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

In many cases, he had given Phoenix access to those computers in the first place. But Electron tried to tread quietly, carefully, through most systems, while Phoenix had noisily stomped around with all the grace of a buffalo—and left just as many footprints. Electron hardly wanted to face full charges for those or any other sites. He had broken into thousands of sites on the X.25 network, but he hadn’t been charged with any of them. He couldn’t help feeling a little like the gangster Al Capone being done for tax evasion.

The proceedings were attracting considerable media attention. Electron suspected the AFP or the DPP were alerting the media to upcoming court appearances, perhaps in part to prove to the Americans that `something was being done’.

This case had American pressure written all over it. Electron’s barrister, Boris Kayser, said he suspected that `the Americans’—American institutions, companies or government agencies—were indirectly funding some of the prosecution’s case by offering to pay for US witnesses to attend the trial. The Americans wanted to see the Australian hackers go down, and they were throwing all their best resources at the case to make sure it happened.

There was one other thing—in some ways the most disturbing matter of all. In the course of the legal to-ing and fro-ing, Electron was told that it was the US Secret Service back in 1988 which had triggered the AFP investigation into The Realm hackers—an investigation which had led to Electron’s bust and current legal problems. The Secret Service was after the hackers who broke into Citibank.

As it happened, Electron had never touched Citibank. Credit cards couldn’t interest him less. He found banks boring and, the way he looked at it, their computers were full of mundane numbers belonging to the world of accounting. He had already suffered through enough of those tedious types of numbers in his university course. Unless he wanted to steal from banks—something he would not do—there was no point in breaking into their computers.

But the US Secret Service was very interested in banks—and in Phoenix. For they didn’t just believe that Phoenix had been inside Citibank’s computers. They believed he had masterminded the Citibank attack.

And why did the US Secret Service think that? Because, Electron was told, Phoenix had gone around bragging about it in the underground. He hadn’t just told people he had hacked into Citibank computers, he reportedly boasted that he had stolen some $50000 from the bank.

Going through his legal brief, Electron had discovered something which seemed to confirm what he was being told. The warrant for the telephone tap on both of Phoenix’s home phones mentioned a potential `serious loss to Citibank’ as a justification for the warrant. Strangely, the typed words had been crossed out in the handwritten scrawl of the judge who approved the warrant. But they were still legible. No wonder the US Secret Service began chasing the case, Electron thought. Banks get upset when they think people have found a way to rip them off anonymously.

Electron knew that Phoenix hadn’t stolen any money from Citibank. Rather, he had been circulating fantastic stories about himself to puff up his image in the underground, and in the process had managed to get them all busted.

In September 1992, Phoenix rang Electron suggesting they get together to discuss the case. Electron wondered why. Maybe he suspected something, sensing that the links binding them were weak, and becoming weaker by the month. That Electron’s mental illness had changed his perception of the world. That his increasingly remote attitude to Phoenix suggested an underlying anger about the continual bragging. Whatever the reason, Phoenix’s gnawing worry must have been confirmed when Electron put off meeting with him.

Electron didn’t want to meet with Phoenix because he didn’t like him, and because he thought Phoenix was largely responsible for getting the Australian hackers into their current predicament.

With these thoughts fermenting in his mind, Electron listened with interest a few months later when his solicitor, John McLoughlin, proposed an idea. In legal circles, it was nothing new. But it was new to Electron. He resolved to take up McLoughlin’s advice.

Electron decided to testify as a Crown witness against Phoenix.

Chapter 7 — Judgement Day.

Your dream world is just about to end.

— from `Dreamworld’, Diesel and Dust.

In another corner of the globe, the British hackers Pad and Gandalf learned with horror that the Australian authorities had busted the three Realm hackers. Electron had simply disappeared one day. A short time later, Phoenix was gone too. Then the reports started rolling in from newspapers and from other Australian hackers on a German board similar to Altos, called Lutzifer.

Something else worried Pad. In one of his hacking forays, he had discovered a file, apparently written by Eugene Spafford, which said he was concerned that some British hackers—read Pad and Gandalf—would create a new worm, based on the RTM worm, and release it into the Internet. The unnamed British hackers would then be able to cause maximum havoc on thousands of Internet sites.

It was true that Gandalf and Pad had captured copies of various worm source codes. They fished around inside SPAN until they surfaced with a copy of the Father Christmas worm. And, after finally successfully hacking Russell Brand’s machine at LLNL, they deftly lifted a complete copy of the WANK worm. In Brand’s machine, they also found a description of how someone had broken into SPAN looking for the WANK worm code, but hadn’t found it. `That was me breaking into SPAN to look around,’ Gandalf laughed, relaying the tale to Pad.

Despite their growing library of worm code, Pad had no intention of writing any such worm. They simply wanted the code to study what penetration methods the worms had used and perhaps to learn something new. The British hackers prided themselves on never having done anything destructive to systems they hacked. In places where they knew their activities had been discovered—such as at the Universities of Bath, Edinburgh, Oxford and Strathclyde—they wrote notes to the admins signed 8lgm. It wasn’t only an ego thing—it was also a way of telling the admins that they weren’t going to do anything nasty to the system.

At one university, the admins thought 8lgm was some kind of weird variation on a Belgian word and that the hackers who visited their systems night after night were from Belgium. At another uni, the admins made a different guess at the meaning. In the morning, when they came into work and saw that the hackers had been playing in their system all night, they would sigh to each other, `Our eight little green men are at it again’.

At the University of Lancaster, the hackers wrote a message to the admins which said: `Don’t do anything naughty. We have a good image around the world, so please don’t tarnish it or start making up stories about us messing up systems. Don’t hold your breath for us to hack you, but keep us in mind.’ Wherever they went, their message was the same.

Nonetheless Pad visualised a scenario where Spaf whipped up the computer security and law enforcement people into a frenzied panic and tried to pin all sorts of things on the British hackers, none of which they had done. The underground saw Spaf as being rabid in his attack on hackers, based largely on his response to the RTM worm. And Gandalf had hacked Spaf’s machine.

The crackdown on the Australians, combined with the discovery of the Spaf file, had a profound effect on Pad. Always cautious anyway, he decided to give up hacking. It was a difficult decision, and weaning himself from exploring systems night after night was no easy task. However, in the face of what had happened to Electron and Phoenix, continuing to hack didn’t seem worth the risk.

When Pad gave up hacking, he bought his own NUI so he could access places like Altos legitimately. The NUI was expensive—about [sterling]10 an hour—but he was never on for long. Leisurely chats of the type he once enjoyed in Altos were out of the question, but at least he could mail letters to his friends like Theorem and Gandalf. There would have been easier ways to maintain his friendship with Gandalf, who lived in Liverpool, only an hour’s drive away. But it wouldn’t be the same. Pad and Gandalf had never met, or even talked on the phone. They talked on-line, and via email. That was the way they related.

Pad also had other reasons for giving up hacking. It was an expensive habit in Britain because British Telecom time-charged for local phone calls. In Australia, a hacker could stay on-line for hours, jumping from one computer to another through the data network, all for the cost of one local call. Like the Australians, Pad could launch his hacking sessions from a local uni or X.25 dial-up. However, an all-night hacking session based on a single phone call might still cost him [sterling]5 or more in timed-call charges—a considerable amount of money for an unemployed young man. As it was, Pad had already been forced to stop hacking for brief periods when he ran out of his dole money.

Although Pad didn’t think he could be prosecuted for hacking under British law in early 1990, he knew that Britain was about to enact its own computer crime legislation—the Computer Misuse Act 1990—in August. The 22-year-old hacker decided that it was better to quit while he was ahead.

And he did, for a while at least. Until July 1990, when Gandalf, two years his junior, tempted him with one final hack before the new Act came into force. Just one last fling, Gandalf told him. After that last fling in July, Pad stopped hacking again.

The Computer Misuse Act passed into law in August 1990, following two law commission reviews on the subject. The Scottish Law Commission issued a 1987 report proposing to make unauthorised data access illegal, but only if the hacker tried to `secure advantage, or cause damage to another person’—including reckless damage.2 Simple look-see hacking would not be a crime under the report’s recommendations. However, in 1989 The Law Commission of England and Wales issued its own report proposing that simple unauthorised access should be a crime regardless of intent—a recommendation which was eventually included in the law.

Late in 1989, Conservative MP Michael Colvin introduced a private member’s bill into the British parliament. Lending her support to the bill, outspoken hacker-critic Emma Nicholson, another Conservative MP, fired public debate on the subject and ensured the bill passed through parliament successfully.

In November 1990, Pad was talking on-line with Gandalf, and his friend suggested they have one more hack, just one more, for old time’s sake. Well, thought Pad, one more—just a one-off thing—wouldn’t hurt.

Before long, Pad was hacking regularly again, and when Gandalf tried to give it up, Pad was there luring him to return to his favourite pastime. They were like two boys at school, getting each other into trouble—the kind of trouble which always comes in pairs. If Pad and Gandalf hadn’t known each other, they probably would both have walked away from hacking forever in 1990.

As they both got back into the swing of things, they tried to make light of the risk of getting caught. `Hey, you know,’ Gandalf joked on-line more than once, `the first time we actually meet each other in person will probably be in a police station.’

Completely irreverent and always upbeat, Gandalf proved to be a true friend. Pad had rarely met such a fellow traveller in the real world, let alone on-line. What others—particularly some American hackers—viewed as prickliness, Pad saw as the perfect sense of humour. To Pad, Gandalf was the