface of life. But after their mother’s death, their father
began to favour Electron’s sister, perhaps because of her resemblance
to his late wife. This drove a deeper, more subtle wedge between
brother and sister.
Electron’s father, a painter who taught art at a local high school,
was profoundly affected by his wife’s death. Despite some barriers of
social class and money, theirs had been a marriage of great affection
and love and they made a happy home. Electron’s father’s paintings
hung on almost every wall in the house, but after his wife’s death he
put down his brushes and never took them up again. He didn’t talk
about it. Once, Electron asked him why he didn’t paint any more. He
looked away and told Electron that he had ‘lost the motivation’.
Electron’s grandmother moved into the home to help her son care for
his two children, but she developed Alzheimer’s disease. The children
ended up caring for her. As a teenager, Electron thought it was
maddening caring for someone who couldn’t even remember your name.
Eventually, she moved into a nursing home.
In August 1989, Electron’s father arrived home from the doctor’s
office. He had been mildly ill for some time, but refused to take time
off work to visit a doctor. He was proud of having taken only one
day’s sick leave in the last five years. Finally, in the holidays, he
had seen a doctor who had conducted numerous tests. The results had
come in.
Electron’s father had bowel cancer and the disease had spread. It
could not be cured. He had two years to live at the most.
Electron was nineteen years old at the time, and his early love of the
computer, and particularly the modem, had already turned into a
passion. Several years earlier his father, keen to encourage his
fascination with the new machines, used to bring one of the school’s
Apple IIes home over weekends and holidays. Electron spent hours at
the borrowed machine. When he wasn’t playing on the computer, he read,
plucking one of his father’s spy novels from the over-crowded
bookcases, or his own favourite book, The Lord of The Rings.
Computer programming had, however, captured the imagination of the
young Electron years before he used his first computer. At the age of
eleven he was using books to write simple programs on paper--mostly
games--despite the fact that he had never actually touched a keyboard.
His school may have had a few computers, but its administrators had
little understanding of what to do with them. In year 9, Electron had
met with the school’s career counsellor, hoping to learn about career
options working with computers.
‘I think maybe I’d like to do a course in computer programming ...’
His voice trailed off, hesitantly.
‘Why would you want to do that?’ she said. ‘Can’t you think of
anything better than that?’
‘Uhm ...’ Electron was at a loss. He didn’t know what to do. That was
why he had come to her. He cast around for something which seemed a more mainstream career option but which might also let him work on
computers. ‘Well, accounting maybe?’
‘Oh yes, that’s much better,’ she said.
‘You can probably even get into a university, and study accounting
there. I’m sure you will enjoy it,’ she added, smiling as she closed
his file.
The borrowed computers were, in Electron’s opinion, one of the few
good things about school. He did reasonably well at school, but only
because it didn’t take much effort. Teachers consistently told his
father that Electron was underachieving and that he distracted the
other students in class. For the most part, the criticism was just
low-level noise. Occasionally, however, Electron had more serious
run-ins with his teachers. Some thought he was gifted. Others thought
the freckle-faced, Irish-looking boy who helped his friends set fire
to textbooks at the back of the class was nothing but a smart alec.
When he was sixteen, Electron bought his own computer. He used it to
crack software protection, just as Par had done. The Apple was soon
replaced by a more powerful Amiga with a 20 megabyte IBM compatible
sidecar. The computers lived, in succession, on one of the two desks
in his bedroom. The second desk, for his school work, was usually
piled high with untouched assignments.
The most striking aspect of Electron’s room was the ream after ream of
dot matrix computer print-out which littered the floor. Standing at
almost any point in the simply furnished room, someone could reach out
and grab at least one pile of print-outs, most of which contained
either usernames and passwords or printed computer program code. In
between the piles of print-outs, were T-shirts, jeans, sneakers and
books on the floor. It was impossible to walk across Electron’s room
without stepping on something.
The turning point for Electron was the purchase of a second-hand 300
baud modem in 1986. Overnight, the modem transformed Electron’s love
of the computer into an obsession. During the semester immediately
before the modem’s arrival, Electron’s report card showed six As and
one B. The following semester he earned six Bs and only one A.
Electron had moved onto bigger and better things than school. He
quickly became a regular user of underground BBSes and began hacking.
He was enthralled by an article he discovered describing how several
hackers claimed to have moved a satellite around in space simply by
hacking computers. From that moment on, Electron decided he wanted to
hack--to find out if the article was true.
Before he graduated from school in 1987, Electron had hacked NASA, an
achievement which saw him dancing around the dining room table in the
middle of the night chanting, ‘I got into NASA! I got into NASA!’ He
hadn’t moved any satellites, but getting into the space agency was as
thrilling as flying to the moon.
By 1989, he had been hacking regularly for years, much to the chagrin
of his sister, who claimed her social life suffered because the
family’s sole phone line was always tied up by the modem.
For Phoenix, Electron was a partner in hacking, and to a lesser degree
a mentor. Electron had a lot to offer, by that time even more than The
Realm.
‘Cactus, Cad, Cadaver, Caddis, Cadence, Cadet, Caesura. What the fuck
is a Caesura?’ Phoenix kept ploughing through the Cs.
‘Dunno. Kill that,’ Electron answered, distracted.
‘Caesura. Well, fuck. I know I’d wanna use that as a password.’
Phoenix laughed. ‘What the hell kind of word is Caduceus?’
‘A dead one. Kill all those. Who makes up these dictionaries?’
Electron said.
‘Yeah.’
‘Caisson, Calabash. Kill those. Kill, kill, kill,’ Electron said
gleefully.
‘Hang on. How come I don’t have Calabash in my list?’ Phoenix feigned
indignation.
Electron laughed.
‘Hey,’ Phoenix said, ‘we should put in words like "Qwerty" and
"ABCDEF" and "ASDFGH".’
‘Did that already.’ Electron had already put together a list of other
common passwords, such as the ‘words’ made when a user typed the six
letters in the first alphabet row on a keyboard.
Phoenix started on the list again. ‘OK the COs. Commend, Comment,
Commerce, Commercial, Commercialism, Commercially. Kill those last
three.’
‘Huh? Why kill Commercial?’
‘Let’s just kill all the words with more than eight characters,’
Phoenix said.
‘No. That’s not a good idea.’
‘How come? The computer’s only going to read the first eight
characters and encrypt those. So we should kill all the rest.’
Sometimes Phoenix just didn’t get it. But Electron didn’t rub it in.
He kept it low-key, so as not to bruise Phoenix’s ego. Often Electron
sensed Phoenix sought approval from the older hacker, but it was a
subtle, perhaps even unconscious search.
‘Nah,’ Electron began, ‘See, someone might use the whole word,
Commerce or Commercial. The first eight letters of these words are not
the same. The eighth character in Commerce is "e", but in Commercial
it’s "i".’
There was a short silence.
‘Yeah,’ Electron went on, ‘but you could kill all the words
like Commercially, and Commercialism, that come after Commercial.
See?’
‘Yeah. OK. I see,’ Phoenix said.
‘But don’t just kill every word longer than eight characters,’
Electron added.
‘Hmm. OK. Yeah, all right.’ Phoenix seemed a bit out of sorts. ‘Hey,’
he brightened a bit, ‘it’s been a whole ten minutes since my machine
crashed.’
‘Yeah?’ Electron tried to sound interested.
‘Yeah. You know,’ Phoenix changed the subject to his favourite topic,
‘what we really need is Deszip. Gotta get that.’ Deszip was a computer
program which could be used for password cracking.
‘And Zardoz. We need Zardoz,’ Electron added. Zardoz was a restricted
electronic publication detailing computer security holes.
‘Yeah. Gotta try to get into Spaf’s machine. Spaf’ll have it for
sure.’ Eugene Spafford, Associate Professor of Computer Science at
Purdue University in the US, was one of the best known computer
security experts on the Internet in 1990.
‘Yeah.’
And so began their hunt for the holy grail.
Deszip and Zardoz glittered side by side as the most coveted prizes in
the world of the international Unix hacker.
Cracking passwords took time and computer resources. Even a moderately
powerful university machine would grunt and groan under the weight of
the calculations if it was asked to do. But the Deszip program could
change that, lifting the load until it was, by comparison,
feather-light. It worked at breathtaking speed and a hacker using
Deszip could crack encrypted passwords up to 25 times faster.
Zardoz, a worldwide security mailing list, was also precious, but for
a different reason. Although the mailing list’s formal name was
Security Digest, everyone in the underground simply called it Zardoz,
after the computer from which the mailouts originated. Zardoz also
happened to be the name of a science fiction cult film starring Sean Connery. Run by Neil Gorsuch, the Zardoz mailing list contained
articles, or postings, from various members of the computer security
industry. The postings discussed newly discovered bugs--problems with
a computer system which could be exploited to break into or gain root
access on a machine. The beauty of the bugs outlined in Zardoz was
that they worked on any computer system using the programs or
operating systems it described. Any university, any military system,
any research institute which ran the software documented in Zardoz was
vulnerable. Zardoz was a giant key ring, full of pass keys made to fit
virtually every lock.
True, system administrators who read a particular Zardoz posting might
take steps to close up that security hole. But as the hacking
community knew well, it was a long time between a Zardoz posting and a
shortage of systems with that hole. Often a bug worked on many
computers for months--sometimes years--after being announced on
Zardoz.
Why? Many admins had never heard of the bug when it was first
announced. Zardoz was an exclusive club, and most admins simply
weren’t members. You couldn’t just walk in off the street and sign up
for Zardoz. You had to be vetted by peers in the computer security
industry. You had to administer a legitimate computer system,
preferably with a large institution such as a university or a research
body such as CSIRO. Figuratively speaking, the established members of
the Zardoz mailing list peered down their noses at you and determined
if you were worthy of inclusion in Club Zardoz. Only they decided if
you were trustworthy enough to share in the great security secrets of
the world’s computer systems.
In 1989, the white hats, as hackers called the professional security
gurus, were highly paranoid about Zardoz getting into the wrong hands.
So much so, in fact, that many postings to Zardoz were fine examples
of the art of obliqueness. A computer security expert would hint at a
new bug in his posting without actually coming out and explaining it
in what is commonly referred to as a ‘cookbook’ explanation.
This led to a raging debate within the comp-sec industry. In one
corner, the cookbook purists said that bulletins such as Zardoz were
only going to be helpful if people were frank with each other. They
wanted people posting to Zardoz to provide detailed, step-by-step
explanations on how to exploit a particular security hole. Hackers
would always find out about bugs one way or another and the best way
to keep them out of your system was to secure it properly in the first
place. They wanted full disclosure.
In the other corner, the hard-line, command-and-control computer
security types argued that posting an announcement to Zardoz posed the
gravest of security risks. What if Zardoz fell into the wrong hands?
Why, any sixteen-year-old hacker would have step-by-step directions
showing how to break into thousands of individual computers! If you
had to reveal a security flaw--and the jury was still out in their
minds as to whether that was such a good idea--it should be done only
in the most oblique terms.
What the hard-liners failed to understand was that world-class hackers
like Electron could read the most oblique, carefully crafted Zardoz
postings and, within a matter of days if not hours, work out exactly
how to exploit the security hole hinted at in the text. After which
they could just as easily have written a cookbook version of the security bug.
Most good hackers had come across one or two issues of Zardoz in their
travels, often while rummaging though the system administrator’s mail
on a prestigious institution’s computer. But no-one from the elite of
the Altos underground had a full archive of all the back issues. The
hacker who possessed that would have details of every major security
hole discovered by the world’s best computer security minds since at
least 1988.
Like Zardoz, Deszip was well guarded. It was written by computer
security expert Dr Matthew Bishop, who worked at NASA’s Research
Institute for Advanced Computer Science before taking up a teaching
position at Dartmouth, an Ivy League college in New Hampshire. The
United States government deemed Deszip’s very fast encryption
algorithms to be so important, they were classified as armaments. It
was illegal to export them from the US.
Of course, few hackers in 1990 had the sophistication to use weapons
such as Zardoz and Deszip properly. Indeed, few even knew they
existed. But Electron and Phoenix knew, along with a tiny handful of
others, including Pad and Gandalf from Britain. Congregating on Altos
in Germany, they worked with a select group of others carefully
targeting sites likely to contain parts of their holy grail. They were
methodical and highly strategic, piecing information together with
exquisite, almost forensic, skill. While the common rabble of other
hackers were thumping their heads against walls in brute-force attacks
on random machines, these hackers spent their time hunting for
strategic pressure points--the Achilles’ heels of the computer
security community.
They had developed an informal hit list of machines, most of which
belonged to high-level computer security gurus. Finding one or two
early issues of Zardoz, Electron had combed through their postings
looking not just on the surface--for the security bugs--but also
paying careful attention to the names and addresses of the people
writing articles. Authors who appeared frequently in Zardoz, or had
something intelligent to say, went on the hit list. It was those
people who were most likely to keep copies of Deszip or an archive of
Zardoz on their machines.
Electron had searched across the world for information about Deszip
and DES (Data Encryption Standard), the original encryption program
later used in Deszip. He hunted through computers at the University of
New York, the US Naval Research Laboratories in Washington DC,
Helsinki University of Technology, Rutgers University in New Jersey,
Melbourne University and Tampere University in Finland, but the search
bore little fruit. He found a copy of CDES, a public domain encryption
program which used the DES algorithm, but not Deszip. CDES could be
used to encrypt files but not to crack passwords.
The two Australian hackers had, however, enjoyed a small taste of
Deszip. In 1989 they had broken into a computer at Dartmouth College
called Bear. They discovered Deszip carefully tucked away in a corner
of Bear and had spirited a copy of the program away to a safer machine
at another institution.
It turned out to be a hollow victory. That copy of Deszip had been
encrypted with Crypt, a program based on the German Enigma machine
used in World War II. Without the passphrase--the key to unlock the encryption--it was impossible to read Deszip. All they could do was
stare, frustrated, at the file name Deszip labelling a treasure just
out of reach.
Undaunted, the hackers decided to keep the encrypted file just in case
they ever came across the passphrase somewhere--in an email letter,
for example--in one of the dozens of new computers they now hacked
regularly. Relabelling the encrypted Deszip file with a more innocuous
name, they stored the copy in a dark corner of another machine.
Thinking it wise to buy a little insurance as well, they gave a second
copy of the encrypted Deszip to Gandalf, who stored it on a machine in
the UK in case the Australians’ copy disappeared unexpectedly.
In January 1990, Electron turned his attention to getting Zardoz.
After carefully reviewing an old copy of Zardoz, he had discovered a
system admin in Melbourne on the list. The subscriber could well have
the entire Zardoz archive on his machine, and that machine was so
close--less than half an hour’s drive from Electron’s home. All
Electron had to do was to break into the CSIRO.
The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, or
CSIRO, is a government owned and operated research body with many
offices around Australia. Electron only wanted to get into one: the
Division of Information Technology at 55 Barry Street, Carlton, just
around the corner from the University of Melbourne.
Rummaging through a Melbourne University computer, Electron had
already found one copy of the Zardoz archive, belonging to a system
admin. He gathered it up and quietly began downloading it to his
computer, but as his machine slowly siphoned off the Zardoz copy, his
link to the university abruptly went dead. The admin had discovered
the hacker and quickly killed the connection. All of which left
Electron back at square one--until he found another copy of Zardoz on
the CSIRO machine.
It was nearly 3 a.m. on 1 February 1990, but Electron wasn’t tired.
His head was buzzing. He had just successfully penetrated an account
called Worsley on the CSIRO computer called
DITMELA, using the sendmail bug. Electron assumed
DITMELA stood for Division of Information Technology, Melbourne,
computer ‘A’.
Electron began sifting through Andrew Worsley’s directories that day.
He knew Zardoz was in there somewhere, since he had seen it before.
After probing the computer, experimenting with different security
holes hoping one would let him inside, Electron managed to slip in
unnoticed. It was mid-afternoon, a bad time to hack a computer since
someone at work would likely spot the intruder before long. So
Electron told himself this was just a reconnaissance mission. Find out
if Zardoz was on the machine, then get out of there fast and come back
later--preferably in the middle of the night--to pull Zardoz out.
When he found a complete collection of Zardoz in Worsley’s directory,
Electron was tempted to try a grab and run. The problem was that, with
his slow modem, he couldn’t run very quickly. Downloading Zardoz would
take several hours. Quashing his overwhelming desire to reach out and
grab Zardoz then and there, he slipped out of the machine noiselessly.
Early next morning, an excited and impatient Electron crept back into
DITMELA and headed straight for Worsley’s directory. Zardoz was still
there. And a sweet irony. Electron was using a security bug he had
found on an early issue of Zardoz to break into the computer which
would surrender the entire archive to him.
Getting Zardoz out of the CSIRO machine was going to be a little
difficult. It was a big archive and at 300 baud--30 characters per
second--Electron’s modem would take five hours to siphon off an entire
copy. Using the CAT command, Electron made copies of all the Zardoz
issues and bundled them up into one 500 k file. He called the new file
.t and stored it in the temporary directory on DITMELA.
Then he considered what to do next. He would mail the Zardoz bundle to
another account outside the CSIRO computer, for safe-keeping. But
after that he had to make a choice: try to download the thing himself
or hang up, call Phoenix and ask him to download it.
Using his 2400 baud modem, Phoenix would be able to download the
Zardoz bundle eight times faster than Electron could. On the other
hand, Electron didn’t particularly want to give Phoenix access to the
CSIRO machine. They had both been targeting the machine, but he hadn’t
told Phoenix that he had actually managed to get in. It wasn’t that he
planned on withholding Zardoz when he got it. Quite the contrary,
Electron wanted Phoenix to read the security file so they could bounce
ideas off each other. When it came to accounts, however, Phoenix had a
way of messing things up. He talked too much. He was simply not
discreet.
While Electron considered his decision, his fingers kept working at
the keyboard. He typed quickly, mailing copies of the Zardoz bundle to
two hacked student accounts at Melbourne University. With the
passwords to both accounts, he could get in whenever he wanted and he
wasn’t taking any chances with this precious cargo. Two accounts were
safer than one--a main account and a back-up in case someone changed
the password on the first one.
Then, as the DITMELA machine was still in the process of mailing the
Zardoz bundle off to the back-up sites, Electron’s connection suddenly
died.
The CSIRO machine had hung up on him, which probably meant one thing.
The admin had logged him off. Electron was furious. What the hell was
a system administrator doing on a computer at this hour? The admin was
supposed to be asleep! That’s why Electron logged on when he did. He
had seen Zardoz on the CSIRO machine the day before but he had been so
patient refusing to touch it because the risk of discovery was too
great. And now this.
The only hope was to call Phoenix and get him to login to the
Melbourne Uni accounts to see if the mail had arrived safely. If so,
he could download it with his faster modem before the CSIRO admin had
time to warn the Melbourne Uni admin, who would change the passwords.
Electron got on the phone to Phoenix. They had long since stopped
caring about what time of day they rang each other. 10 p.m. 2 a.m.
4.15 a.m. 6.45 a.m.
‘Yeah.’ Electron greeted Phoenix in the usual way.
‘Yup,’ Phoenix responded.
Electron told Phoenix what happened and gave him the two accounts at
Melbourne University where he had mailed the Zardoz bundle.
Phoenix hung up and rang back a few minutes later. Both accounts were
dead. Someone from Melbourne University had gone in and changed the
passwords within 30 minutes of Electron being booted off the CSIRO
computer. Both hackers were disturbed by the implications of this
event. It meant someone--in fact probably several people--were onto
them. But their desperation to get Zardoz overcame their fear.
Electron had one more account on the CSIRO computer. He didn’t want to
give it to Phoenix, but he didn’t have a choice. Still, the whole
venture was filled with uncertainty. Who knew if the Zardoz bundle was
still there? Surely an admin who bothered to kick Electron out would
move Zardoz to somewhere inaccessible. There was, however, a single
chance.
When Electron read off the password and username, he told Phoenix to
copy the Zardoz bundle to a few other machines on the Internet instead
of trying to download it to his own computer. It would be much
quicker, and the CSIRO admin wouldn’t dare break into someone else’s
computers to delete the copied file. Choosing overseas sites would
make it even harder for the admin to reach the admins of those
machines and warn them in time. Then, once Zardoz was safely tucked
away in a few back-up sites, Phoenix could download it over the
Internet from one of those with less risk of being booted off the
machine halfway through the process.
Sitting at his home in Kelvin Grove, Thornbury, just two suburbs north
of the CSIRO machine, Ian Mathieson watched the hacker break into his
computer again. Awoken by a phone call at 2.30 a.m. telling him there
was a suspected hacker in his computer, Mathieson immediately logged
in to his work system, DITMELA, via his home computer and modem. The
call, from David Hornsby of the Melbourne University Computer Science
Department, was no false alarm.
After watching the unknown hacker, who had logged in through a
Melbourne University machine terminal server, for about twenty
minutes, Mathieson booted the hacker off his system. Afterwards he
noticed that the DITMELA computer was still trying to execute a
command issued by the hacker. He looked a little closer, and
discovered DITMELA was trying to deliver mail to two Melbourne
University accounts.
The mail, however, hadn’t been completely delivered. It was still
sitting in the mail spool, a temporary holding pen for undelivered
mail. Curious as to what the hacker would want so much from his
system, Mathieson moved the file into a subdirectory to look at it. He
was horrified to find the entire Zardoz archive, and he knew exactly
what it meant. These were no ordinary hackers--they were precision
fliers. Fortunately, Mathieson
consoled himself, he had stopped the mail before it had been sent out
and secured it.
Unfortunately, however, Mathieson had missed Electron’s original
file--the bundle of Zardoz copies. When Electron had mailed the file,
he had copied it, leaving the original intact. They were still sitting
on DITMELA under the unassuming name .t. Mailing a file didn’t delete
it--the computer only sent a copy of the original. Mathieson was an
intelligent man, a medical doctor with a master’s degree in computer
science, but he had forgotten to check the temporary directory, one of
the few places a hacker could store files on a Unix system if he
didn’t have root privileges.
At exactly 3.30 a.m. Phoenix logged into DITMELA from the University
of Texas. He quickly looked in the temporary directory. The .t file
was there, just as Electron had said it would be. The hacker quickly
began transferring it back to the University of Texas.
He was feeling good. It looked like the Australians were going to get
the entire Zardoz collection after all. Everything was going extremely
well--until the transfer suddenly died. Phoenix had forgotten to check
that there was enough disk space available on the University of Texas
account to download the sizeable Zardoz bundle. Now, as he was logged
into a very hot machine, a machine where the admin could well be
watching his every move, he discovered there wasn’t enough room for
the Zardoz file.
Aware that every second spent on-line to DITMELA posed a serious risk,
Phoenix logged off the CSIRO machine immediately. Still connected to
the Texas computer, he fiddled around with it, deleting other files
and making enough room to pull the whole 500 k Zardoz file across.
At 3.37 a.m. Phoenix entered DITMELA again. This time, he vowed,
nothing would go wrong. He started up the file transfer and waited.
Less than ten minutes later, he logged off the CSIRO computer and
nervously checked the University of Texas system. It was there.
Zardoz, in all its glory. And it was his! Phoenix was ecstatic.
He wasn’t done yet and there was no time for complacency. Swiftly, he
began compressing and encrypting Zardoz. He
compressed it because a smaller file was less obvious on the Texas
machine and was faster to send to a back-up machine. He encrypted it
so no-one nosing around the file would be able to see what was in it.
He wasn’t just worried about system admins; the Texas system was
riddled with hackers, in part because it was home to his friend,
Legion of Doom hacker Erik Bloodaxe, a
student at the university.
After Phoenix was satisfied Zardoz was safe, he rang Electron just
before 4 a.m. with the good news. By 8.15, Phoenix had downloaded
Zardoz from the Texas computer onto his own machine. By 1.15 p.m.,
Electron had downloaded it from Phoenix’s machine to his own.
Zardoz had been a difficult conquest, but Deszip would prove to be
even more so. While dozens of security experts possessed complete
Zardoz archives, far fewer people had Deszip. And, at least
officially, all of them were in the US.
The US government banned the export of cryptography algorithms. To
send a copy of Deszip, or DES or indeed any other encryption program
outside the US was a crime. It was illegal because the US State
Department’s Office of Defense Trade Controls considered any
encryption program to be a weapon. ITAR, the International Traffic in
Arms Regulations stemming from the US Arms Export Control Act 1977,
restricted publication of and trad in ‘defense articles’. It didn’t matter whether you flew to Europe with a disk in your pocket, or you
sent the material over the Internet. If you violated ITAR, you faced
the prospect of prison.
Occasionally, American computer programmers discreetly slipped copies
of encryption programs to specialists in their field outside the US.
Once the program was outside the US, it was fair game--there was
nothing US authorities could do about someone in Norway sending Deszip
to a colleague in Australia. But even so, the comp-sec and
cryptography communities outside the US still held programs such as
Deszip very tightly within their own inner sanctums.
All of which meant that Electron and Phoenix would almost certainly
have to target a site in the US. Electron continued to compile a hit
list, based on the Zardoz mailing list, which he gave to Phoenix. The
two hackers then began searching the growing Internet for computers
belonging to the targets.
It was an impressive hit list. Matthew Bishop, author of Deszip.
Russell Brand, of the Lawrence Livermore National Labs, a research
laboratory funded by the US Department of Energy. Dan Farmer, an
author of the computer program COPS, a popular security-testing
program which included a password cracking program. There were others.
And, at the top of the list, Eugene Spafford, or Spaf, as the hackers
called him.
By 1990, the computer underground viewed Spaf not just as security
guru, but also as an anti-hacker zealot. Spaf was based at Purdue
University, a hotbed of computer security experts. Bishop had earned
his PhD at Purdue and Dan Farmer was still there. Spaf was also one of
the founders of usenet, the Internet newsgroups service. While working
as a computer scientist at the university, he had made a name for
himself by, among other things, writing a technical analysis of the
RTM worm. The worm, authored by Cornell University student Robert T.
Morris Jr in 1988, proved to be a boon for Spaf’s career.
Prior to the RTM worm, Spaf had been working in software engineering.
After the worm, he became a computer ethicist and a very public
spokesman for the conservatives in the computer security industry.
Spaf went on tour across the US, lecturing the public and the media on
worms, viruses and the ethics of hacking. During the Morris case,
hacking became a hot topic in the United States, and Spaf fed the
flames. When Judge Howard G. Munson refused to sentence Morris to
prison, instead ordering him to complete 400 hours community service,
pay a $10000 fine and submit to three years probation, Spaf publicly
railed against the decision. The media reported that he had called on
the computer industry to boycott any company which chose to employ
Robert T. Morris Jr.
Targeting Spaf therefore served a dual purpose for the Australian
hackers. He was undoubtedly a repository of treasures such as Deszip,
and he was also a tall poppy.
One night, Electron and Phoenix decided to break into Spaf’s machine
at Purdue to steal a copy of Deszip. Phoenix would do the actual
hacking, since he had the fast modem, but he would talk to Electron
simultaneously on the other phone line. Electron would guide him at
each step. That way, when Phoenix hit a snag, he wouldn’t have to
retreat to regroup and risk discovery.
Both hackers had managed to break into another computer at Purdue,
called Medusa. But Spaf had a separate machine, Uther, which was
connected to Medusa.
Phoenix poked and prodded at Uther, trying to open a hole wide enough
for him to crawl through. At Electron’s suggestion, he tried to use
the CHFN bug. The CHFN command lets users change the information
provided--such as their name, work address or office phone
number--when someone ‘fingers’ their accounts. The bug had appeared in
one of the Zardoz files and Phoenix and Electron had already used it
to break into several other machines.
Electron wanted to use the CHFN bug because, if the attack was
successful, Phoenix would be able to make a root account for himself
on Spaf’s machine. That would be the ultimate slap in the face to a
high-profile computer security guru.
But things weren’t going well for Phoenix. The frustrated Australian
hacker kept telling Electron that the bug should work, but it
wouldn’t, and he couldn’t figure out why. The problem, Electron
finally concluded, was that Spaf’s machine was a Sequent. The CHFN bug
depended on a particular Unix password file structure, but Sequents
used a different structure. It didn’t help that Phoenix didn’t know
that much about Sequents--they were one of Gandalf’s specialties.
After a few exasperating hours struggling to make the CHFN bug work,
Phoenix gave up and turned to another security flaw suggested by
Electron: the FTP bug. Phoenix ran through the bug in his mind.
Normally, someone used FTP, or file transfer protocol, to transfer
files over a network, such as the Internet, from one computer to
another. FTPing to another machine was a bit like telnetting, but the
user didn’t need a password to login and the commands he could execute
once in the other computer were usually very limited.
If it worked, the FTP bug would allow Phoenix to slip in an extra
command during the FTP login process. That command would force Spaf’s
machine to allow Phoenix to login as anyone he wanted--and what he
wanted was to login as someone who had root privileges. The ‘root’
account might be a little obvious
if anyone was watching, and it didn’t always have remote
access anyway. So he chose ‘daemon’, another commonly root-privileged
account, instead.
It was a shot in the dark. Phoenix was fairly sure Spaf would have
secured his machine against such an obvious attack, but Electron urged
him to give it a try anyway. The FTP bug had been announced throughout
the computer security community long ago, appearing in an early issue
of Zardoz. Phoenix hesitated, but he had run out of ideas, and time.
Phoenix typed:
FTP -i uther.purdue.edu
quote user anonymous
quote cd ~daemon
quote pass anything
The few seconds it took for his commands to course from his suburban
home in Melbourne and race deep into the Midwest felt like a lifetime.
He wanted Spaf’s machine, wanted Deszip, and wanted this attack to
work. If he could just get Deszip, he felt the Australians would be
unstoppable.
Spaf’s machine opened its door as politely as a doorman at the Ritz
Carlton. Phoenix smiled at his computer. He was in.
It was like being in Aladdin’s cave. Phoenix just sat there, stunned
at the bounty which lay before him. It was his, all his. Spaf had
megabytes of security files in his directories. Source code for the
RTM Internet worm. Source code for the WANK worm. Everything. Phoenix
wanted to plunge his hands in each treasure chest and scoop out greedy
handfuls, but he resisted the urge. He had a more important--a more
strategic--mission to accomplish first.
He prowled through the directories, hunting everywhere for Deszip.
Like a burglar scouring the house for the family silver, he pawed
through directory after directory. Surely, Spaf had to have Deszip. If
anyone besides Matthew Bishop was going to have a copy, he would. And
finally, there it was. Deszip. Just waiting for Phoenix.
Then Phoenix noticed something else. Another file. Curiosity got the
better of him and he zoomed in to have a quick look. This one
contained a passphrase--the passphrase. The phrase the Australians
needed to decrypt the original copy of Deszip they had stolen from the
Bear computer at Dartmouth three months earlier. Phoenix couldn’t
believe the passphrase. It was so simple, so obvious. But he caught
himself. This was no time to cry over spilled milk. He had to get
Deszip out of the machine quickly, before anyone noticed he was there.
But as Phoenix began typing in commands, his screen appeared to freeze
up. He checked. It wasn’t his computer. Something was wrong at the
other end. He was still logged into Spaf’s machine. The connection
hadn’t been killed. But when he typed commands, the computer in West
Lafayette, Indiana, didn’t respond. Spaf’s machine just sat there,
deaf and dumb.
Phoenix stared at his computer, trying to figure out what was
happening. Why wouldn’t Spaf’s machine answer? There were two
possibilities. Either the network--the connection between the first
machine he penetrated at Purdue and Spaf’s own machine--had gone down
accidentally. Or someone had pulled the plug.
Why pull the plug? If they knew he was in there, why not just kick him
out of the machine? Better still, why not kick him out of Purdue all
together? Maybe they wanted to keep him on-line to trace which machine
he was coming from, eventually winding backwards from system to
system, following his trail.
Phoenix was in a dilemma. If the connection had crashed by accident,
he wanted to stay put and wait for the network to come back up again.
The FTP hole in Spaf’s machine was an incredible piece of luck.
Chances were that someone would find
evidence of his break-in after he left and plug it. On the
other hand, he didn’t want the people at Purdue tracing his
connections.
He waited a few more minutes, trying to hedge his bets. Feeling nervy
as the extended silence emanating from Spaf’s machine wore on, Phoenix
decided to jump. With the lost treasures of Aladdin’s cave fading in
his mind’s eye like a mirage, Phoenix killed his connection.
Electron and Phoenix talked on the phone, moodily contemplating their
losses. It was a blow, but Electron reminded himself that getting
Deszip was never going to be easy. At least they had the passphrase to
unlock the encrypted Deszip taken from Dartmouth.
Soon, however, they discovered a problem. There had to be one,
Electron thought. They couldn’t just have something go off without a
hitch for a change. That would be too easy. The problem this time was
that when they went searching for their copy from Dartmouth, which had
been stored several months before, it had vanished. The Dartmouth
system admin must have deleted it.
It was maddening. The frustration was unbearable. Each time they had
Deszip just within their grasp, it slipped away and
disappeared. Yet each time they lost their grip, it only deepened
their desire to capture the elusive prize. Deszip was fast becoming an
all-consuming obsession for Phoenix and Electron.
Their one last hope was the second copy of the encrypted Dartmouth
Deszip file they had given to Gandalf, but that hope did not burn
brightly. After all, if the Australians’ copy had been deleted, there
was every likelihood that the Brit’s copy had suffered the same fate.
Gandalf’s copy hadn’t been stored on his own computer. He had put it
on some dark corner of a machine in Britain.
Electron and Phoenix logged onto Altos and waited for Pad or Gandalf
to show up.
Phoenix typed .s for a list of who was on-line. He saw that Pad was
logged on:
No Chan User
0 Guest
1 Phoenix
2 Pad
Guest 0 was Electron. He usually logged on as Guest, partly because he
was so paranoid about being busted and because he believed operators
monitored his connections if they knew it was Electron logging in.
They seemed to take great joy in sniffing the password to his own
account on Altos. Then, when he had logged off, they logged in and
changed his password so he couldn’t get back under the name Electron.
Nothing was more annoying. Phoenix typed, ‘Hey, Pad. How’s it going?’
Pad wrote back, ‘Feeny! Heya.’
‘Do you and Gand still have that encrypted copy of Deszip we gave you
a few months ago?’
‘Encrypted copy ... hmm. Thinking.’ Pad paused. He and Gandalf hacked
dozens of computer systems regularly. Sometimes it was difficult to
recall just where they had stored things.
‘Yeah, I know what you mean. I don’t know. It was on a system on
JANET,’ Pad said. Britain’s Joint Academic Network was the equivalent
of Australia’s AARNET, an early Internet based largely on a backbone
of universities and research centres.
‘I can’t remember which system it was on,’ Pad continued.
If the Brits couldn’t recall the institution, let alone the machine
where they had hidden Deszip, it was time to give up
all hope. JANET comprised hundreds, maybe thousands, of machines. It
was far too big a place to randomly hunt around for a file which
Gandalf would no doubt have tried to disguise in the first place.
‘But the file was encrypted, and you didn’t have the password,’ Pad
wrote. ‘How come you want it?’
‘Because we found the password. ’ That was the
etiquette on Altos. If you wanted to suggest an action, you put it in
< >.
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