Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession from the Electronic Frontier (30 page)

‘Should I give him the key?’ Phoenix whispered to Electron.

Gandalf was waiting. To fend him off, Phoenix said, ‘It’s 9 chars.’

Chars was short for characters. On Altos the rule was to abbreviate where ever possible.

‘What is the first char?’

‘Yeah. Tell him,’ Electron whispered to Phoenix.

‘Well, the key is ...’

‘You’re going to spew when you find out, Gand,’ Electron interrupted.

‘Yes ... go on,’ Gandalf said. ‘I am listening.’

‘You won’t believe it. The key is ... Dartmouth.’

‘WHAT???? WHAT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!’ Gandalf exclaimed.

‘No!!! IT’s NOT TRUE! Bollox! You are KIDDING?’

The British hacker was thumping himself on the head. The name of the frigging university! What a stupid password!

Phoenix gave an on-line chuckle. ‘Hehe. Yeah. So hard to guess. We could have had Deszip for all these months ...’

‘Jesus. I hope it’s still on that JANET system,’ Gandalf said. Now that he actually had the password, finding the file became even more urgent.

‘Pray. Pray. Pray,’ Phoenix said. ‘Yeah, you should have seen the licence text on Deszip--it was by NASA.’

‘You’ve seen it? You saw Deszip’s source code?’

‘No,’ Phoenix answered. ‘When I went back to the BEAR machine to check if Deszip was still there, the program was gone. But the licence agreement and other stuff was there. Should have read the licence ...

truly amazing. It basically went on and on about how the people who wrote it didn’t want people like us to get a hold of it. Hehe.’

Electron was growing impatient. ‘Yeah. So, Gand, when you gonna go check that JANET system?’

‘Now. Fingers crossed, m8! See ya l8r ...’ Then he was gone.

The waiting was driving Electron nuts. He kept thinking about Deszip, about how he could have had it months and months ago. That program was such a prize. He was salivating at the thought of getting it after all this time pursuing it around the globe, chasing its trail from system to system, never quite getting close enough to grab it.

When Gandalf showed up again, Pad, Phoenix and Electron were all over him in an instant.

‘WE FUCKING GOT IT GUYS!!!!!’ Gandalf exclaimed.

‘Good job m8!’ Pad said.

‘YES!’ Electron added. ‘Have you decrypted it yet?’

‘Not yet. Crypt isn’t on that machine. We can either copy Crypt onto that machine or copy the file onto another computer which already has Crypt on it,’ Gandalf said.

‘Let’s move it. Quick ... quick ... this damn thing has a habit of disappearing,’ Electron said.

‘Yeah, this is the last copy ... the only one I got.’

‘OK. Think ... think ... where can we copy it to?’ Electron said.

‘Texas!’ Gandalf wanted to copy it to a computer at the University of Texas at Austin, home of the LOD hacker Erik Bloodaxe.

Irrepressible, Gandalf came on like a steam roller if he liked you--and cut you down in a flash if he didn’t. His rough-and-tumble working-class humour particularly appealed to Electron. Gandalf seemed able to zero in on the things which worried you most--something so deep or serious it was often unsaid. Then he would blurt it out in such crass, blunt terms you couldn’t help laughing. It was his way of being in your face in the friendliest possible manner.

‘Yeah! Blame everything on Erik!’ Phoenix joked. ‘No, seriously. That place is crawling with security now, all after Erik. They are into everything.’

Phoenix had heard all about the security purge at the university from Erik. The Australian called Erik all the time, mostly by charging the calls to stolen AT&T cards. Erik hadn’t been raided by the Secret Service yet, but he had been tipped off and was expecting a visit any day.

‘It probably won’t decrypt anyway,’ Electron said.

‘Oh, phuck off!’ Gandalf shot back. ‘Come on! I need a site NOW!’

‘Thinking ...’ Phoenix said. ‘Gotta be some place with room--how big is it?’

‘It’s 900 k compressed--probably 3 meg when we uncompress it. Come on, hurry up! How about a university?’

‘Princeton, Yale could do either of those.’ Electron suggested. ‘What about MIT--you hacked an account there recently, Gand?’

‘No.’

All four hackers racked their minds for a safe haven. The world was their oyster, as British and Australian hackers held a real-time conversation in Germany about whether to hide their treasure in Austin, Texas; Princeton, New Jersey; Boston, Massachusetts; or New Haven, Connecticut.

‘We only need somewhere to stash it for a little while, until we can download it,’ Gandalf said. ‘Got to be some machine where we’ve got root. And it’s got to have anon FTP.’

Anon FTP, or anonymous file transfer protocol, on a host machine would allow Gandalf to shoot the file from his JANET machine across the Internet into the host. Most importantly, Gandalf could do so without an account on the target machine. He could simply login as

‘anonymous’, a method of access which had more limitations than simply logging in with a normal account. He would, however, still be able to upload the file.

‘OK. OK, I have an idea,’ Phoenix said. ‘Lemme go check it out.’

Phoenix dropped out of Altos and connected to the University of Texas.

The physical location of a site didn’t matter. His head was spinning and it was the only place he could think of. But he didn’t try to connect to Happy, the machine he often used which Erik had told him about. He headed to one of the other university computers, called Walt.

The network was overloaded. Phoenix was left dangling, waiting to connect for minutes on end. The lines were congested. He logged back into Altos and told Pad and Electron. Gandalf was nowhere to be seen.

‘Damn,’ Electron said. Then, ‘OK, I might have an idea.’

‘No, wait!’ Phoenix cut in. ‘I just thought of a site! And I have root too! But it’s on NASA ...’

‘Oh that’s OK. I’m sure they won’t mind a bit. ’

‘I’ll go make sure it’s still OK. Back in a bit,’ Phoenix typed.

Phoenix jumped out of Altos and headed toward NASA. He telnetted into a NASA computer called CSAB at the Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. He had been in and out of NASA quite a few times and had recently made himself a root account on CSAB. First, he had to check the account was still alive, then he had to make sure the system administrator wasn’t logged in.

Whizzing past the official warning sign about unauthorised access in US government computers on the login screen, Phoenix typed in his user name and password.

It worked. He was in. And he had root privileges.

He quickly looked around on the system. The administrator was on-line.

Damn.

Phoenix fled the NASA computer and sprinted back into Altos. Gandalf was there, along with the other two, waiting for him.

‘Well?’ Electron asked.

‘OK. All right. The NASA machine will work. It has anon FTP. And I still have root. We’ll use that.’

Gandalf jumped in. ‘Hang on--does it have Crypt?’

‘Argh! Forget to check. I think it must.’

‘Better check it, m8!’

‘Yeah, OK.’

Phoenix felt exasperated, rushing around trying to find sites that worked. He logged out of Altos and coursed his way back into the NASA machine. The admin was still logged on, but Phoenix was running out of time. He had to find out if the computer had Crypt on it. It did.

Phoenix rushed back to Altos. ‘Back again. We’re in business.’

‘Yes!’ Electron said, but he quickly jumped in with a word of warning.

‘Don’t say the exact machine at NASA or the account out loud. Whisper it to Gandalf. I think the ops are listening in on my connection.’

‘Well,’ Phoenix typed slowly, ‘there’s only one problem. The admin is logged on.’

‘Arghhh!’ Electron shouted.

‘Just do it,’ Pad said. ‘No time to worry.’

Phoenix whispered the Internet IP address of the NASA machine to Gandalf.

‘OK, m8, I’ll anon FTP it to NASA. I’ll come back here and tell you the new filename. Then you go in and decrypt it and uncompress the file. W8 for me here.’

Ten minutes later, Gandalf returned. ‘Mission accomplished. The file is there!’

‘Now, go go Pheeny!’ Electron said.

‘Gand, whisper the filename to me,’ Phoenix said.

‘The file’s called "d" and it’s in the pub directory,’ Gandalf whispered.

‘OK, folks. Here we go!’ Phoenix said as he logged off.

Phoenix dashed to the NASA computer, logged in and looked for the file named ‘d’. He couldn’t find it. He couldn’t even find the pub directory. He began hunting around the rest of the file system. Where was the damn thing?

Uh oh. Phoenix noticed the system administrator, Sharon Beskenis, was still logged in. She was connected from Phoebe, another NASA machine.

There was only one other user besides himself logged into the CSAB

machine, someone called Carrie. As if that wasn’t bad enough, Phoenix

realised his username stood out a like a sore thumb. If the admin

looked at who was on-line she would see herself, Carrie and a user called ‘friend’, an account he had created for himself. How many legitimate accounts on NASA computers had that name?

Worse, Phoenix noticed that he had forgotten to cover his login trail.

‘Friend’ was telnetting into the NASA computer from the University of Texas. No, no, he thought, that would definitely have to go. He disconnected from NASA, bounced back to the university and then logged in to NASA again. Good grief. Now the damn NASA machine showed two people logged in as ‘friend’. The computer hadn’t properly killed his previous login. Stress.

Phoenix tried frantically to clear out his first login by killing its process number. The NASA computer responded that there was no such process number. Increasingly nervous, Phoenix figured he must have typed in the wrong number. Unhinged, he grabbed one of the other process numbers and killed that.

Christ! That was the admin’s process number. Phoenix had just disconnected Sharon from her own machine. Things were not going well.

Now he was under serious pressure. He didn’t dare logout, because Sharon would no doubt find his ‘friend’ account, kill it and close up the security hole he had originally used to get in. Even if she didn’t find Deszip on her own machine, he might not be able to get back in again to retrieve it.

After another frenzied minute hunting around the machine, Phoenix finally unearthed Gandalf’s copy of Deszip. Now, the moment of truth.

He tried the passphrase. It worked! All he had to do was uncompress Deszip and get it out of there. He typed, ‘uncompress deszip.tar.z’, but he didn’t like how the NASA computer answered his command:

corrupt input

Something was wrong, terribly wrong. The file appeared to be partially destroyed. It was too painful a possibility to contemplate. Even if only a small part of the main Deszip program had been damaged, none of it would be useable.

Rubbing sweat from his palms, Phoenix hoped that maybe the file had just been damaged as he attempted to uncompress it. He had kept the original, so he went back to that and tried decrypting and uncompressing it again. The NASA computer gave him the same ugly response. Urgently, he tried yet again, but this time attempted to uncompress the file in a different way. Same problem.

Phoenix was at his wits’ end. This was too much. The most he could hope was that the file had somehow become corrupted in the transfer from Gandalf’s JANET machine. He logged out of NASA and returned to Altos. The other three were waiting impatiently for him.

Electron, still logged in as the mystery Guest, leaped in. ‘Did it work?’

‘No. Decrypted OK, but the file was corrupted when I tried to decompress it.’

‘Arghhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!’ Gandalf exclaimed.

‘Fuckfuckfuck,’ Electron wrote. ‘Doomed to fail.’

‘Sigh Sigh Sigh,’ Pad typed.

Gandalf and Electron quizzed Phoenix in detail about each command he had used, but in the end there seemed only one hope. Move a copy of the decryption program to the JANET computer in the UK and try decrypting and uncompressing Deszip there.

Phoenix gave Gandalf a copy of Crypt and the British hacker went to work on the JANET computer. A little later he rendezvoused on Altos again.

Phoenix was beside himself by this stage. ‘Gand! Work???’

‘Well, I decrypted it using the program you gave me ...’

‘And And And???’ Electron was practically jumping out of his seat at his computer.

‘Tried to uncompress it. It was taking a LONG time. Kept going--expanded to 8 megabytes.’

‘Oh NO. Bad Bad Bad,’ Phoenix moaned. ‘Should only be 3 meg. If it’s making a million files, it’s fucked.’

‘Christ,’ Pad typed. ‘Too painful.’

‘I got the makefile--licensing agreement text etc., but the Deszip program itself was corrupted,’ Gandalf concluded.

‘I don’t understand what is wrong with it. ’ Phoenix wrote.

‘AgonyAgonyAgony,’ Electron groaned. ‘It’ll never never never work.’

‘Can we get a copy anywhere else?’ Gandalf asked.

‘That FTP bug has been fixed at Purdue,’ Pad answered. ‘Can’t use that to get in again.’

Disappointment permeated the atmosphere on Altos.

There were, of course, other possible repositories for Deszip. Phoenix and Electron had already penetrated a computer at Lawrence Livermore National Labs in California. They had procured root on the gamm5

machine and planned to use it as a launchpad for penetrating security expert Russell Brand’s computer at LLNL, called Wuthel. They were sure Brand had Deszip on his computer.

It would require a good deal of effort, and possibly another roller-coaster ride of desire, expectation and possible disappointment. For now, the four hackers resolved to sign off, licking their wounds at their defeat in the quest for Deszip.

‘Well, I’m off. See you l8r,’ Pad said.

‘Yeah, me too,’ Electron added.

‘Yeah, OK. L8r, m8s!’ Gandalf said.

Then, just for fun, he added in typical Gandalf style, ‘See you in jail!’

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