Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession from the Electronic Frontier (25 page)

Indeed, Force saw a great deal of himself in the young hacker. They were from a similarly comfortable, educated middle-class background.

They were also both a little outside the mainstream. Force’s family were migrants to Australia. Some of Phoenix’s family lived in Israel, and his family was very religious.

Phoenix attended one of the most Orthodox Jewish schools in Victoria, a place which described itself as a ‘modern orthodox Zionist’

institution. Nearly half the subjects offered in year 9 were in Jewish Studies, all the boys wore yarmulkes and the school expected students to be fluent in Hebrew by the time they graduated.

In his first years at the school, Phoenix had acquired the nickname

‘The Egg’. Over the following years he became a master at playing the game--jumping through hoops to please teachers. He learned that doing well in religious studies was a good way to ingratiate himself to teachers, as well as his parents and, in their eyes at least, he became the golden-haired boy.

Anyone scratching below the surface, however, would find the shine of the golden-haired boy was merely gilt. Despite his success in school and his matriculation, Phoenix was having trouble. He had been profoundly affected by the bitter break-up and divorce of his parents when he was about fourteen.

After the divorce, Phoenix was sent to boarding school in Israel for about six months. On his return to Melbourne, he lived with his younger sister and mother at his maternal grandmother’s house. His brother, the middle child, lived with his father.

School friends sometimes felt awkward visiting Phoenix at home. One of his best friends found it difficult dealing with Phoenix’s mother, whose vivacity sometimes bordered on the neurotic and shrill. His grandmother was a chronic worrier, who pestered Phoenix about using the home phone line during thunderstorms for fear he would be electrocuted. The situation with Phoenix’s father wasn’t much better.

A manager at Telecom, he seemed to waver between appearing disinterested or emotionally cold and breaking into violent outbursts of anger.

But it was Phoenix’s younger brother who seemed to be the problem child. He ran away from home at around seventeen and dealt in drugs before eventually finding his feet. Yet, unlike Phoenix, his brother’s problems had been laid bare for all to see. Hitting rock bottom forced him to take stock of his life and come to terms with his situation.

In contrast, Phoenix found less noticeable ways of expressing his rebellion. Among them was his enthusiasm for tools of power--the martial arts, weapons such as swords and staffs, and social engineering. During his final years of secondary school, while still living at his grandmother’s home, Phoenix took up hacking. He hung around various Melbourne BBSes, and then he developed an on-line friendship with Force.

Force watched Phoenix’s hacking skills develop with interest and after a couple of months he invited him to join The Realm. It was the shortest initiation of any Realm member, and the vote to include the new hacker was unanimous. Phoenix proved to be a valuable member, collecting information about new systems and networks for The Realm’s databases. At their peak of hacking activity, Force and Phoenix spoke on the phone almost every day.

Phoenix’s new-found acceptance contrasted with the position of Electron, who visited The Realm regularly for a few months in 1988. As Phoenix basked in the warmth of Force’s approval, the eighteen-year-old Electron felt the chill of his increasing scorn.

Force eventually turfed Electron and his friend, Powerspike, out of his exclusive Melbourne club of hackers. Well, that was how Force told it. He told the other members of The Realm that Electron had committed two major sins. The first was that he had been wasting resources by using accounts on OTC’s Minerva system to connect to Altos, which meant the accounts would be immediately tracked and killed.

Minerva admins such as Michael Rosenberg--sworn enemy of The Realm--recognised the Altos NUA. Rosenberg was OTC’s best defence against hackers. He had spent so much time trying to weed them out of Minerva that he knew their habits by heart: hack, then zoom over to Altos for a chat with fellow hackers, then hack some more.

Most accounts on Minerva were held by corporations. How many legitimate users from ANZ Bank would visit Altos? None. So when Rosenberg saw an account connecting to Altos, he silently observed what the hacker was doing--in case he bragged on the German chat board--then changed the password and notified the client, in an effort to lock the hacker out for good.

Electron’s second sin, according to Force, was that he had been withholding hacking information from the rest of the group. Force’s stated view--though it didn’t seem to apply to him personally--was one in, all in.

It was a very public expulsion. Powerspike and Electron told each other they didn’t really care. As they saw it, they might have visited The Realm BBS now and then but they certainly weren’t members of The Realm. Electron joked with Powerspike, ‘Who would want to be a member of a no-talent outfit like The Realm?’ Still, it must have hurt.

Hackers in the period 1988-90 depended on each other for information.

They honed their skills in a community which shared intelligence and they grew to rely on the pool of information.

Months later, Force grudgingly allowing Electron to rejoin The Realm, but the relationship remained testy. When Electron finally logged in again, he found a file in the BBS entitled ‘Scanner stolen from the Electron’. Force had found a copy of Electron’s VMS scanner on an overseas computer while Electron was in exile and had felt no qualms about pinching it for The Realm.

Except that it wasn’t a scanner. It was a VMS Trojan. And there was a big difference. It didn’t scan for the addresses of computers on a network. It snagged passwords when people connected from their VMS

computers to another machine over an X.25 network. Powerspike cracked up laughing when Electron told him. ‘Well,’ he told Powerspike, ‘Mr Bigshot Force might know something about Prime computers, but he doesn’t know a hell of a lot about VMS.’

Despite Electron’s general fall from grace, Phoenix talked to the outcast because they shared the obsession. Electron was on a steep learning curve and, like Phoenix, he was moving fast--much faster than any of the other Melbourne hackers.

When Phoenix admitted talking to Electron regularly, Force tried to pull him away, but without luck. Some of the disapproval was born of Force’s paternalistic attitude toward the Australian hacking scene. He considered himself to be a sort of godfather in the hacking community.

But Force was also increasingly concerned at Phoenix’s ever more flagrant taunting of computer security bigwigs and system admins. In one incident, Phoenix knew a couple of system admins and security people were waiting on a system to trap him by tracing his network connections. He responded by sneaking into the computer unnoticed and quietly logging off each admin. Force laughed about it at the time, but privately the story made him more than a little nervous.

Phoenix enjoyed pitting himself against the pinnacles of the computer security industry. He wanted to prove he was better, and he frequently upset people because often he was. Strangely, though, Force’s protégé also thought that if he told these experts about a few of the holes in their systems, he would somehow gain their approval. Maybe they would even give him inside information, like new penetration techniques, and, importantly, look after him if things got rough. Force wondered how Phoenix could hold two such conflicting thoughts in his mind at the same time without questioning the logic of either.

It was against this backdrop that Gavin came to Force with his urgent warning in late 1989. Gavin had learned that the Australian Federal Police were getting complaints about hackers operating out of Melbourne. The Melbourne hacking community had become very noisy and was leaving footprints all over the place as its members traversed the world’s data networks.

There were other active hacking communities outside Australia--in the north of England, in Texas, in New York. But the Melbourne hackers weren’t just noisy--they were noisy inside American computers. It wasn’t just a case of American hackers breaking into American systems.

This was about foreign nationals penetrating American computers. And there was something else which made the Australian hackers a target.

The US Secret Service knew an Australian named Phoenix had been inside Citibank, one of the biggest financial institutions in the US.

Gavin didn’t have many details to give Force. All he knew was that an American law enforcement agency--probably the Secret Service--had been putting enormous pressure on the Australian government to bust these people.

What Gavin didn’t know was that the Secret Service wasn’t the only source of pressure coming from the other side of the Pacific. The FBI had also approached the Australian Federal Police about the mysterious but noisy Australian hackers who kept breaking into American systems,5

and the AFP had acted on the information.

In late 1989, Detective Superintendent Ken Hunt of the AFP headed an investigation into the Melbourne hackers. It was believed to be the first major investigation of computer crime since the introduction of Australia’s first federal anti-hacking laws. Like most law enforcement agencies around the world, the AFP were new players in the field of computer crime. Few officers had expertise in computers, let alone computer crime, so this case would prove to be an important proving ground.6

When Gavin broke the news, Force acted immediately. He called Phoenix on the phone, insisting on meeting him in person as soon as possible.

As their friendship had progressed, they had moved from talking on-line to telephone conversations and finally to spending time together in person. Force sat Phoenix down alone and gave him a stern warning. He didn’t tell him how he got his information, but he made it clear the source was reliable.

The word was that the police felt they had to bust someone. It had come to the point where an American law enforcement officer had reportedly told his Australian counterpart, ‘If you don’t do something about it soon, we’ll do something about it ourselves’. The American hadn’t bothered to elaborate on just how they might do something about it, but it didn’t matter.

Phoenix looked suddenly pale. He had certainly been very noisy, and was breaking into systems virtually all the time now. Many of those systems were in the US.

He certainly didn’t want to end up like the West German hacker Hagbard, whose petrol-doused, charred remains had been discovered in a German forest in June 1989.

An associate of Pengo’s, Hagbard had been involved in a ring of German hackers who sold the information they found in American computers to a KGB agent in East Germany from 1986 to 1988.

In March 1989, German police raided the homes and offices of the German hacking group and began arresting people. Like Pengo, Hagbard had secretly turned himself into the German authorities months before and given full details of the hacking ring’s activities in the hope of gaining immunity from prosecution.

American law enforcement agencies and prosecutors had not been enthusiastic about showing the hackers any leniency. Several US

agencies, including the CIA and the FBI, had been chasing the German espionage ring and they wanted stiff sentences, preferably served in an American prison.

German court proceedings were under way when Hagbard’s body was found.

Did he commit suicide or was he murdered? No-one knew for sure, but the news shook the computer underground around the world. Hackers discussed the issue in considerable depth. On the one hand, Hagbard had a long history of mental instability and drug use, having spent time in psychiatric hospitals and detoxification centres off and on since the beginning of 1987. On the other hand, if you were going to kill yourself, would you really want to die in the agony of a petrol fire? Or would you just take a few too many pills or a quick bullet?

Whether it was murder or suicide, the death of Hagbard loomed large before Phoenix. Who were the American law enforcement agencies after in Australia? Did they want him?

No. Force reassured him, they were after Electron. The problem for Phoenix was that he kept talking to Electron on the phone--in voice conversations. If Phoenix continued associating with Electron, he too would be scooped up in the AFP’s net.

The message to Phoenix was crystal clear.

Stay away from Electron.

[ ]

‘Listen, you miserable scum-sucking pig.’

‘Huh?’ Phoenix answered, only half paying attention.

‘Piece of shit machine. I did all this editing and the damn thing didn’t save the changes,’ Electron growled at the Commodore Amiga, with its 512 k of memory, sitting on the desk in his bedroom.

It was January 1990 and both Phoenix and Electron were at home on holidays before the start of university.

‘Yeah. Wish I could get this thing working. Fucking hell. Work you!’

Phoenix yelled. Electron could hear him typing at the other end of the phone while he talked. He had been struggling to get AUX, the Apple version of Unix, running on his Macintosh SE30 for days.

It was difficult to have an uninterrupted conversation with Phoenix.

If it wasn’t his machine crashing, it was his grandmother asking him questions from the doorway of his room.

‘You wanna go through the list? How big is your file?’ Phoenix asked, now more focused on the conversation.

‘Huh? Which file?’

‘The dictionary file. The words to feed into the password cracker,’

Phoenix replied.

Electron pulled up his list of dictionary words and looked at it. I’m going to have to cut this list down a bit, he thought. The dictionary was part of the password cracking program.

The larger the dictionary, the longer it took the computer to crack a list of passwords. If he could weed out obscure words--words that people were unlikely to pick as passwords--then he could make his cracker run faster.

An efficient password cracker was a valuable tool. Electron would feed his home computer a password file from a target computer, say from Melbourne University, then go to bed. About twelve hours later, he would check on his machine’s progress.