Hack (2 page)

Hack

By Peter Wrenshall

This book has been made available under the Creative Commons license
by-nc-nd
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/

It may be freely downloaded, uploaded, shared and performed but no part of it may be used for commercial gain without prior written permission from the author.

After the FBI announced that they had caught the
Pentagon Hacker
in a Seattle high school, the first thing everybody wanted to know was how I did it. How could some high school student, working alone on a home computer, get into a classified area of the Pentagon network, and start quietly looking around?

The newspapers said that I must have been working with an insider. The television news, which called it the
biggest military computer break-in of all time
, said that I was probably funded by a criminal organization.

What could I say to that? I wasn’t exactly a computer criminal—more like a computer trespasser. I mean, if you leave your door unlocked, you’ve got to expect that sooner or later, someone is going to open it to see what’s behind it. Besides, I never stole any secrets, I never took any money or credit card details, and I never sent out a single virus or Trojan horse.

But try telling that to the FBI. They interrogated me for days, wanting to know how I had managed to get a privileged user account. What could I say? That I had phoned them and asked them for it . . .

“I.T. Services, good afternoon,” said the voice on the other end of the line.

“Hi. Can I speak to Amanda, please?”

Amanda was an older woman who had been helpful the last time I had spoken to her, though on that occasion I had been an office manager.

“I’m not sure if she is in. Who’s calling, please?”

“It’s John Halsey.”

John Halsey was another of my alter egos: a college graduate—polite, well dressed, and well groomed—a guy who might raise a smile among the women in the office, a decent boy they wouldn’t mind introducing to their own daughters. He also happened to have recently started work at the Pentagon.

“One minute, please.”

There was a click on the line as the call was patched through to Amanda.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Amanda. It’s John Halsey. I’m calling about my new user account.”

There was a pause while Amanda waited for me to explain.

“I’ve only been here a few weeks, and I’ve forgotten my password already.

Bill Harlow said you’d be able to help me out.” I used a high-level manager’s name on purpose; it always amazes me how much of a difference a bit of insider information and name-dropping can make.

“Okay. I’ll have to take you through security before I can reset your password.”

“That’s the problem. My manager sent the security documents to your department, but they didn’t go through yet. I just spoke to somebody about it ten minutes ago.”

“Oh, I see. I’m sorry, but I can’t reset your password without going through security.”

“I'm going to get into trouble, then. I just started here, and I can’t even log on to my computer.”

There was a pause. Amanda, I knew, was wrestling with her conscience. That was why I had chosen to talk to her. Middle-aged women often have children my age—Halsey’s age—and they identify with me. They wouldn’t want me to get into trouble.

“Who’s your manager there?”

1

“Ray Hollis. Please don’t say anything to him. He gave me a lecture on Monday about security. Normally, I’m good about these things. Could you help me out? You don’t have to change my password. Just reset it to the default?”

“Um . . .”

Of course, I was asking Amanda to do something that was against company policy. The helpdesk policy forbids staff from ever giving out passwords over the phone. That would be crazy. But if you go through the security process successfully, then they will reset it to the default for that department, which I had found out the previous week to be the current date, separated by dashes.

“It’s not like you’re giving out my password or anything, is it?” I persisted.

“Is this a new account?”

“Yeah, I just got it.”

“All right, I’ll reset the password to the default.”

“Oh, thanks. You saved me.”

“Try not to forget your password again,” Amanda said in a maternal tone.

“I won’t,” I replied meekly.

“Have a nice day.”

That was it. I had obtained the next level of security clearance. The next day, I would switch from the phone back to the computer, and within perhaps a month or two I would be all the way inside, with access to systems in the military that many generals couldn’t see. I had done it at other companies, dozens of times. Why should the Pentagon be any different?

Was this illegal? Sure, but at that point, I wasn’t worried about getting caught.

I was too careful for that, or so I thought. In the end, my closest friends sold me out.

My own crew.

I remember the day the FBI arrested me. It was a quiet and uneventful school day—up to that point. Walking down the corridor, I was daydreaming about my next hack, when I noticed one of my teachers, Mr. O’Meara, standing in the middle of the corridor, looking at me. The students had nicknamed him “Dreary O’Meara,” because his teaching style was one long monotonous drone. Looking back, I can picture him drilling FBI recruits in that same voice, telling them the correct way to handcuff suspects. But at that point, I didn’t know what his real job was.

I stopped walking. Just to play it safe, I turned to go back the other way, and noticed two men in suits approaching me. I knew the day had come. They had found me.

I hit the stairs that led upwards, at full speed. I heard O’Meara, or whatever his real name was, shout, “Get him!”

I burst through the classroom door at the top of the stairs, and went through one room and into another, closing the adjoining door, and wedging a chair behind it.

I had ten seconds on the FBI at the most, and had to think quickly. I opened the window, but could see that it was too high to jump.

Every sailor has his ‘ditch kit’—the bag of food, water, and maps that he keeps at the boat’s exit, in case of disaster. I had my own emergency escape plan, too.

You never know what you might need, on a rainy day. But since I was nowhere near any of the exits, I knew it wasn’t going to work.

The best I could hope for was to try to hide, and pray that I had enough time to wipe my notebook computer clean of any incriminating evidence left over from previous hacks. I took it out of my backpack, and threw the bag out the window onto the ground below, as a decoy—one of the oldest tricks in the book.

2

I left the window open, and ran to the exit door. Back in the corridor, I looked down the stairway, and saw O’Meara coming up. He had doubled-back, looking to cut me off. I started running again, and made it to the next set of stairs. Before I jumped the banister, I heard someone shout, “The window!”

Moving quickly among the students, I made my way to the entrance of the school offices. I slowed to a walking pace, and went in. Only staff were allowed past this point, but I knew my way around. After hacking and cracking started to take up most of my free time, I’d had to discuss my schoolwork with a counselor, Mr. Alton.

He had arranged for an IQ test, on which I had scored only 71, and he told me that I was probably autistic. I pointed out that I had filled the answers in backwards, as a test for him, which he had failed, and after that he stopped talking to me. But I still knew my way around his office, which he kept unlocked at lunch time.

I went in, and crouched down under the desk. I opened the lid of my computer, and hit the space bar, making it come out of standby mode.

I hit the function key that I had programmed to begin scrambling the RAM

disk. RAM disks are much quicker to wipe clean of any trace evidence than hard disks. Then I opened Alton’s desk drawer, stuck the computer inside, as it continued wiping the incriminating data, and closed the drawer.

I opened the door, and peeked out. There was nobody around. I tiptoed along the corridor. When I got to the first corner, I peeked around it, and then moved quickly down the stairs, to the outside door. Looking through the fireproof mesh of glass and metal, I could see the pathway was deserted. I opened the door to leave, but immediately someone grabbed me from behind, and shoved me to the floor, with a knee on top of me for good measure.

“Karl Ripley, I am arresting you for computer espionage,” said a voice behind me.

Then I heard another voice ask, “Where is it? Where is it?”

That was Agent North, wanting to know where my computer was. I wasn’t about to tell him, or anyone else. I was counting slowly to myself: one thousand, one thousand one, one thousand two . . .

Agent after agent turned up, but I didn’t tell them, either. They were quick to find my computer, but not quick enough to prevent its memory from being wiped clean thirty-five times over. They would get nothing from it. North had been counting on getting to the hard disk in my machine. But I never used writable disks when I was hacking. Why leave a trail of evidence? My code of practice was: take only memories.

“Get him up,” ordered North. With my hands cuffed behind my back, the agents lifted me to face him. I could see the triumph in his eyes. He had finally arrested the infamous Pentagon hacker. But I thought there was something else, too—

some confusion, perhaps. Two of the points on the FBI’s criminal profile had been wrong. Perhaps it was those two little mistakes that had allowed me to avoid capture for so long. The FBI had been looking for a man with an advanced degree in computer science, and in his mid-twenties. But I was a high school student, and I was only sixteen years old.

After my arrest, the papers went crazy, calling me the most notorious hacker ever, and speculating that I had pulled off the greatest hack of all time. If they had known about what followed—how I worked for the FBI and met Grace, and all that—

perhaps they would have had a different opinion. To my mind, that was always my best hack. But, of course, all that was kept secret.

Until now.