Underground, Suelette Dreyfus [ebook reader online .txt] 📗

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