Underground
By Suelette Dreyfus with
Research by Julian Assange
Chapter 10
Anthrax The Outsider
They had a gun at my head and a knife at my back
Don’t wind me up too tight
--
from ‘Powderworks’ on Midnight Oil (also called
The Blue Album) by
Midnight Oil
Anthrax didn’t like working as part of a team. He always considered
other people to be the weakest link in the chain.
Although people were never to be trusted completely, he socialised
with many hackers and phreakers and worked with a few of them now and
again on particular projects. But he never formed intimate
partnerships with any of them. Even if a fellow hacker dobbed him in
to the police, the informant couldn’t know the full extent of his
activities. The nature of his relationships was also determined, in
part, by his isolation. Anthrax lived in a town in rural Victoria.
Despite the fact that he never joined a hacking partnership like The
Realm, Anthrax liked people, liked to talk to them for hours at a time
on the telephone. Sometimes he received up to ten international calls
a day from his phreaker friends overseas. He would be over at a
friend’s house, and the friend’s mother would knock on the door of the
bedroom where the boys were hanging out, listening to new music,
talking.
The mother would poke her head in the door, raise an eyebrow and point
at Anthrax. ‘Phone call for you. Someone from Denmark.’ Or sometimes
it was Sweden. Finland. The US. Wherever. Though they didn’t say
anything, his friends’ parents thought it all a bit strange. Not many
kids in country towns got international calls trailing them around
from house to house. But then not many kids were master phreakers.
Anthrax loved the phone system and he understood its power. Many
phreakers thought it was enough to be able to call their friends
around the globe for free. Or make hacking attack phone calls without
being traced. However, real power for Anthrax lay in controlling voice
communications systems--things that moved conversations around the
world. He cruised through people’s voice mailbox messages to piece
together a picture of what they were doing. He wanted to be able to
listen into telephone conversations. And he wanted to be able to
reprogram the telephone system, even take it down. That was real
power, the kind that lots of people would notice.
The desire for power grew throughout Anthrax’s teenage years. He ached
to know everything, to see everything, to play with exotic systems in
foreign countries. He needed to know the purpose of every system, what
made them tick, how they fitted together. Understanding how things
worked would give him control.
His obsession with telephony and hacking began early in life. When he
was about eleven, his father had taken him to see the film War Games.
All Anthrax could think of as he left the theatre was how much he
wanted to learn how to hack. He had already developed a fascination
for computers, having received the simplest of machines, a Sinclair
ZX81 with 1 k of memory, as a birthday present from his parents.
Rummaging through outdoor markets, he found a few second-hand books on
hacking. He read Out of the Inner Circle by Bill Landreth, and Hackers
by Steven Levy.
By the time he was fourteen, Anthrax had joined a Melbourne-based
group of boys called The Force. The members swapped Commodore 64 and
Amiga games. They also wrote their own demos--short computer
programs--and delighted in cracking the copy protections on the games
and then trading them with other crackers around the world. It was
like an international penpal group. Anthrax liked the challenge
provided by cracking the protections, but few teenagers in his town
shared an interest in his unusual hobby. Joining The Force introduced
him to a whole new world of people who thought as he did.
When Anthrax first read about phreaking he wrote to one of his American
cracking contacts asking for advice on how to start. His friend sent him
a list of AT&T calling card numbers and a toll-free direct-dial number
which connected Australians with American operators. The card numbers
were all expired or cancelled, but Anthrax didn’t care. What captured
his imagination was the fact that he could call an operator all the way
across the Pacific for free. Anthrax began trying to find more special
numbers.
He would hang out at a pay phone near his house. It was a seedy
neighbourhood, home to the most downtrodden of all the town’s
residents, but Anthrax would stand at the pay phone for hours most
evenings, oblivious to the clatter around him, hand-scanning for
toll-free numbers. He dialled 0014--the prefix for the international
toll-free numbers--followed by a random set of numbers. Then, as he
got more serious, he approached the task more methodically. He
selected a range of numbers, such as 300 to 400, for the last three
digits. Then he dialled over and over, increasing the number by one
each time he dialled. 301. 302. 303. 304. Whenever he hit a
functioning phone number, he noted it down. He never had to spend a
cent since all the 0014 numbers were free.
Anthrax found some valid numbers, but many of them had modems at the
other end. So he decided it was time to buy a modem so he could explore
further. Too young to work legally, he lied about his age and landed an
after-school job doing data entry at an escort agency. In the meantime,
he spent every available moment at the pay phone, scanning and adding
new numbers to his growing list of toll-free modem and operator-assisted
numbers.
The scanning became an obsession. Often Anthrax stayed at the phone
until 10 or 11 p.m. Some nights it was 3 a.m. The pay phone had a
rotary dial, making the task laborious, and sometimes he would come
home with blisters on the tips of his fingers.
A month or so after he started working, he had saved enough money for
a modem.
Hand scanning was boring, but no more so than school. Anthrax attended
his state school regularly, at least until year 10. Much of that was
due to his mother’s influence. She believed in education and in
bettering oneself, and she wanted to give her son the opportunities
she had been denied. It was his mother, a psychiatric nurse, who
scrimped and saved for months to buy him his first real computer, a
$400 Commodore 64. And it was his mother who took out a loan to buy
the more powerful Amiga a few years later in 1989. She knew the boy
was very bright. He used to read her medical textbooks, and computers
were the future.
Anthrax had always done well in school, earning distinctions every
year from year 7 to year 10. But not in maths. Maths bored him. Still,
he had some aptitude for it. He won an award in year 6 for designing a
pendulum device which measured the height of a building using basic
trigonometry--a subject he had never studied. However, Anthrax didn’t
attend school so much after year 10. The teachers kept telling him
things he already knew, or things he could learn much faster from
reading a book. If he liked a topic, he wandered off to the library to
read about it.
Things at home became increasingly complicated around that time. His
family had struggled from the moment they arrived in Australia from
England, when Anthrax was about twelve. They struggled financially,
they struggled against the roughness of a country town, and, as
Indians, Anthrax, his younger brother and their mother struggled
against racism.
The town was a violent place, filled with racial hatred and ethnic
tension. The ethnics had carved out corners for themselves, but
incursions into enemy territory were common and almost always resulted
in violence. It was the kind of town where people ended up in fist
fights over a soccer game. Not an easy place for a half-Indian,
half-British boy with a violent father.
Anthrax’s father, a white Englishman, came from a farming family. One
of five sons, he attended an agricultural college where he met and
married the sister of an Indian student on a scholarship. Their
marriage caused quite a stir, even making the local paper under the
headline ‘Farmer Marries Indian Woman’. It was not a happy marriage
and Anthrax often wondered why his father had married an Indian.
Perhaps it was a way of rebelling against his dominating father.
Perhaps he had once been in love. Or perhaps he simply wanted someone
he could dominate and control. Whatever the reason, the decision was
an unpopular one with Anthrax’s grandfather and the mixed-race family
was often excluded from larger family gatherings.
When Anthrax’s family moved to Australia, they had almost no money.
Eventually, the father got a job as an officer at Melbourne’s
Pentridge prison, where he stayed during the week. He only received a
modest income, but he seemed to like his job. The mother began working
as a nurse. Despite their new-found financial stability, the family
was not close. The father appeared to have little respect for his wife
and sons, and Anthrax had little respect for his father.
As Anthrax entered his teenage years, his father became increasingly
abusive. On weekends, when he was home from work, he used to hit
Anthrax, sometimes throwing him on the floor and kicking him. Anthrax
tried to avoid the physical abuse but the scrawny teenager was little
match for the beefy prison officer. Anthrax and his brother were quiet
boys. It seemed to be the path of least resistance with a rough father
in a rough town. Besides, it was hard to talk back in the painful
stutter both boys shared through their early teens.
One day, when Anthrax was fifteen, he came home to find a commotion at
his house. On entering the house, Anthrax went to his parents’
bedroom. He found his mother there, and she was very upset and
emotionally distressed. He couldn’t see his father anywhere, but found
him relaxing on the sofa in the lounge room, watching TV.
Disgust consumed Anthrax and he retreated into the kitchen. When his
father came in not long after to prepare some food Anthrax watched his
back with revulsion. Then he noticed a carving knife resting on the
counter. As Anthrax reached for the knife, an ambulance worker
appeared in the doorway. Anthrax put the knife down and walked away.
But he wasn’t so quiet after that. He started talking back, at home and
at school, and that marked the beginning of the really big problems. In
primary school and early high school he had been beaten up now and
again. Not any more. When a fellow student hauled Anthrax up against the
wall of the locker shed and started shaking him and waving his fist,
Anthrax lost it. He saw, for a moment, his father’s face instead of the
student’s and began to throw punches in a frenzy that left his victim in
a terrible state.
At home, Anthrax’s father learned how to bait his son. The bully
always savours a morsel of resistance from the victim, which makes
going in for the kill a little more fun. Talking back gave the father
a good excuse to get violent. Once he nearly broke his son’s neck.
Another time it was his arm. He grabbed Anthrax and twisted his arm
behind his back. There was an eerie sound of cracking cartilage, and
then pain. Anthrax screamed for his father to stop. His father twisted
Anthrax’s arm harder, then pressed on his neck. His mother shrieked at
her husband to let go of her son. He wouldn’t.
‘Look at you crying,’ his father sneered. ‘You disgusting animal.’
‘You’re the disgusting animal,’ Anthrax shouted, talking back again.
His father threw Anthrax on the floor and began kicking him in the
head, in the ribs, all over.
Anthrax ran away. He went south to Melbourne for a week, sleeping
anywhere he could, in the empty night-time spaces left over by day
workers gone to orderly homes. He even crashed in hospital emergency
rooms. If a nurse asked why he was there, he would answer politely, ‘I
received a phone call to meet someone here’. She would nod her head
and move on to someone else.
Eventually, when Anthrax returned home, he took up martial arts to
become strong. And he waited.
👉👆👈
Anthrax was poking around a MILNET gateway when he stumbled on the
door to System X.* He had wanted to find this system for months,
because he had intercepted email about it which had aroused his
curiosity.
Anthrax telnetted into the gateway. A gateway binds two different
networks. It allows, for example, two computer networks which talk
different languages to communicate. A gateway might allow someone on a
system running DECNET to login to a TCP/IP based system, like a Unix.
Anthrax was frustrated that he couldn’t seem to get past the System X
gateway and on to the hosts on the other side.
Using normal address formats for a variety of networks, he tried
telling the gateway to make a connection. X.25. TCP/IP. Whatever lay
beyond the gateway didn’t respond. Anthrax looked around until he
found a sample of addresses in a help file. None of them worked, but
they offered a clue as to what format an address might take.
Each address had six digits, the first three numbers of which
corresponded to telephone area codes in the Washington DC area. So he
picked one of the codes and started guessing the last three digits.
Hand scanning was a pain, as ever, but if he was methodical and
persistent, something should turn up. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. On it
went. Eventually he connected to something--a Sunos Unix system--which
gave him a full IP address in its login message. Now that was handy.
With the full IP address, he could connect to System X again through
the Internet directly--avoiding the gateway if he chose to. It’s
always helpful in covering your tracks to have a few different routing
options. Importantly, he could approach System X through more than
just its front door.
Anthrax spiralled through the usual round of default usernames and
passwords. Nothing. This system required a more strategic attack.
He backed out of the login screen, escaped from the gateway and went
to another Internet site to have a good look at System X from a
healthy distance. He ‘fingered’ the site, pulling up any bit of
information System X would release to the rest of the Internet when
asked. He probed and prodded, looking for openings. And then he found
one. Sendmail.
The version of Sendmail run by System X had a security hole Anthrax
could exploit by sending himself a tiny backdoor program. To do this,
he used System X’s mail-processing service to send a ‘letter’ which
contained a tiny computer program. System X would never have allowed
the program to run normally, but this program worked like a letter
bomb. When System X opened the letter, the program jumped out and
started running. It told System X that anyone could connect to port
2001--to an interactive shell--of the computer without using a
password.
A port is a door to the outside world. TCP/IP computers use a standard
set of ports for certain services. Port 25 for mail. Port 79 for
Finger. Port 21 for FTP. Port 23 for Telnet. Port 513 for Rlogin. Port
80 for the World Wide Web. A TCP/IP based computer system has 65535
ports but most of them go unused. Indeed, the average Unix box uses
only 35, leaving the remaining 65500 ports sitting idle. Anthrax
simply picked one of these sleepy ports, dusted off the cobwebs and
plugged in using the backdoor created by his tiny mail-borne program.
Connecting directly to a port created some problems, because the
system wouldn’t recognise certain keystrokes from the port, such as
the return key. For this reason, Anthrax had to create an account for
himself which would let him telnet to the site and login like any
normal user. To do this, he needed root privileges in order to create
an account and, ultimately, a permanent backdoor into the system.
He began hunting for vulnerabilities in System X’s security. There was
nothing obvious, but he decided to try out a bug he had successfully
used elsewhere. He had first learned about it on an international
phone conference, where he had traded information with other hackers
and phreakers. The security hole involved the system’s relatively
obscure load-module program. The program added features to the running
system but, more importantly, it ran as root, meaning that it had a
free run on the system when it was executed. It also meant that any
other programs the load-module program called up also ran as root. If
Anthrax could get this program to run one of his own programs--a
little Trojan--he could get root on System X.
The load-module bug was by no means a sure thing on System X. Most
commercial systems--computers run by banks or credit agencies, for
example--had cleaned up the load-module bug in their Sunos computers
months before. But military systems consistently missed the bug. They
were like turtles--hard on the outside, but soft and vulnerable on the
inside. Since the bug couldn’t be exploited unless a hacker was
already inside a system, the military’s computer security officials
didn’t seem to pay much attention to it. Anthrax had visited a large
number of military systems prior to System X, and in his experience
more than 90 per cent of their Sunos computers had never fixed the
bug.
With only normal privileges, Anthrax couldn’t force the load-module
program to run his backdoor Trojan program. But he could trick it into
doing so. The secret was in one simple keyboard character: /.
Unix-based computer systems are a bit like the protocols of the
diplomatic corps; the smallest variation can change something’s
meaning entirely. Hackers, too, understand the implications of subtle
changes.
A
Unix-based system reads the phrase:
/bin/program
very differently from:
bin program
One simple character--the ‘/’--makes an enormous difference. A Unix
computer reads the ‘/’ as a road sign. The first phrase tells the
computer, ‘Follow the road to the house of the user called "bin" and
when you get there, go inside and fetch the file called "program" and
run it’. A blank space, however, tells the computer something quite
different. In this case, Anthrax knew it told the computer to execute
the command which proceeded the space. That second phrase told the
machine, ‘Look everywhere for a program called "bin" and run it’.
Anthrax prepared for his attack on the load-module program by
installing his own special program, named ‘bin’, into a temporary
storage area on System X. If he could get System X to run his program
with root privileges, he too would have procured root level access to
the system. When everything was in place, Anthrax forced the system to
read the character ‘/’ as a blank space. Then he ran the load-module
program, and watched. When System X hunted around for a program named
‘bin’, it quickly found Anthrax’s Trojan and ran it.
The hacker savoured the moment, but he didn’t pause for long. With a
few swift keystrokes, he added an entry to the password file, creating
a basic account for himself. He exited his connection to port 2001,
circled around through another route, using the 0014 gateway, and
logged into System X using his newly created account. It felt good
walking in through the front door.
Once inside, Anthrax had a quick look around. The system startled him.
There were only three human users. Now that was definitely odd. Most
systems had hundreds of users. Even a small system might serve 30 or
40 people, and this was not a small system. He concluded that System X
wasn’t just some machine designed to send and receive email. It was
operational. It did something.
Anthrax considered how to clean up his footsteps and secure his
position. While he was hardly broadcasting his presence, someone might
discover his arrival simply by looking at who was logged in on the
list of accounts in the password file. He had given his backdoor root
account a bland name, but he could reasonably assume that these three
users knew their system pretty well. And with only three users, it was
probably the kind of system that had lots of babysitting. After all
that effort, Anthrax needed a watchful nanny like a hole in the head.
He worked at moving into the shadows.
He removed himself from the WTMP and UTMP files, which listed who had
been on-line and who was still logged in. Anthrax wasn’t invisible,
but an admin would have to look closely at the system’s network
connections and list of processes to find him. Next stop: the login
program.
Anthrax couldn’t use his newly created front-door account for an
extended period--the risk of discovery was too great. If he accessed
the computer repeatedly in this manner, a prying admin might
eventually find him and delete his account. An extra account on a
system with only three users was a dead give-away. And losing access
to System X just as things were getting interesting was not on his
agenda.
Anthrax leaned back in his chair and stretched his shoulders. His
hacking room was an old cloakroom, though it was barely recognisable
as such. It looked more like a closet--a very messy closet. The whole
room was ankle-deep in scrap papers, most of them with lists of
numbers on the back and front. Occasionally, Anthrax scooped up all
the papers and piled them into heavy-duty garbage bags, three of which
could just fit inside the room at any one time. Anthrax always knew
roughly where he had ‘filed’ a particular set of notes. When he needed
it, he tipped the bag onto the floor, searched through the mound and
returned to the computer. When the sea of paper reached a critical
mass, he jammed everything back into the garbage bag again.
The computer--an Amiga 500 box with a cheap Panasonic TV as the
monitor--sat on a small desk next to his mother’s sewing machine
cabinet. The small bookcase under the desk
was stuffed with magazines like Compute and Australian Communications,
along with a few Commodore, Amiga and Unix reference manuals. There
was just enough space for Anthrax’s old stereo and his short-wave
radio. When he wasn’t listening to his favourite show, a hacking
program broadcast from a pirate station in Ecuador, he tuned into
Radio Moscow or the BBC’s World Service.
Anthrax considered what to do with System X. This system had aroused
his curiosity and he intended to visit it frequently.
It was time to work on the login patch. The patch replaced the
system’s normal login program and had a special feature: a master
password. The password was like a diplomatic passport. It would let
him do anything, go anywhere. He could login as any user using the
master password. Further, when he logged in with the master password,
he wouldn’t show up on any log files--leaving no trail. But the beauty
of the login patch was that, in every other way, it ran as the normal
login program. The regular computer users--all three of them--could
login as usual with their passwords and would never know Anthrax had
been in the system.
He thought about ways of setting up his login patch. Installing a
patch on System X wasn’t like mending a pair of jeans. He couldn’t
just slap on a swath from an old bandanna and quick-stitch it in with
a thread of any colour. It was more like mending an expensive cashmere
coat. The fabric needed to be a perfect match in colour and texture.
And because the patch required high-quality invisible mending, the
size also needed to be just right.
Every file in a computer system has three dates: the date it was
created, the date it was last modified and the date it was last
accessed. The problem was that the login patch needed to have the same
creation and modification dates as the original login program so that
it would not raise suspicions. It wasn’t hard to get the dates but it
was difficult to paste them onto the patch. The last access date
wasn’t important as it changed whenever the program was run
anyway--whenever a user of the System X logged in.
If Anthrax ripped out the original login program and stitched his
patch in its place, the patch would be stamped with a new creation
date. He knew there was no way to change a creation date short of
changing the clock for the whole system--something which would cause
problems elsewhere in System X.
The first thing a good system admin does when he or she suspects a
break-in is search for all files created or modified over the previous
few days. One whiff of an intruder and a good admin would be all over
Anthrax’s login patch within about five minutes.
Anthrax wrote the modification and creation dates down on a bit of
paper. He would need those in a moment. He also jotted down the size
of the login file.
Instead of tearing out the old program and sewing in a completely new
one, Anthrax decided to overlay his patch by copying it onto the top
of the old program. He uploaded his own login patch, with his master
password encased inside it, but he didn’t install it yet. His patch
was called ‘troj’--short for Trojan. He typed:
cat<troj>/bin/login
Then he gave the number to a friend in Adelaide, to call overseas. But
when that friend read off the code, the operator jumped in.
Different things set him off. The librarian, for example. In early
1993 Anthrax had enrolled in Asia-Pacific and Business Studies at a
university in a nearby regional city. Ever since he showed up on the
campus, he had been hassled by a student who worked part-time at the
university library. On more than one occasion, Anthrax had been
reading at a library table when a security guard came up and asked to
search his bags. And when Anthrax looked over his shoulder to the
check-out desk, that librarian was always there, the one with the bad
attitude smeared across his face.
The harassment became so noticeable, Anthrax’s friends began
commenting on it. His bag would be hand-searched when he left the
library, while other students walked through the electronic security
boom gate unbothered. When he returned a book one day late, the
librarian--that librarian--insisted he pay all sorts of fines.
Anthrax’s pleas of being a poor student fell on deaf ears. By the time
exam period rolled around at the end of term, Anthrax decided to
punish the librarian by taking down the library’s entire computer
system.
Logging in to the library computer via modem from home, Anthrax
quickly gained root privileges. The system had security holes a mile
wide. Then, with one simple command, he deleted every file in the
computer. He knew the system would be backed up somewhere, but it
would take a day or two to get the system up and running again. In the
meantime, every loan or book search had to be conducted manually.
During Anthrax’s first year at university, even small incidents
provoked punishment. Cutting him off while he was driving, or swearing
at him on the road, fit the bill. Anthrax would memorise the licence
plate of the offending driver, then social engineer the driver’s
personal details. Usually he called the police to report what appeared
to be a stolen car and then provided the licence plate number. Shortly
after, Anthrax tuned into to his police scanner, where he picked up
the driver’s name and address as it was read over the airways to the
investigating police car. Anthrax wrote it all down.
Then began the process of punishment. Posing as the driver, Anthrax rang
the driver’s electricity company to arrange a power disconnection. The
next morning the driver might return home to find his electricity cut
off. The day after, his gas might be disconnected. Then his water. Then
his phone.
Some people warranted special punishment--people such as Bill. Anthrax
came across Bill on the Swedish Party Line, an English-speaking
telephone conference. For a time, Anthrax was a regular fixture on the
line, having attempted to call it by phreaking more than 2000 times
over just a few months. Of course, not all those attempts were
successful, but he managed to get through at least half the time. It
required quite an effort to keep a presence on the party line, since
it automatically cut people off after only ten minutes. Anthrax made
friends with the operators, who sometimes let him stay on-line a while
longer.
Bill, a Swedish Party Line junkie, had recently been released from
prison, where he had served time for beating up a Vietnamese boy at a
railway station. He had a bad attitude and he often greeted the party
line by saying, ‘Are there any coons on the line today?’ His attitude
to women wasn’t much better. He relentlessly hit on the women who
frequented the line. One day, he made a mistake. He gave out his phone
number to a girl he was trying to pick up. The operator copied it down
and when her friend Anthrax came on later that day, she passed it on
to him.
Anthrax spent a few weeks social engineering various people, including
utilities and relatives whose telephone numbers appeared on Bill’s
phone accounts, to piece together the details of his life. Bill was a
rough old ex-con who owned a budgie and was dying of cancer. Anthrax
phoned Bill in the hospital and proceeded to tell him all sorts of
personal details about himself, the kind of details which upset a
person.
Not long after, Anthrax heard that Bill had died. The hacker felt as
though he had perhaps gone a bit too far.
☋☋☋
The tension at home had eased a little by the time Anthrax left to
attend university. But when he returned home during holidays he found
his father even more unbearable. More and more, Anthrax rebelled
against his father’s sniping comments and violence. Eventually, he
vowed that the next time his father tried to break his arm he would
fight back. And he did.
One day Anthrax’s father began making bitter fun of his younger son’s
stutter. Brimming with biting sarcasm, the father mimicked Anthrax’s
brother.
‘Why are you doing that?’ Anthrax yelled. The bait had worked once
again.
It was as though he became possessed with a spirit not his own. He
yelled at his father, and put a fist into the wall. His father grabbed
a chair and thrust it forward to keep Anthrax at bay, then reached
back for the phone. Said he was calling the police. Anthrax ripped the
phone from the wall. He pursued his father through the house, smashing
furniture. Amid the crashing violence of the fight, Anthrax suddenly
felt a flash of fear for his mother’s clock--a much loved, delicate
family heirloom. He gently picked it up and placed it out of harm’s
way. Then he heaved the stereo into the air and threw it at his
father. The stereo cabinet followed in its wake. Wardrobes toppled
with a crash across the floor.
When his father fled the house, Anthrax got a hold of himself and
began to look around. The place was a disaster area. All those things
so tenderly gathered and carefully treasured by his mother, the things
she had used to build her life in a foreign land of white people
speaking an alien tongue, lay in fragments scattered around the house.
Anthrax felt wretched. His mother was distraught at the destruction
and he was badly shaken by how much it upset her. He promised to try
and control his temper from that moment on. It proved to be a constant
battle. Mostly he would win, but not always. The battle still simmered
below the surface.
Sometimes it boiled over.
👿👿👿
Anthrax considered the possibilities of who else would be using his
login patch. It could be another hacker, perhaps someone who was
running another sniffer that logged Anthrax’s previous login. But it
was more likely to be a security admin. Meaning he had been found out.
Meaning that he might be being traced even as he leap-frogged through
System X to the telecommunications company’s computer.
Anthrax made his way to the system admin’s mailboxes. If the game was
up, chances were something in the mailbox would give it away.
There it was. The evidence. They were onto him all right, and they
hadn’t wasted any time. The admins had mailed CERT, the Computer
Emergency Response Team at Carnegie Mellon University, reporting a
security breach. CERT, the nemesis of every Internet hacker, was bound
to complicate matters. Law enforcement would no doubt be called in
now.
It was time to get out of this system, but not before leaving in a
blaze of glory. A prank left as a small present.
CERT had written back to the admins acknowledging the incident and
providing a case number. Posing as one of the admins, Anthrax drafted
a letter to CERT. To make the thing look official, he added the case
number ‘for reference’. The letter went something like this:
‘In regard to incident no. XXXXX, reported on this date, we have since
carried out some additional investigations on the matter. We have
discovered the security incident was caused by a disgruntled employee
who was fired for alcoholism and decided to retaliate against the
company in this manner.
‘We have long had a problem with alcohol and drug abuse due to the
stressful nature of the company environment. No further investigation
is necessary.’
At his computer terminal, Anthrax smiled. How embarrassing was that
going to be? Try scraping that mud off. He felt very pleased with
himself.
Anthrax then tidied up his things in the company’s computer, deleted
the sniffer and moved out.
Things began to move quickly after that. He logged into System X later
to check the sniffer records, only to find that someone had used his
login patch password on that system as well. He became very nervous.
It was one thing goofing around with a commercial site, and quite
another being tracked from a military computer.
A new process had been added to System X, which Anthrax recognised. It
was called ‘-u’. He didn’t know what it did, but he had seen it before
on military systems. About 24 hours after it appeared, he found
himself locked out of the system. He had tried killing off the -u
process before. It disappeared for a split-second and reappeared. Once
it was in place, there was no way to destroy it.
Anthrax also unearthed some alarming email. The admin at a site
upstream from both System X and the company’s system had been sent a
warning letter: ‘We think there has been a security incident at your
site’. The circle was closing in on him. It was definitely time to get
the hell out. He packed up his things in a hurry. Killed off the
remaining sniffer. Moved his files. Removed the login patch. And
departed with considerable alacrity.
After he cut his connection, Anthrax sat wondering about the admins.
If they knew he was into their systems, why did they leave the
sniffers up and running? He could understand leaving the login patch.
Maybe they wanted to track his movements, determine his motives, or
trace his connection. Killing the patch would have simply locked him
out of the only door the admins could watch. They wouldn’t know if he
had other backdoors into their system. But the sniffer? It didn’t make
any sense.
It was possible that they simply hadn’t seen the sniffer. Leaving it
there had been an oversight. But it was almost too glaring an error to
be a real possibility. If it was an error, it implied the admins
weren’t actually monitoring the connections in and out of their
systems. If they had been watching the connections, they would
probably have seen the sniffer. But if they weren’t monitoring the
connections, how on earth did they find out his special password for
the login patch? Like all passwords on the system, that one was
encrypted. There were only two ways to get that password. Monitor the
connection and sniff it, or break the encryption with a brute-force
attack.
Breaking the encryption would probably have taken millions of dollars
of computer time. He could pretty well rule that option out. That left
sniffing it, which would have alerted them to his own sniffer. Surely
they wouldn’t have left his sniffer running on purpose. They must have
known he would learn they were watching him through his sniffer. The
whole thing was bizarre.
Anthrax thought about the admins who were chasing him. Thought about
their moves, their strategies. Wondered why. It was one of the
unsolved mysteries a hacker often faced--an unpleasant side of
hacking. Missing the answers to certain questions, the satisfaction of
a certain curiosity. Never being able to look over the fence at the
other side.
Chapter 11
The Prisoner’s Dilemma
Harrisburg Oh Harrisburg
The plant is melting down
The people out in Harrisburg
Are getting out of town
And when this stuff gets in
You cannot get it out
-- from ‘Harrisburg’, on
Red Sails in the Sunset by Midnight Oil
Anthrax thought he would never get caught. But in some strange way, he
also wanted to get caught. When he thought about being busted, he
found himself filled with a strange emotion--impatience. Bring on the
impending doom and be done with it. Or perhaps it was frustration at
how inept his opponents seemed to be. They kept losing his trail and
he was impatient with their incompetence. It was more fun outwitting a
worthy opponent.
Perhaps he didn’t really want to be caught so much as tracked. Anthrax
liked the idea of the police tracking him, of the system
administrators pursuing him. He liked to follow the trail of their
investigations through other people’s mail. He especially liked being
on-line, watching them trying to figure out where he was coming from.
He would cleverly take control of their computers in ways they
couldn’t see. He watched every character they typed, every spelling
error, every mistyped command, each twist and turn taken in the vain
hope of catching him.
He hadn’t been caught back in early 1991, when it seemed everyone was
after him. In fact Anthrax nearly gave up hacking and phreaking
completely in that year after what he later called ‘The Fear of God’
speech.
Late at night, on a university computer system, he bumped into another
hacker. It wasn’t an entirely uncommon experience. Once in a while,
hackers recognised another of their kind. Strange connections to
strange places in the middle of the night. Inconsistencies in process
names and sizes. The clues were visible for those who knew how to find
them.
The two hackers danced around each other, trying to determine who the
other was without giving away too much information. Finally the
mystery hacker asked Anthrax, ‘Are you a disease which affects sheep?’
Anthrax typed the simple answer back. ‘Yes.’
The other hacker revealed himself as Prime Suspect, one of the
International Subversives. Anthrax recognised the name. He had seen
Prime Suspect around on the BBSes, had read his postings. Before
Anthrax could get started on a friendly chat, the IS hacker jumped in
with an urgent warning.
He had unearthed emails showing the Feds were closing in on Anthrax.
The mail, obtained from system admins at Miden Pacific, described the
systems Anthrax had been visiting. It showed the phone connections he
had been using to get to them, some of which Telecom had traced back
to his phone. One of the admins had written, ‘We’re on to him. I feel
really bad. He’s seventeen years old and they are going to bust him
and ruin his life.’ Anthrax felt a cold chill run down his spine.
Prime Suspect continued with the story. When he first came across the
email, he thought it referred to himself. The two hackers were the
same age and had evidently been breaking into the same systems. Prime
Suspect had freaked out over the mail. He took it back to the other
two IS hackers, and they talked it through. Most of the description
fitted, but a few of the details didn’t seem to make sense. Prime
Suspect wasn’t calling from a country exchange. The more they worked
it through, the clearer it became that the email must have been
referring to someone else. They ran through the list of other options
and Anthrax’s name came up as a possibility. The IS hackers had all
seen him around a few systems and BBSes. Trax had even spoken to him
once on a conference call with another phreaker. They pieced together
what they knew of him and the picture fitted. The AFP were onto
Anthrax and they seemed to know a lot about him. They had traced his
telephone connection back to his house. They knew his age, which
implied they knew his name. The phone bills were in his parents’
names, so there may have been some personal surveillance of him. The
Feds were so close they were all but treading on his heels. The IS
hackers had been keeping an eye out for him, to warn him, but this was
the first time they had found him.
Anthrax thanked Prime Suspect and got out of the system. He sat frozen
in the night stillness. It was one thing to contemplate getting caught,
to carry mixed emotions on the hypothetical situation. It was another to
have the real prospect staring you in the face. In the morning, he
gathered up all his hacking papers, notes, manuals--everything. Three
trunks’ worth of material. He carried it all to the back garden, lit a
bonfire and watched it burn. He vowed to give up hacking forever.
And he did give it up, for a time. But a few months later he somehow
found himself back in front of his computer screen, with his modem
purring. It was so tempting, so hard to let go. The police had never
shown up. Months had come and gone, still nothing. Prime Suspect must
have been wrong. Perhaps the AFP were after another hacker entirely.
Then, in October 1991, the AFP busted Prime Suspect, Mendax and Trax.
But Anthrax continued to hack, mostly on his own as usual, for another
two years. He reminded himself that the IS hackers worked in a team.
If the police hadn’t nailed him when they busted the others, surely
they would never find him now. Further, he had become more skilled as
a hacker, better at covering his tracks, less likely to draw attention
to himself. He had other rationalisations too. The town where he lived
was so far away, the police would never bother travelling all the way
into the bush. The elusive Anthrax would remain at large forever, the
unvanquished Ned Kelly of the computer underground.
🔥🌀🔥
Mundane matters were on Anthrax’s mind on the morning of 14 July 1994.
The removalists were due to arrive to take things from the half-empty
apartment he had shared with another student. His room-mate had
already departed and the place was a clutter of boxes stuffed with
clothes, tapes and books.
Anthrax sat in bed half-asleep, half-watching the ‘Today’ show when he
heard the sound of a large vehicle pulling up outside. He looked out
the window expecting to see the removalists. What he saw instead was
at least four men in casual clothes running toward the house.
They were a little too enthusiastic for removalists and they split up
before getting to the door, with two men forking off toward opposite
sides of the building. One headed for the car port. Another dove
around the other side of the building. A third banged on the front
door. Anthrax shook himself awake.
The short, stocky guy at the front door was a worry. He had puffy,
longish hair and was wearing a sweatshirt and acid-wash jeans so tight
you could count the change in his back pocket. Bad ideas raced through
Anthrax’s head. It looked like a home invasion. Thugs were going to
break into his home, tie him up and terrorise him before stealing all
his valuables.
‘Open up. Open up,’ the stocky one shouted, flashing a police badge.
Stunned, and still uncomprehending, Anthrax opened the door. ‘Do you
know who WE are?’ the stocky one asked him.
Anthrax looked confused. No. Not sure.
‘The Australian Federal Police.’ The cop proceeded to read out the
search warrant.
What happened from this point forward is a matter of some debate. What
is fact is that the events of the raid and what
followed formed the basis of a formal complaint by Anthrax to the
Office of the Ombudsman and an internal investigation within the AFP.
The following is simply Anthrax’s account of how it happened.
The stocky one barked at Anthrax, ‘Where’s your computer?’
‘What computer?’ Anthrax looked blankly at the officer. He didn’t have
a computer at his apartment. He used the uni’s machines or friend’s
computers.
‘Your computer. Where is it? Which one of your friends has it?’
‘No-one has it. I don’t own one.’
‘Well, when you decide to tell us where it is, you let us know.’
Yeah. Right. If Anthrax did have a hidden computer at uni, revealing
its location wasn’t top of the must-do list.
The police pawed through his personal letters, quizzed Anthrax about
them. Who wrote this letter? Is he in the computer underground? What’s
his address?
Anthrax said ‘no comment’ more times than he could count. He saw a few
police moving into his bedroom and decided it was time to watch them
closely, make sure nothing was planted. He stood up to follow them in
and observe the search when one of the cops stopped him. Anthrax told
them he wanted a lawyer. One of the police looked on with disapproval.
‘You must be guilty,’ he told Anthrax. ‘Only guilty people ask for
lawyers. And here I was feeling sorry for you.’
Then one of the other officers dropped the bomb. ‘You know,’ he began
casually, ‘we’re also raiding your parents’ house ...’
Anthrax freaked out. His mum would be hysterical. He asked to call his
mother on his mobile, the only phone then working in the apartment.
The police refused to let him touch his mobile. Then he asked to call
her from the pay phone across the street. The police refused again.
One of the officers, a tall, lanky cop, recognised a leverage point if
ever he saw one. He spread the guilt on thick.
‘Your poor sick mum. How could you do this to your poor sick mum?
We’re going to have to take her to Melbourne for questioning, maybe
even to charge her, arrest her, take her to jail. You make me sick. I
feel sorry for a mother having a son like you who is going to cause
her all this trouble.’
From that moment on, the tall officer took every opportunity to talk
about Anthrax’s ‘poor sick mum’. He wouldn’t let up. Not that he
probably knew the first thing about scleroderma, the creeping fatal
disease which affected her. Anthrax often thought about the pain his
mother was in as the disease worked its way from her extremities to
her internal organs. Scleroderma toughened the skin on the fingers and
feet, but made them overly sensitive, particularly to changes in
weather. It typically affected women native to hot climates who moved
to colder environments.
Anthrax’s mobile rang. His mother. It had to be. The police wouldn’t
let him answer it.
The tall officer picked up the call, then turned to the stocky cop and
said in a mocking Indian accent, ‘It is some woman with an Indian
accent’. Anthrax felt like jumping out of his chair and grabbing the
phone. He felt like doing some other things too, things that would
have undoubtedly landed him in prison then and there.
The stocky cop nodded to the tall one, who handed the mobile to
Anthrax.
At first, he couldn’t make sense of what his mother was saying. She
was a terrified mess. Anthrax tried to calm her down. Then she tried
to comfort him.
‘Don’t worry. It will be all right,’ she said it, over and over. No
matter what Anthrax said, she repeated that phrase, like a chant. In
trying to console him, she was actually calming herself. Anthrax
listened to her trying to impose order on the chaos around her. He
could hear noises in the background and he guessed it was the police
rummaging through her home. Suddenly, she said she had to go and hung
up.
Anthrax handed the phone back to the police and sat with his head in
his hands. What a wretched situation. He couldn’t believe this was
happening to him. How could the police seriously consider taking his
mother to Melbourne for questioning? True, he phreaked from her home
office phone, but she had no idea how to hack or phreak. As for
charging his mother, that would just about kill her. In her mental and
physical condition, she would simply collapse, maybe never to get up
again.
He didn’t have many options. One of the cops was sealing up his mobile
phone in a clear plastic bag and labelling it. It was physically
impossible for him to call a lawyer, since the police wouldn’t let him
use the mobile or go to a pay phone. They harangued him about coming
to Melbourne for a police interview.
‘It is your best interest to cooperate,’ one of the cops told him. ‘It
would be in your best interest to come with us now.’
Anthrax pondered that line for a moment, considered how ludicrous it
sounded coming from a cop. Such a bald-faced lie told so
matter-of-factly. It would have been humorous if the situation with
his mother hadn’t been so awful. He agreed to an interview with the
police, but it would have to be done on another day.
The cops wanted to search his car. Anthrax didn’t like it, but there
was nothing incriminating in the car anyway. As he walked outside in
the winter morning, one of the cops looked down at Anthrax’s feet,
which were bare in accordance with the Muslim custom of removing shoes
in the house. The cop asked if he was cold.
The other cop answered for Anthrax. ‘No. The fungus keeps them warm.’
Anthrax swallowed his anger. He was used to racism, and plenty of it,
especially from cops. But this was over the top.
In the town where he attended uni, everyone thought he was Aboriginal.
There were only two races in that country town--white and Aboriginal.
Indian, Pakistani, Malay, Burmese, Sri Lankan--it didn’t matter. They
were all Aboriginal, and were treated accordingly.
Once when he was talking on the pay phone across from his house, the
police pulled up and asked him what he was doing there. Talking on the
phone, he told them. It was pretty obvious. They asked for
identification, made him empty his pockets, which contained his small
mobile phone. They told him his mobile must be stolen, took it from
him and ran a check on the serial number. Fifteen minutes and many
more accusations later, they finally let him go with the flimsiest of
apologies. ‘Well, you understand,’ one cop said. ‘We don’t see many of
your type around here.’
Yeah. Anthrax understood. It looked pretty suspicious, a dark-skinned
boy using a public telephone. Very suss indeed.
In fact, Anthrax had the last laugh. He had been on a phreaked call to
Canada at the time and he hadn’t bothered to hang up when the cops
arrived. Just told the other phreakers to hang on. After the police
left, he picked up the conversation where he left off.
Incidents like that taught him that sometimes the better path was to
toy with the cops. Let them play their little games. Pretend to be
manipulated by them. Laugh at them silently and give them nothing. So
he appeared to ignore the fungus comment and led the cops to his car.
They found nothing.
When the police finally packed up to leave, one of them handed Anthrax
a business card with the AFP’s phone number.
‘Call us to arrange an interview time,’ he said.
‘Sure,’ Anthrax replied as he shut the door.
[🔥🔥🔥 ]
Anthrax keep putting the police off. Every time they called hassling
him for an interview, he said he was busy. But when they began ringing
up his mum, he found himself in a quandary. They were threatening and
yet reassuring to his mother all at the same time and spoke politely
to her, even apologetically.
‘As bad as it sounds,’ one of them said, ‘we’re going to have to
charge you with things Anthrax has done, hacking, phreaking, etc. if
he doesn’t cooperate with us. We know it sounds funny, but we’re
within our rights to do that. In fact that is what the law dictates
because the phone is in your name.’
He followed this with the well-worn ‘it’s in your son’s best interest
to cooperate’ line, delivered with cooing persuasion.
Anthrax wondered why there was no mention of charging his father,
whose name appeared on the house’s main telephone number. That line
also carried some illegal calls.
His mother worried. She asked her son to cooperate with the police.
Anthrax felt he had to protect his mother and finally agreed to a
police interview after his uni exams. The only reason he did so was
because of the police threat to charge his mother. He was sure that if
they dragged his mother through court, her health would deteriorate
and lead to an early death.
Anthrax’s father picked him up from uni on a fine November day and
drove down to Melbourne. His mother had insisted that he attend the
interview, since he knew all about the law and police. Anthrax didn’t
mind having him along: he figured a witness might prevent any use of
police muscle.
During the ride to the city, Anthrax talked about how he would handle
the interview. The good news was that the AFP had said they wanted to
interview him about his phreaking, not his hacking. He went to the
interview understanding they would only be discussing his ‘recent
stuff’--the phreaking. He had two possible approaches to the
interview. He could come clean and admit everything, as his first
lawyer had advised. Or he could pretend to cooperate and be evasive,
which was what his instincts told him to do.
His father jumped all over the second option. ‘You have to cooperate
fully. They will know if you are lying. They are trained to pick out
lies. Tell them everything and they will go easier on you.’ Law and
order all the way.
‘Who do they think they are anyway? The pigs.’ Anthrax looked away,
disgusted at the thought of police harassing people like his mother.
‘Don’t call them pigs,’ his father snapped. ‘They are police officers.
If you are ever in trouble, they are the first people you are ever
going to call.’
‘Oh yeah. What kind of trouble am I going to be in that the first
people I call are the AFP?’ Anthrax replied.
Anthrax would put up with his father coming along so long as he kept
his mouth shut during the interview. He certainly wasn’t there for
personal support. They had a distant relationship at best. When his
father began working in the town where Anthrax now lived and studied,
his mother had tried to patch things between them. She suggested his
father take Anthrax out for dinner once a week, to smooth things over.
Develop a relationship. They had dinner a handful of times and Anthrax
listened to his father’s lectures. Admit you were wrong. Cooperate
with the police. Get your life together. Own up to it all. Grow up. Be
responsible. Stop being so useless. Stop being so stupid.
The lectures were a bit rich, Anthrax thought, considering that his
father had benefited from Anthrax’s hacking skills. When he discovered
Anthrax had got into a huge news clipping database, he asked the boy
to pull up every article containing the word ‘prison’. Then he had him
search for articles on discipline. The searches should have cost a
fortune, probably thousands of dollars. But his father didn’t pay a
cent, thanks to Anthrax. And he didn’t spend much time lecturing
Anthrax on the evils of hacking then.
When they arrived at AFP headquarters, Anthrax made a point of putting
his feet up on the leather couch in the reception area and opened a
can of Coke he had brought along. His father got upset.
‘Get your feet off that seat. You shouldn’t have brought that can of
Coke. It doesn’t look very professional.’
‘Hey, I’m not going for a job interview here,’ Anthrax responded.
Constable Andrew Sexton, a redhead sporting two earrings, came up to
Anthrax and his father and took them upstairs for coffee. Detective
Sergeant Ken Day, head of the Computer Crime Unit, was in a meeting,
Sexton said, so the interview would be delayed a little.
Anthrax’s father and Sexton found they shared some interests in law
enforcement. They discussed the problems associated with
rehabilitation and prisoner discipline. Joked with each other.
Laughed. Talked about ‘young Anthrax’. Young Anthrax did this. Young
Anthrax did that.
Young Anthrax felt sick. Watching his own father cosying up to the
enemy, talking as if he wasn’t even there.
When Sexton went to check on whether Day had finished his meeting,
Anthrax’s father growled, ‘Wipe that look of contempt off your face,
young man. You are going to get nowhere in this world if you show that
kind of attitude, they are going to come down on you like a ton of
bricks.’
Anthrax didn’t know what to say. Why should he treat these people with
any respect after the way they threatened his mother?
The interview room was small but very full. A dozen or more boxes, all
filled with labelled print-outs.
Sexton began the interview. ‘Taped record of interview conducted at
Australian Federal Police Headquarters, 383 Latrobe Street Melbourne
on 29 November 1994.’ He reeled off the names of the people present
and asked each to introduce himself for voice recognition.
‘As I have already stated, Detective Sergeant Day and I are making
enquiries into your alleged involvement into the manipulation of
private automated branch exchanges [PABXes] via Telecom 008 numbers in
order to obtain free phone calls nationally and internationally. Do
you clearly understand this allegation?’
‘Yes.’
Sexton continued with the necessary, and important, preliminaries. Did
Anthrax understand that he was not obliged to answer any questions?
That he had the right to communicate with a lawyer? That he had
attended the interview of his own free will? That he was free to leave
at any time?
Yes, Anthrax said in answer to each question.
Sexton then ploughed through a few more standard procedures before he
finally got to the meat of the issue--telephones. He fished around in
one of the many boxes and pulled out a mobile phone. Anthrax confirmed
that it was his phone.
‘Was that the phone that you used to call the 008 numbers and subsequent connections?’ Sexton asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Contained in that phone is a number of pre-set numbers. Do you
agree?’
‘Yes.’
‘I went to the trouble of extracting those records from it.’ Sexton
looked pleased with himself for hacking Anthrax’s speed-dial numbers
from the mobile. ‘Number 22 is of some interest to myself. It comes up
as Aaron. Could that be the person you referred to before as Aaron in
South Australia?’
‘Yes, but he is always moving house. He is a hard person to track
down.’
Sexton went through a few more numbers, most of which Anthrax hedged.
He asked Anthrax questions about his manipulation of the phone system,
particularly about the way he made free calls overseas using
Australian companies’ 008 numbers.
When Anthrax had patiently explained how it all worked, Sexton went
through some more speed-dial numbers.
‘Number 43.Do you recognise that one?’
‘That’s the Swedish Party Line.’
‘What about these other numbers? Such as 78? And 30?’
‘I’m not sure. I couldn’t say what any of these are. It’s been so
long,’ Anthrax paused, sensing the pressure from the other side of the
table. ‘These ones here, they are numbers in my town. But I don’t know
who. Very often, ’cause I don’t have any pen and paper with me, I just
plug a number into the phone.’
Sexton looked unhappy. He decided to go in a little harder. ‘I’m going
to be pretty blunt. So far you have admitted to the 008s but I think
you are understating your knowledge and your experience when it comes
to these sort of offences.’ He caught himself. ‘Not offences. But your
involvement in all of this ... I think you have got a little bit more
... I’m not saying you are lying, don’t get me wrong, but you tend to
be pulling yourself away from how far you were really into this. And
how far everyone looked up to you.’
There was the gauntlet, thrown down on the table. Anthrax picked it
up.
‘They looked up to me? That was just a perception. To be honest, I
don’t know that much. I couldn’t tell you anything about telephone
exchanges or anything like that. In the past, I guess the reason they
might look up to me in the sense of a leader is because I was doing
this, as you are probably aware, quite a bit in the past, and
subsequently built up a reputation. Since then I decided I wouldn’t do
it again.’
‘Since this?’ Sexton was quick off the mark.
‘No. Before. I just said, "I don’t want anything to do with this any
more. It’s just stupid". When I broke up with my girlfriend ... I just
got dragged into it again. I’m not trying to say that I am any less
responsible for any of this but I will say I didn’t originate any of
these 008s. They were all scanned by other people. But I made calls
and admittedly I did a lot of stupid things.’
But Sexton was like a dog with a bone.
‘I just felt that you were tending to ... I don’t know if it’s because
your dad’s here or ... I have read stuff that "Anthrax was a legend
when it came to this, and he was a scanner, and he was the man to talk
to about X.25, Tymnet, hacking, Unix. The whole kit and kaboodle".’
Anthrax didn’t take the bait. Cops always try that line. Play on a
hacker’s ego, get them to brag. It was so transparent.
‘It’s not true,’ he answered. ‘I know nothing about ... I can’t
program. I have an Amiga with one meg of memory. I have no formal
background in computers whatsoever.’
That part was definitely true. Everything was self-taught. Well,
almost everything. He did take one programming class at uni, but he
failed it. He went to the library to do extra research, used in his
final project for the course. Most of his classmates wrote simple
200-line programs with few functions; his ran to 500 lines and had
lots of special functions. But the lecturer flunked him. She told him,
‘The functions in your program were not taught in this course’.
Sexton asked Anthrax if he was into carding, which he denied
emphatically. Then Sexton headed back into scanning. How much had
Anthrax done? Had he given scanned numbers to other hackers? Anthrax
was evasive, and both cops were getting impatient.
‘What I am trying to get at is that I believe that, through your
scanning, you are helping other people break the law by promoting this
sort of thing.’ Sexton had shown his hand.
‘No more than a telephone directory would be assisting someone,
because it’s really just a list. I didn’t actually break anything. I
just looked at it.’
‘These voice mailbox systems obviously belong to people. What would
you do when you found a VMB?’
‘Just play with it. Give it to someone and say, "Have a look at this.
It is interesting," or whatever.’
‘When you say play with it you would break the code out to the VMB?’
‘No. Just have a look around. I’m not very good at breaking VMBs.’
Sexton tried a different tack. ‘What are 1-900 numbers? On the back of
that document there is a 1-900 number. What are they generally for?
Easy question. ‘In America they like cost $10 a minute. You can ring
them up, I think, and get all sorts of information, party lines, etc.’
‘It’s a conference type of call?’
‘Yes.’
‘Here is another document, contained in a clear plastic sleeve
labelled AS/AB/S/1. Is this a scan? Do you recognise your
handwriting?’
‘Yes, it’s in my handwriting. Once again it’s the same sort of scan.
It’s just dialling some commercial numbers and noting them.’
‘And once you found something, what would you do with it?’
Anthrax had no intention of being painted as some sort of ringleader
of a scanning gang. He was a sociable loner, not a part of a team.
‘I’d just look at it, like in the case of this one here--630. I just
punched in a few numbers and it said that 113 diverts somewhere, 115
says goodbye, etc. I’d just do that and I probably never came back to
it again.’
‘And you believe that if I pick up the telephone book, I would get all
this information?’
‘No. It’s just a list of numbers in the same sense that a telephone
book is.’
‘What about a 1-800 number?’
‘That is the same as a 0014.’
‘If you rang a 1-800 number, where would you go?’
Anthrax wondered if the Computer Crimes Unit gained most of its
technical knowledge from interviews with hackers.
‘You can either do 0014 or you can do 1-800. It’s just the same.’
‘Is it Canada--0014?’
‘It’s everywhere.’ Oops. Don’t sound too cocky. ‘Isn’t it?’
‘No, I’m not familiar.’ Which is just what Anthrax was thinking.
Sexton moved on. ‘On the back of that document there is more type
scans ...’
‘It’s all just the same thing. Just take a note of what is there. In
this case, box 544 belongs to this woman ...’
‘So, once again, you just release this type of information on the
bridge?’
‘Not all of it. Most of it I would probably keep to myself and never
look at it again. I was bored. Is it illegal to scan?’
‘I’m not saying it’s illegal. I’m just trying to show that you were
really into this. I’m building a picture and I am gradually getting to
a point and I’m going to build a picture to show that for a while
there ...’ Sexton then interrupted himself and veered down a less
confrontational course. ‘I’m not saying you are doing it now, but back
then, when all these offences occurred, you were really into scanning
telephone systems, be it voice mailboxes ... I’m not saying you found
the 008s but you ... anything to bugger up Telecom. You were really
getting into it and you were helping other people.’
Anthrax took offence. ‘The motivation for me doing it wasn’t to bugger
up Telecom.’
Sexton backpedalled. ‘Perhaps ... probably a poor choice of words.’
He began pressing forward on the subject of hacking, something the
police had not said they were going to be discussing. Anthrax felt a
little unnerved, even rattled.
Day asked if Anthrax wanted a break.
‘No,’ he answered. ‘I just want to get it over and done with, if
that’s OK. I’m not going to lie. I’m not going to say "no comment".
I’m going to admit to everything ’cause, based on what I have been
told, it’s in my best interest to do so.’
The police paused. They didn’t seem to like that last comment much.
Day tried to clear things up.
‘Before we go any further, based on what you have been told, it is in
your best interests to tell the truth. Was it any member of the AFP
that told you this?’
‘Yes.’
‘Who?’ Day threw the question out quickly.
Anthrax couldn’t remember their names. ‘The ones who came to my house.
I think Andrew also said it to me,’ he said, nodding in the direction
of the red-headed constable.
Why were the cops getting so uncomfortable all of a sudden? It was no
secret that they had told both Anthrax and his mother repeatedly that
it was in his best interest to agree to an interview.
Day leaned forward, peered at Anthrax and asked, ‘What did you
interpret that to mean?’
‘That if I don’t tell the truth, if I say "no comment" and don’t
cooperate, that it is going to be ... it will mean that you will go
after me with ...’ Anthrax grasped for the right words, but he felt
tongue-tied, ‘with ... more force, I guess.’
Both officers stiffened visibly.
Day came back again. ‘Do you feel that an unfair inducement has been
placed on you as a result of that?’
‘In what sense?’ The question was genuine.
‘You have made the comment and it has now been recorded and I have to
clear it up. Do you feel like, that a deal has been offered to you at
any stage?’
A deal? Anthrax thought about it. It wasn’t a deal as in ‘Talk to us
now and we will make sure you don’t go to jail’. Or ‘Talk now and we
won’t beat you with a rubber hose’.
‘No,’ he answered.
‘Do you feel that as a result of that being said that you have been
pressured to come forward today and tell the truth?’
Ah, that sort of deal. Well, of course.
‘Yes, I have been pressured,’ Anthrax answered.
The two police
officers looked stunned. Anthrax paused, concerned about the growing
feeling of disapproval in the room. ‘Indirectly,’ he added quickly,
almost apologetically.
For a brief moment, Anthrax just didn’t care. About the police. About
his father. About the pressure. He would tell the truth. He decided to
explain the situation as he saw it.
‘Because since they came to my house, they emphasised the fact that if
I didn’t come for an interview, that they would then charge my mother
and, as my mother is very sick, I am not prepared to put her through
that.’
The police looked at each other. The shock waves reverberated around
the room. The AFP clearly hadn’t bargained on this coming out in the
interview tape. But what he said about his mother being threatened was
the truth, so let it be on the record with everything else.
Ken Day caught his breath, ‘So you are saying that you
have now been ...’ he cut himself off ... ‘that you are not here
voluntarily?’
Anthrax thought about it. What did ‘voluntarily’ mean? The police
didn’t cuff him to a chair and tell him he couldn’t leave until he
talked. They didn’t beat him around the head with a baton. They
offered him a choice: talk or inflict the police on his ailing mother.
Not a palatable choice, but a choice nonetheless. He chose to talk to
protect his mother.
‘I am here voluntarily,’ he answered.
‘That is not what you have said. What you have just said is
that pressure has been placed on you and that you have had to come in
here and answer the questions. Otherwise certain actions would take
place. That does not mean you are here
voluntarily.’
The police must have realised they were on very thin ice and Anthrax
felt pressure growing in the room. The cops pushed. His father did not
looked pleased.
‘I was going to come anyway,’ Anthrax answered, again almost
apologetically. Walk the tightrope, he thought. Don’t get them too mad
or they will charge my mother. ‘You can talk to the people who carried
out the warrant. All along, I said to them I would come in for an
interview. Whatever my motivations are, I don’t think should matter. I
am going to tell you the truth.’
‘It does matter,’ Day responded, ‘because at the beginning of the
interview it was stated--do you agree--that you have come in here
voluntarily?’
‘I have. No-one has forced me.’
Anthrax felt exasperated. The room was getting stuffy. He wanted to
finish this thing and get out of there. So much pressure.
‘And is anyone forcing you to make the answers you have given here
today?’ Day tried again.
‘No individuals are forcing me, no.’ There. You have what you want.
Now get on with it and let’s get out of here.
‘You have to tell the truth. Is that what you are saying?’ The police
would not leave the issue be.
‘I want to tell the truth. As well.’ The key words there were ‘as
well’. Anthrax thought, I want to and I have to.
‘It’s the circumstances that are forcing this upon you, not an
individual?’
‘No.’ Of course it was the circumstances. Never mind that the police
created the circumstance.
Anthrax felt as if the police were just toying with him. He knew and
they knew they would go after his mother if this interview wasn’t to
their liking. Visions of his frail mother being hauled out of her
house by the AFP flashed through his mind. Anthrax felt sweaty and
hot. Just get on with it. Whatever makes them happy, just agree to it
in order to get out of this crowded room.
‘So, would it be fair to summarise it, really, to say that perhaps ...
of your activity before the police arrived at your premises, that is
what is forcing you?’
What was this cop talking about? His ‘activity’ forcing him? Anthrax
felt confused. The interview had already gone on some time. The cops
had such obscure ways of asking things. The room was oppressively
small.
Day pressed on with the question, ‘The fact that you could see you had
broken the law, and that is what is forcing you to come forward here
today and tell the truth?’
Yeah. Whatever you want. ‘OK,’ Anthrax started to answer, ‘That is a
fair assump--’
Day cut him off. ‘I just wanted to clarify that because the
interpretation I immediately got from that was that we, or members of
the AFP, had unfairly and unjustly forced you to come in here today,
and that is not the case?’
Define ‘unfairly’. Define ‘unjustly’. Anthrax thought it was unfair
the cops might charge his mother. But they told her it was perfectly
legal to do so. Anthrax felt light-headed. All these thoughts whirring
around inside his head.
‘No, that is not the case. I’m sorry for ...’ Be humble. Get out of
that room faster.
‘No, that is OK. If that is what you believe, say it. I have no
problems with that. I just like to have it clarified. Remember, other
people might listen to this tape and they will draw inferences and
opinions from it. At any point where I think there is an ambiguity, I
will ask for clarification. Do you understand that?’
‘Yes. I understand.’ Anthrax couldn’t really focus on what Day was
saying. He was feeling very distressed and just wanted to finish the
interview.
The cops finally moved on, but the new topic was almost as unpleasant.
Day began probing about Anthrax’s earlier hacking career--the one he
had no intention of talking about. Anthrax began to feel a bit better.
He agreed to talk to the police about recent phreaking activities, not
hacking matters. Indeed, he had repeatedly told them that topic was
not on his agenda. He felt like he was standing on firmer ground.
After being politely stonewalled, Day circled around and tried again.
‘OK. I will give you another allegation; that you have unlawfully
accessed computer systems in Australia and the United States. In the
US, you specifically targeted military computer systems. Do you
understand that allegation?’
‘I understand that. I wouldn’t like to comment on it.’ No, sir. No
way.
Day tried a new tack. ‘I will further allege that you did work with a
person known as Mendax.’
What on earth was Day talking about? Anthrax had heard of Mendax, but
they had never worked together. He thought the cops must not have very
good informants.
‘No. That is not true. I know no-one of that name.’ Not strictly true,
but true enough.
‘Well, if he was to turn around to me and say that you were doing all
this hacking, he would be lying, would he?’
Oh wonderful. Some other hacker was crapping on to the cops with lies
about how he and Anthrax had worked together. That was exactly why
Anthrax didn’t work in a group. He had plenty of real allegations to
fend off. He didn’t need imaginary ones too.
‘Most certainly would. Unless he goes by some other name, I know
no-one by that name, Mendax.’ Kill that off quick.
In fact Mendax had not ratted on Anthrax at all. That was just a
technique the police used.
‘You don’t wish to comment on the fact that you have hacked into other
computer systems and military systems?’ If there
was one thing Anthrax could say for Day, it was that he was
persistent.
‘No. I would prefer not to comment on any of that. This is the advice
I have received: not to comment on anything unrelated to the topic
that I was told I would be talking about when I came down here.’
‘All right, well are you going to answer any questions in relation to
unlawfully accessing any computer systems?’
‘Based upon the legal advice that I received, I choose not to.’
Day pursed his lips. ‘All right. If that is your attitude and you
don’t wish to answer any of those questions, we won’t pursue the
matter. However, I will inform you now that the matter may be reported
and you may receive a summons to answer the questions or face charges
in relation to those allegations, and, at any time that you so choose,
you can come forward and tell us the truth.’
Woah. Anthrax took a deep breath. Could the cops make him come answer
questions with a summons? They were changing the game midway through.
Anthrax felt as though the carpet had been pulled out from beneath his
feet. He needed a few minutes to clear his head.
‘Is it something I can think over and discuss?’ Anthrax asked.
‘Yes. Do you want to have a pause and a talk with your father? The
constable and I can step out of the room, or offer you another room.
You may wish to have a break and think about it if you like. I think
it might be a good idea. I think we might have a ten-minute break and
put you in another room and let you two have a chat about it. There is
no pressure.’
Day and the Sexton stopped the interview and guided father and son
into another room. Once they were alone, Anthrax looked to his father
for support. This voice inside him still cried out to keep away from
his earlier hacking journeys. He needed someone to tell him the same
thing.
His father was definitely not that someone. He railed against Anthrax
with considerable vehemence. Stop holding back. You have to tell
everything. How could you be so stupid? You can’t fool the police.
They know. Confess it all before it’s too late. At the end of the
ten-minute tirade, Anthrax felt worse than he had at the beginning.
When the two returned to the interview room, Anthrax’s father turned
to the police and said suddenly, ‘He has decided to confess’.
That was not true. Anthrax hadn’t decided anything of the sort. His
father was full of surprises. It seemed every time he opened his
mouth, an ugly surprise came out.
Ken Day and Andrew Sexton warmed up a shaky Anthrax by showing him
various documents, pieces of paper with Anthrax’s scribbles seized
during the raid, telephone taps. At one stage, Day pointed to some
handwritten notes which read ‘KDAY’. He looked at Anthrax.
‘What’s that? That’s me.’
Anthrax smiled for the first time in a long while. It was something to
be happy about. The head of the AFP’s Computer Crime Unit in Melbourne
sat there, so sure he was onto something big. There was his name, bold
as day, in the hacker’s handwriting on a bit of paper seized in a
raid. Day seemed to be expecting something good.
Anthrax said, ‘If you ring that up you will find it is a radio
station.’ An American radio station. Written on the same bit of paper
were the names of an American clothing store, another US-based radio
station, and a few records he wanted to order.
‘There you go,’ Day laughed at his own hasty conclusions. ‘I’ve got a
radio station named after me.’
Day asked Anthrax why he wrote down all sorts of things, directory
paths, codes, error messages.
‘Just part of the record-keeping. I think I wrote this down when I had
first been given this dial-up and I was just feeling my way around,
taking notes of what different things did.’
‘What were your intentions at the time with these computer networks?’
‘At this stage, I was just having a look, just a matter of curiosity.’
‘Was it a matter of curiosity--"Gee, this is interesting" or was it
more like "I would like to get into them" at this stage?’
‘I couldn’t say what was going through my mind at the time. But
initially once I got into the first system--I’m sure you have heard
this a lot--but once you get into the first system, it’s like you get
into the next one and the next one and the next one, after a while it
doesn’t ...’ Anthrax couldn’t find the right words to finish the
explanation.
‘Once you have tasted the forbidden fruit?’
‘Exactly. It’s a good analogy.’
Day pressed on with questions about Anthrax’s hacking. He successfully
elicited admissions from the hacker. Anthrax gave Day more than the
police officer had before, but probably not as much as he would have
liked.
It was, however, enough. Enough to keep the police from charging
Anthrax’s mother. And enough for them to charge him.
🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
Anthrax didn’t see his final list of charges until the day he appeared
in court on 28 August 1995. The whole case seemed to be a bit
disorganised. His Legal Aid lawyer had little knowledge of computers,
let alone computer crime. He told Anthrax he could ask for an
adjournment because he hadn’t seen the final charges until so late,
but Anthrax wanted to get the thing over and done with. They had
agreed that Anthrax would plead guilty to the charges and hope for a
reasonable magistrate.
Anthrax looked through the hand-up brief provided by the prosecution,
which included a heavily edited transcript of his interview with the
police. It was labelled as a ‘summary’, but it certainly didn’t
summarise everything important in that interview. Either the
prosecution or the police had cut out all references to the fact that
the police had threatened to charge Anthrax’s mother if he didn’t
agree to be interviewed.
Anthrax pondered the matter. Wasn’t everything relevant to his case
supposed to be covered in a hand-up brief? This seemed very relevant
to his case, yet there wasn’t a mention of it anywhere in the
document. He began to wonder if the police had edited down the
transcript just so they could cut out that portion of the interview.
Perhaps the judge wouldn’t be too happy about it. He thought that
maybe the police didn’t want to be held accountable for how they had
dealt with his mother.
The rest of the hand-up brief wasn’t much better. The only statement
by an actual ‘witness’ to Anthrax’s hacking was from his former
room-mate, who claimed that he had watched Anthrax break into a NASA
computer and access an ‘area of the computer system which showed the
latitude/longitude of ships’.
Did space ships even have longitudes and latitudes? Anthrax didn’t
know. And he had certainly never broken into a NASA computer in front
of the room-mate. It was absurd. This guy is lying, Anthrax thought,
and five minutes under cross-examination by a reasonable lawyer would
illustrate as much. Anthrax’s instincts told him the prosecution had a
flimsy case for some of the charges, but he felt overwhelmed by
pressure from all sides--his family, the bustle in the courtroom, even
the officiousness of his own lawyer quickly rustling through his
papers.
Anthrax looked around the room. His eyes fell on his father, who sat
waiting on the public benches. Anthrax’s lawyer wanted him there to
give evidence during sentencing. He thought it would look good to show
there was a family presence. Anthrax gave the suggestion a cool
reception. But he didn’t understand how courts worked, so he followed
his lawyer’s advice.
Anthrax’s mother was back at his apartment, waiting for news. She had
been on night duty and was supposed to be sleeping. That was the
ostensible reason she didn’t attend. Anthrax thought perhaps that the
tension was too much for her. Whatever the reason, she didn’t sleep
all that day. She tidied the place, washed the dishes, did the
laundry, and kept herself as busy as the tiny apartment would allow
her.
Anthrax’s girlfriend, a pretty, moon-faced Turkish girl, also came to
court. She had never been into the hacking scene. A group of school
children, mostly girls, chatted in the rows behind her.
Anthrax read through the four-page summary of facts provided by the
prosecution. When he reached the final page, his heart stopped. The
final paragraph said:
31. Penalty
s85ZF (a)--12 months, $6000 or both
s76E(a)--2 years, $12000 or both
Pointing to the last paragraph, Anthrax asked his lawyer what that was
all about. His lawyer told him that he would probably get prison but,
well, it wouldn’t be that bad and he would just have ‘to take it on
the chin’. He would, after all, be out in a year or two.
Rapists sometimes got off with less than that. Anthrax couldn’t
believe the prosecution was asking for prison. After he cooperated,
suffering through that miserable interview. He had no prior
convictions. But the snowball had been set in motion. The magistrate
appeared and opened the court.
Anthrax felt he couldn’t back out now and he pleaded guilty to 21
counts, including one charge of inserting data and twenty charges of
defrauding or attempting to defraud a carrier.
His lawyer put the case for a lenient sentence. He called Anthrax’s
father up on the stand and asked him questions about his son. His
father probably did more harm than good. When asked if he thought his
son would offend again, his father replied, ‘I don’t know’.
Anthrax was livid. It was further unconscionable behaviour. Not long
before the trial, Anthrax had discovered that his father had planned
to sneak out of the country two days before the court case. He was
going overseas, he told his wife, but not until after the court case.
It was only by chance that she discovered his surreptitious plans to
leave early. Presumably he would find his son’s trial humiliating.
Anthrax’s mother insisted he stayed and he begrudgingly delayed the
trip.
His father sat down, a bit away from Anthrax and his lawyer. The
lawyer provided a colourful alternative to the prosecutor. He perched
one leg up on his bench, rested an elbow on the knee and stroked his
long, red beard. It was an impressive beard, more than a foot long and
thick with reddish brown curls. Somehow it fitted with his two-tone
chocolate brown suit and his tie, a breathtakingly wide creation with
wild patterns in gold. The suit was one size too small. He launched
into the usual courtroom flourish--lots of words saying nothing. Then
he got to the punch line.
‘Your worship, this young man has been in all sorts of places. NASA,
military sites, you wouldn’t believe some of the places he has been.’
‘I don’t think I want to know where he has been,’ the magistrate
answered wryly.
The strategy was Anthrax’s. He thought he could turn a
liability into an asset by showing that he had been in many
systems--many sensitive systems--but had done no malicious damage in
any of them.
The strategy worked and the magistrate announced there was no way he
was sending the young hacker to jail.
The prosecutor looked genuinely disappointed and launched a counter
proposal--1500 hours of community service. Anthrax caught his breath.
That was absurd. It would take almost nine months, full time. Painting
buildings, cleaning toilets. Forget about his university studies. It was
almost as bad as prison.
Anthrax’s lawyer protested. ‘Your Worship, that penalty is something
out of cyberspace.’ Anthrax winced at how corny that sounded, but the
lawyer looked very pleased with himself.
The magistrate refused to have a bar of the prosecutor’s counter
proposal. Anthrax’s girlfriend was impressed with the magistrate. She
didn’t know much about the law or the court system, but he seemed a
fair man, a just man. He didn’t appear to want to give a harsh
punishment to Anthrax at all. But he told the court he had to send a
message to Anthrax, to the class of school children in the public
benches and to the general community that hacking was wrong in the
eyes of the law. Anthrax glanced back at the students. They looked
like they were aged thirteen or fourteen, about the age he got into
hacking and phreaking.
The magistrate announced his sentence. Two hundred hours of community
service and $6116.90 of restitution to be paid to two telephone
companies--Telecom and Teleglobe in Canada. It wasn’t prison, but it was
a staggering amount of money for a student to rake up. He had a year to
pay it off, and it would definitely take that long. At least he was
free.
Anthrax’s girlfriend thought how unlucky it was to have landed those
giggling school children in the courtroom on that day. They laughed
and pointed and half-whispered. Court was a game. They didn’t seem to
take the magistrate’s warning seriously. Perhaps they were gossiping
about the next party. Perhaps they were chatting about a new pair of
sneakers or a new CD.
And maybe one or two murmured quietly how cool it would be to break
into NASA.
There is an afterword at page 288 on the scroll that gives updates and follows up with those charged in these pages.
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