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

might also have perceived an undercurrent of hostility between Day and Phoenix—an undercurrent which did not seem to exist between Day and either of the other Realm hackers.

Day, a short, careful man who gave off an air of bottled intensity, seemed to have an acute dislike for Phoenix. By all observations the feeling was mutual. A cool-headed professional, Day would never say anything in public to express the dislike—that was not his style. His dislike was only indicated by a slight tightness in the muscles of an otherwise unreadable face.

On 6 October 1993, Phoenix and Nom stood side by side in the dock for sentencing. Wearing a stern expression, Judge Smith began by detailing both the hackers’ charges and the origin of The Realm. But after the summary, the judge saved his harshest rebuke for Phoenix.

`There is nothing … to admire about your conduct and every reason why it should be roundly condemned. You pointed out [weaknesses] to some of the system administrators … [but] this was more a display of arrogance and a demonstration of what you thought was your superiority rather than an act of altruism on your part.

`You … bragged about what you had done or were going to do … Your conduct revealed … arrogance on your part, open defiance, and an intention to the beat the system. [You] did cause havoc for a time within the various targeted systems.’

Although the judge appeared firm in his views while passing sentence, behind the scenes he had agonised greatly over his decision. He had attempted to balance what he saw as the need for deterrence, the creation of a precedence for sentencing hacking cases in Australia, and the individual aspects of this case. Finally, after sifting through the arguments again and again, he had reached a decision.

`I have no doubt that some sections of our community would regard anything than a custodial sentence as less than appropriate. I share that view. But after much reflection … I have concluded that an immediate term of imprisonment is unnecessary.’

Relief rolled across the faces of the hackers’ friends and relatives as the judge ordered Phoenix to complete 500 hours of community service work over two years and assigned him a $1000 twelve-month good behaviour bond. He gave Nom 200 hours, and a $500, six-month bond for good behaviour.

As Phoenix was leaving the courtroom, a tall, skinny young man, loped down the aisle towards him.

`Congratulations,’ the stranger said, his long hair dangling in delicate curls around his shoulders.

`Thanks,’ Phoenix answered, combing his memory for the boyish face which couldn’t be any older than his own. `Do I know you?’

`Sort of,’ the stranger answered. `I’m Mendax. I’m about to go through what you did, but worse.’

Chapter 8 — The International Subversives.

All around; an eerie sound.

— from `Maralinga’, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.

Prime Suspect rang Mendax, offering an adventure. He had discovered a strange system called NMELH1 (pronounced N-Melly-H-1) and it was time to go exploring. He read off the dial-up numbers, found in a list of modem phone numbers on another hacked system.

Mendax looked at the scrap of paper in his hand, thinking about the name of the computer system.

The `N’ stood for Northern Telecom, a Canadian company with annual sales of $8 billion. NorTel, as the company was known, sold thousands of highly sophisticated switches and other telephone exchange equipment to some of the world’s largest phone companies. The `Melly’ undoubtedly referred to the fact that the system was in Melbourne. As for the `H-1’, well, that was anyone’s guess, but Mendax figured it probably stood for `host-1’—meaning computer site number one.

Prime Suspect had stirred Mendax’s interest. Mendax had spent hours experimenting with commands inside the computers which controlled telephone exchanges. In the end, those forays were all just guesswork—trial and error learning, at considerable risk of discovery. Unlike making a mistake inside a single computer, mis-guessing a command inside a telephone exchange in downtown Sydney or Melbourne could take down a whole prefix—10000 or more phone lines—and cause instant havoc.

This was exactly what the International Subversives didn’t want to do. The three IS hackers—Mendax, Prime Suspect and Trax—had seen what happened to the visible members of the computer underground in England and in Australia. The IS hackers had three very good reasons to keep their activities quiet.

Phoenix. Nom. And Electron.

But, Mendax thought, what if you could learn about how to manipulate a million-dollar telephone exchange by reading the manufacturer’s technical documentation? How high was the chance that those documents, which weren’t available to the public, were stored inside NorTel’s computer network?

Better still, what if he could find NorTel’s original source code—the software designed to control specific telephone switches, such as the DMS-100 model. That code might be sitting on a computer hooked into the worldwide NorTel network. A hacker with access could insert his own backdoor—a hidden security flaw—before the company sent out software to its customers.

With a good technical understanding of how NorTel’s equipment worked, combined with a backdoor installed in every piece of software shipped with a particular product, you could have control over every new NorTel DMS telephone switch installed from Boston to Bahrain. What power! Mendax thought, what if you you could turn off 10000 phones in Rio de Janeiro, or give 5000 New Yorkers free calls one afternoon, or listen into private telephone conversations in Brisbane. The telecommunications world would be your oyster.

Like their predecessors, the three IS hackers had started out in the Melbourne BBS scene. Mendax met Trax on Electric Dreams in about 1988, and Prime Suspect on Megaworks, where he used the handle Control Reset, not long after that. When he set up his own BBS at his home in Tecoma, a hilly suburb so far out of Melbourne that it was practically in forest, he invited both hackers to visit `A Cute Paranoia’ whenever they could get through on the single phone line.

Visiting on Mendax’s BBS suited both hackers, for it was more private than other BBSes. Eventually they exchanged home telephone numbers, but only to talk modem-to-modem. For months, they would ring each other up and type on their computer screens to each other—never having heard the sound of the other person’s voice. Finally, late in 1990, the nineteen-year-old Mendax called up the 24-year-old Trax for a voice chat. In early 1991, Mendax and Prime Suspect, aged seventeen, also began speaking in voice on the phone.

Trax seemed slightly eccentric, and possibly suffered from some sort of anxiety disorder. He refused to travel to the city, and he once made reference to seeing a psychiatrist. But Mendax usually found the most interesting people were a little unusual, and Trax was both.

Mendax and Trax discovered they had a few things in common. Both came from poor but educated families, and both lived in the outer suburbs. However, they had very different childhoods.

Trax’s parents migrated to Australia from Europe. Both his father, a retired computer technician, and his mother spoke with a German accent. Trax’s father was very much the head of the household, and Trax was his only son.

By contrast, by the time he was fifteen Mendax had lived in a dozen different places including Perth, Magnetic Island, Brisbane, Townsville, Sydney, the Adelaide Hills, and a string of coastal towns in northern New South Wales and Western Australia. In fifteen years he had enrolled in at least as many different schools.

His mother had left her Queensland home at age seventeen, after saving enough money from selling her paintings to buy a motorcycle, a tent and a road map of Australia. Waving goodbye to her stunned parents, both academics, she rode off into the sunset. Some 2000 kilometres later, she arrived in Sydney and joined the thriving counter-culture community. She worked as an artist and fell in love with a rebellious young man she met at an anti-Vietnam demonstration.

Within a year of Mendax’s birth, his mother’s relationship with his father had ended. When Mendax was two, she married a fellow artist. What followed was many turbulent years, moving from town to town as his parents explored the ’70s left-wing, bohemian subculture. As a boy, he was surrounded by artists. His stepfather staged and directed plays and his mother did make-up, costume and set design.

One night in Adelaide, when Mendax was about four, his mother and a friend were returning from a meeting of anti-nuclear protesters. The friend claimed to have scientific evidence that the British had conducted high-yield, above-ground nuclear tests at Maralinga, a desert area in north-west South Australia.

A 1984 Royal Commission subsequently revealed that between 1953 and 1963 the British government had tested nuclear bombs at the site, forcing more than 5000 Aborigines from their native lands. In December 1993, after years of stalling, the British government agreed to pay [sterling]20 million toward cleaning up the more than 200 square kilometres of contaminated lands. Back in 1968, however, the Menzies government had signed away Britain’s responsibility to clean up the site. In the 1970s, the Australian government was still in denial about exactly what had happened at Maralinga.

As Mendax’s mother and her friend drove through an Adelaide suburb carrying early evidence of the Maralinga tragedy, they noticed they were being followed by an unmarked car. They tried to lose the tail, without success. The friend, nervous, said he had to get the data to an Adelaide journalist before the police could stop him. Mendax’s mother quickly slipped into a back lane and the friend leapt from the car. She drove off, taking the police tail with her.

The plain-clothed police pulled her over shortly after, searched her car and demanded to know where her friend had gone and what had occurred at the meeting. When she was less than helpful, one officer told her, `You have a child out at 2 in the morning. I think you should get out of politics, lady. It could be said you were an unfit mother’.

A few days after this thinly veiled threat, her friend showed up at Mendax’s mother’s house, covered in fading bruises. He said the police had beaten him up, then set him up by planting hash on him. `I’m getting out of politics,’ he announced.

However, she and her husband continued their involvement in theatre. The young Mendax never dreamed of running away to join the circus—he already lived the life of a travelling minstrel. But although the actor-director was a good stepfather, he was also an alcoholic. Not long after Mendax’s ninth birthday, his parents separated and then divorced.

Mendax’s mother then entered a tempestuous relationship with an amateur musician. Mendax was frightened of the man, whom he considered a manipulative and violent psychopath. He had five different identities with plastic in his wallet to match. His whole background was a fabrication, right down to the country of his birth. When the relationship ended, the steady pattern of moving around the countryside began again, but this journey had a very different flavour from the earlier happy-go-lucky odyssey. This time, Mendax and his family were on the run from a physically abusive de facto. Finally, after hiding under assumed names on both sides of the continent, Mendax and his family settled on the outskirts of Melbourne.

Mendax left home at seventeen because he had received a tip-off about an impending raid. Mendax wiped his disks, burnt his print-outs and left. A week later, the Victorian CIB turned up and searched his room, but found nothing. He married his girlfriend, an intelligent but introverted and emotionally disturbed sixteen-year-old he had met through a mutual friend in a gifted children’s program. A year later they had a child.

Mendax made many of his friends through the computer community. He