Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession from the Electronic Frontier (12 page)

It was hard to know who was sweating more, the fretting Perth manager, tormented by the idea of loud staff complaints from all over the company because the Minerva account was faulty, or the gangly kid trying his hand at social engineering for the first time.

‘Well,’ Mendax began, trying to keep the sound of authority in his voice. ‘Let’s see. We have your account number, but we had better check your password ... what was it?’ An arrow shot from the bow.

It hit the target. ‘Yes, it’s L-U-R-C-H--full stop.’

Lurch? Uhuh. An Addams Family fan.

‘Can you make sure everything is working? We don’t want our service interrupted.’ The Perth manager sounded quite anxious.

Mendax tapped away on the keyboard randomly and then paused. ‘Well, it looks like everything is working just fine now,’ he quickly reassured him. Just fine.

‘Oh, that’s a relief!’ the Perth manager exclaimed. ‘Thank you for that. Thank you. I just can’t thank you enough for calling us!’ More gratitude.

Mendax had to extract himself. This was getting embarrassing.

‘Yes, well I’d better go now. More customers to call.’ That should work. The Perth manager wanted a contact telephone number, as expected, if something went wrong--so Mendax gave him the one which was permanently busy.

‘Thank you again for your courteous service!’ Uhuh. Anytime.

Mendax hung up and tried the toll-free Minerva number. The password worked. He couldn’t believe how easy it was to get in.

He had a quick look around, following the pattern of most hackers breaking into a new machine. First thing to do was to check the electronic mail of the ‘borrowed’ account. Email often contains valuable information. One company manager might send another information about other account names, password changes or even phone numbers to modems at the company itself. Then it was off to check the directories available for anyone to read on the main system--another good source of information. Final stop: Minerva’s bulletin board of news. This included postings from the system operators about planned downtime or other service issues. He didn’t stay long. The first visit was usually mostly a bit of reconnaissance work.

Minerva had many uses. Most important among these was the fact that Minerva gave hackers an entry point into various X.25 networks. X.25

is a type of computer communications network, much like the Unix-based Internet or the VMS-based DECNET. It has different commands and protocols, but the principle of an extensive worldwide data communications network is the same. There is, however, one important difference. The targets for hackers on the X.25 networks are often far more interesting. For example, most banks are on X.25. Indeed, X.25

underpins many aspects of the world’s financial markets. A number of countries’ classified military computer sites only run on X.25. It is considered by many people to be more secure than the Internet or any DECNET system.

Minerva allowed incoming callers to pass into the X.25

network--something most Australian universities did not offer at the time. And Minerva let Australian callers do this without incurring a long-distance telephone charge.

In the early days of Minerva, the OTC operators didn’t seem to care much about the hackers, probably because it seemed impossible to get rid of them. The OTC operators managed the OTC X.25 exchange, which was like a telephone exchange for the X.25 data network. This exchange was the data gateway for Minerva and other systems connected to that data network.

Australia’s early hackers had it easy, until Michael Rosenberg arrived.

Rosenberg, known on-line simply as MichaelR, decided to clean up Minerva. An engineering graduate from Queensland University, Michael moved to Sydney when he joined OTC at age 21. He was about the same age as the hackers he was chasing off his system. Rosenberg didn’t work as an OTC operator, he managed the software which ran on Minerva.

And he made life hell for people like Force. Closing up security holes, quietly noting accounts used by hackers and then killing those accounts, Rosenberg almost single-handedly stamped out much of the hacker activity in OTC’s Minerva.

Despite this, the hackers--‘my hackers’ as he termed the regulars--had a grudging respect for Rosenberg. Unlike anyone else at OTC, he was their technical equal and, in a world where technical prowess was the currency, Rosenberg was a wealthy young man.

He wanted to catch the hackers, but he didn’t want to see them go to prison. They were an annoyance, and he just wanted them out of his system. Any line trace, however, had to go through Telecom, which was at that time a separate body from OTC. Telecom, Rosenberg was told, was difficult about these things because of strict privacy laws. So, for the most part, he was left to deal with the hackers on his own.

Rosenberg could not secure his system completely since OTC didn’t dictate passwords to their customers. Their customers were usually more concerned about employees being able to remember passwords easily than worrying about warding off wily hackers. The result: the passwords on a number of Minerva accounts were easy pickings.

The hackers and OTC waged a war from 1988 to 1990, and it was fought in many ways.

Sometimes an OTC operator would break into a hacker’s on-line session demanding to know who was really using the account. Sometimes the operators sent insulting messages to the hackers--and the hackers gave it right back to them. They broke into the hacker’s session with ‘Oh, you idiots are at it again’. The operators couldn’t keep the hackers out, but they had other ways of getting even.

Electron, a Melbourne hacker and rising star in the Australian underground, had been logging into a system in Germany via OTC’s X.25

link. Using a VMS machine, a sort of sister system to Minerva, he had been playing a game called Empire on the Altos system, a popular hang-out for hackers. It was his first attempt at Empire, a complex war game of strategy which attracted players from around the world.

They each had less than one hour per day to conquer regions while keeping production units at a strategic level. The Melbourne hacker had spent weeks building his position. He was in second place.

Then, one day, he logged into the game via Minerva and the German system, and he couldn’t believe what he saw on the screen in front of him. His regions, his position in the game, all of it--weeks of work--had been wiped out. An OTC operator had used an X.25

packet-sniffer to monitor the hacker’s login and capture his password to Empire. Instead of trading the usual insults, the operator had waited for the hacker to logoff and then had hacked into the game and destroyed the hacker’s position.

Electron was furious. He had been so proud of his position in his very first game. Still, wreaking havoc on the Minerva system in retribution was out of the question. Despite the fact that they wasted weeks of his work, Electron had no desire to damage their system. He considered himself lucky to be able to use it as long as he did.

The anti-establishment attitudes nurtured in BBSes such as PI and Zen fed on a love of the new and untried. There was no bitterness, just a desire to throw off the mantle of the old and dive into the new.

Camaraderie grew from the exhilarating sense that the youth in this particular time and place were constantly on the edge of big discoveries. People were calling up computers with their modems and experimenting. What did this key sequence do? What about that tone?

What would happen if ... It was the question which drove them to stay up day and night, poking and prodding. These hackers didn’t for the most part do drugs. They didn’t even drink that much, given their age.

All of that would have interfered with their burning desire to know, would have dulled their sharp edge. The underground’s anti-establishment views were mostly directed at organisations which seemed to block the way to the new frontier--organisations like Telecom.

It was a powerful word. Say ‘Telecom’ to a member of the computer underground from that era and you will observe the most striking reaction. Instant contempt sweeps across his face. There is a pause as his lips curl into a noticeable sneer and he replies with complete derision, ‘Telescum’. The underground hated Australia’s national telephone carrier with a passion equalled only to its love of exploration. They felt that Telecom was backward and its staff had no idea how to use their own telecommunications technology. Worst of all, Telecom seemed to actively dislike BBSes.

Line noise interfered with one modem talking to another, and in the eyes of the computer underground, Telecom was responsible for the line noise. A hacker might be reading a message on PI, and there, in the middle of some juicy technical titbit, would be a bit of crud--random characters ‘2’28 v’1’;D>nj4’--followed by the comment, ‘Line noise.

Damn Telescum! At their best as usual, I see’. Sometimes the line noise was so bad it logged the hacker off, thus forcing him to spend another 45 minutes attack dialling the BBS. The modems didn’t have error correction, and the faster the modem speed, the worse the impact of line noise. Often it became a race to read mail and post messages before Telecom’s line noise logged the hacker off.

Rumours flew through the underground again and again that Telecom was trying to bring in timed local calls. The volume of outrage was deafening. The BBS community believed it really irked the national carrier that people could spend an hour logged into a BBS for the cost of one local phone call. Even more heinous, other rumours abounded that Telecom had forced at least one BBS to limit each incoming call to under half an hour. Hence Telecom’s other nickname in the computer underground: Teleprofit.

To the BBS community, Telecom’s Protective Services Unit was the enemy. They were the electronic police. The underground saw Protective Services as ‘the enforcers’--an all-powerful government force which could raid your house, tap your phone line and seize your computer equipment at any time. The ultimate reason to hate Telecom.

There was such hatred of Telecom that people in the computer underground routinely discussed ways of sabotaging the carrier. Some people talked of sending 240 volts of electricity down the telephone line--an act which would blow up bits of the telephone exchange along with any line technicians who happened to be working on the cable at the time. Telecom had protective fuses which stopped electrical surges on the line, but BBS hackers had reportedly developed circuit plans which would allow high-frequency voltages to bypass them. Other members of the underground considered what sweet justice it would be to set fire to all the cables outside a particular Telecom exchange which had an easily accessible cable entrance duct.

It was against this backdrop that the underground began to shift into phreaking. Phreaking is loosely defined as hacking the telephone system. It is a very loose definition. Some people believe phreaking includes stealing a credit card number and using it to make a long-distance call for free. Purists shun this definition. To them, using a stolen credit card is not phreaking, it is carding. They argue that phreaking demands a reasonable level of technical skill and involves manipulation of a telephone exchange. This manipulation may manifest itself as using computers or electrical circuits to generate special tones or modify the voltage of a phone line. The manipulation changes how the telephone exchange views a particular telephone line. The result: a free and hopefully untraceable call. The purist hacker sees phreaking more as a way of eluding telephone traces than of calling his or her friends around the world for free.

The first transition into phreaking and eventually carding happened over a period of about six months in 1988. Early hackers on PI and Zen relied primarily on dial-outs, like those at Melbourne University or Telecom’s Clayton office, to bounce around international computer sites. They also used X.25 dial-outs in other countries--the US, Sweden and Germany--to make another leap in their international journeys.

Gradually, the people running these dial-out lines wised up. Dial-outs started drying up. Passwords were changed. Facilities were cancelled.

But the hackers didn’t want to give up access to overseas systems.

They’d had their first taste of international calling and they wanted more. There was a big shiny electronic world to explore out there.

They began trying different methods of getting where they wanted to go. And so the Melbourne underground moved into phreaking.

Phreakers swarmed to PABXes like bees to honey. A PABX, a private automatic branch exchange, works like a mini-Telecom telephone exchange. Using a PABX, the employee of a large company could dial another employee in-house without incurring the cost of a local telephone call. If the employee was, for example, staying in a hotel out of town, the company might ask him to make all his calls through the company’s PABX to avoid paying extortionate hotel long-distance rates. If the employee was in Brisbane on business, he could dial a Brisbane number which might route him via the company’s PABX to Sydney. From there, he might dial out to Rome or London, and the charge would be billed directly to the company. What worked for an employee also worked for a phreaker.

A phreaker dialling into the PABX would generally need to either know or guess the password allowing him to dial out again. Often, the phreaker was greeted by an automated message asking for the employee’s telephone extension--which also served as the password. Well, that was easy enough. The phreaker simply tried a series of numbers until he found one which actually worked.

Occasionally, a PABX system didn’t even have passwords. The managers of the PABX figured that keeping the phone number secret was good enough security. Sometimes phreakers made free calls out of PABXes simply by exploited security flaws in a particular model or brand of PABX. A series of specific key presses allowed the phreaker to get in without knowing a password, an employee’s name, or even the name of the company for that matter.

As a fashionable pastime on BBSes, phreaking began to surpass hacking.

PI established a private phreaking section. For a while, it became almost old hat to call yourself a hacker. Phreaking was forging the path forward.