Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession from the Electronic Frontier (35 page)

There was one other thing--in some ways the most disturbing matter of all. In the course of the legal to-ing and fro-ing, Electron was told that it was the US Secret Service back in 1988 which had triggered the AFP investigation into The Realm hackers--an investigation which had led to Electron’s bust and current legal problems. The Secret Service was after the hackers who broke into Citibank.

As it happened, Electron had never touched Citibank. Credit cards couldn’t interest him less. He found banks boring and, the way he looked at it, their computers were full of mundane numbers belonging to the world of accounting. He had already suffered through enough of those tedious types of numbers in his university course. Unless he wanted to steal from banks--something he would not do--there was no point in breaking into their computers.

But the US Secret Service was very interested in banks--and in Phoenix. For they didn’t just believe that Phoenix had been inside Citibank’s computers. They believed he had masterminded the Citibank attack.

And why did the US Secret Service think that? Because, Electron was told, Phoenix had gone around bragging about it in the underground. He hadn’t just told people he had hacked into Citibank computers, he reportedly boasted that he had stolen some $50000 from the bank.

Going through his legal brief, Electron had discovered something which seemed to confirm what he was being told. The warrant for the telephone tap on both of Phoenix’s home phones mentioned a potential

‘serious loss to Citibank’ as a justification for the warrant.

Strangely, the typed words had been crossed out in the handwritten scrawl of the judge who approved the warrant. But they were still legible. No wonder the US Secret Service began chasing the case, Electron thought. Banks get upset when they think people have found a way to rip them off anonymously.

Electron knew that Phoenix hadn’t stolen any money from Citibank.

Rather, he had been circulating fantastic stories about himself to puff up his image in the underground, and in the process had managed to get them all busted.

In September 1992, Phoenix rang Electron suggesting they get together to discuss the case. Electron wondered why. Maybe he suspected something, sensing that the links binding them were weak, and becoming weaker by the month. That Electron’s mental illness had changed his perception of the world. That his increasingly remote attitude to Phoenix suggested an underlying anger about the continual bragging.

Whatever the reason, Phoenix’s gnawing worry must have been confirmed when Electron put off meeting with him.

Electron didn’t want to meet with Phoenix because he didn’t like him, and because he thought Phoenix was largely responsible for getting the Australian hackers into their current predicament.

With these thoughts fermenting in his mind, Electron listened with interest a few months later when his solicitor, John McLoughlin, proposed an idea. In legal circles, it was nothing new. But it was new to Electron. He resolved to take up McLoughlin’s advice.

Electron decided to testify as a Crown witness against Phoenix.

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Your dream world is just about to end

-- from ‘Dreamworld’, on Diesel and Dust by Midnight Oil In another corner of the globe, the British hackers Pad and Gandalf learned with horror that the Australian authorities had busted the three Realm hackers. Electron had simply disappeared one day. A short time later, Phoenix was gone too. Then the reports started rolling in from newspapers and from other Australian hackers on a German board similar to Altos, called Lutzifer.

Something else worried Pad. In one of his hacking forays, he had discovered a file, apparently written by Eugene Spafford, which said he was concerned that some British hackers--read Pad and Gandalf--would create a new worm, based on the RTM worm, and release it into the Internet. The unnamed British hackers would then be able to cause maximum havoc on thousands of Internet sites.

It was true that Gandalf and Pad had captured copies of various worm source codes. They fished around inside SPAN until they surfaced with a copy of the Father Christmas worm. And, after finally successfully hacking Russell Brand’s machine at LLNL, they deftly lifted a complete copy of the WANK worm. In Brand’s machine, they also found a description of how someone had broken into SPAN looking for the WANK

worm code, but hadn’t found it. ‘That was me breaking into SPAN to look around,’ Gandalf laughed, relaying the tale to Pad.

Despite their growing library of worm code, Pad had no intention of writing any such worm. They simply wanted the code to study what penetration methods the worms had used and perhaps to learn something new. The British hackers prided themselves on never having done anything destructive to systems they hacked. In places where they knew their activities had been discovered--such as at the Universities of Bath, Edinburgh, Oxford and Strathclyde--they wrote notes to the admins signed 8lgm. It wasn’t only an ego thing--it was also a way of telling the admins that they weren’t going to do anything nasty to the system.

At one university, the admins thought 8lgm was some kind of weird variation on a Belgian word and that the hackers who visited their systems night after night were from Belgium. At another uni, the admins made a different guess at the meaning. In the morning, when they came into work and saw that the hackers had been playing in their system all night, they would sigh to each other, ‘Our eight little green men are at it again’.

At the University of Lancaster, the hackers wrote a message to the admins which said: ‘Don’t do anything naughty. We have a good image around the world, so please don’t tarnish it or start making up stories about us messing up systems. Don’t hold your breath for us to hack you, but keep us in mind.’ Wherever they went, their message was the same.

Nonetheless Pad visualised a scenario where Spaf whipped up the computer security and law enforcement people into a frenzied panic and tried to pin all sorts of things on the British hackers, none of which they had done. The underground saw Spaf as being rabid in his attack on hackers, based largely on his response to the RTM worm. And Gandalf had hacked Spaf’s machine.

The crackdown on the Australians, combined with the discovery of the Spaf file, had a profound effect on Pad. Always cautious anyway, he decided to give up hacking. It was a difficult decision, and weaning himself from exploring systems night after night was no easy task.

However, in the face of what had happened to Electron and Phoenix, continuing to hack didn’t seem worth the risk.

When Pad gave up hacking, he bought his own NUI so he could access places like Altos legitimately. The NUI was expensive--about

[sterling]10 an hour--but he was never on for long. Leisurely chats of the type he once enjoyed in Altos were out of the question, but at least he could mail letters to his friends like Theorem and Gandalf.

There would have been easier ways to maintain his friendship with Gandalf, who lived in Liverpool, only an hour’s drive away. But it wouldn’t be the same. Pad and Gandalf had never met, or even talked on the phone. They talked on-line, and via email. That was the way they related.

Pad also had other reasons for giving up hacking. It was an expensive habit in Britain because British Telecom time-charged for local phone calls. In Australia, a hacker could stay on-line for hours, jumping from one computer to another through the data network, all for the cost of one local call. Like the Australians, Pad could launch his hacking sessions from a local uni or X.25 dial-up. However, an all-night hacking session based on a single phone call might still cost him [sterling]5 or more in timed-call charges--a considerable amount of money for an unemployed young man. As it was, Pad had already been forced to stop hacking for brief periods when he ran out of his dole money.

Although Pad didn’t think he could be prosecuted for hacking under British law in early 1990, he knew that Britain was about to enact its own computer crime legislation--the Computer Misuse Act 1990--in August. The 22-year-old hacker decided that it was better to quit while he was ahead.

And he did, for a while at least. Until July 1990, when Gandalf, two years his junior, tempted him with one final hack before the new Act came into force. Just one last fling, Gandalf told him. After that last fling in July, Pad stopped hacking again.

The Computer Misuse Act passed into law in August 1990, following two law commission reviews on the subject. The Scottish Law Commission issued a 1987 report proposing to make unauthorised data access illegal, but only if the hacker tried to ‘secure advantage, or cause damage to another person’--including reckless damage.2 Simple look-see hacking would not be a crime under the report’s recommendations.

However, in 1989 The Law Commission of England and Wales issued its own report proposing that simple unauthorised access should be a crime regardless of intent--a recommendation which was eventually included in the law.

Late in 1989, Conservative MP Michael Colvin introduced a private member’s bill into the British parliament. Lending her support to the bill, outspoken hacker-critic Emma Nicholson, another Conservative MP, fired public debate on the subject and ensured the bill passed through parliament successfully.

In November 1990, Pad was talking on-line with Gandalf, and his friend suggested they have one more hack, just one more, for old time’s sake.

Well, thought Pad, one more--just a one-off thing--wouldn’t hurt.

Before long, Pad was hacking regularly again, and when Gandalf tried to give it up, Pad was there luring him to return to his favourite pastime. They were like two boys at school, getting each other into trouble--the kind of trouble which always comes in pairs. If Pad and Gandalf hadn’t known each other, they probably would both have walked away from hacking forever in 1990.

As they both got back into the swing of things, they tried to make light of the risk of getting caught. ‘Hey, you know,’ Gandalf joked on-line more than once, ‘the first time we actually meet each other in person will probably be in a police station.’

Completely irreverent and always upbeat, Gandalf proved to be a true friend. Pad had rarely met such a fellow traveller in the real world, let alone on-line. What others--particularly some American hackers--viewed as prickliness, Pad saw as the perfect sense of humour. To Pad, Gandalf was the best m8 a fellow could ever have.

During the time Pad avoided hacking, Gandalf had befriended another, younger hacker named Wandii, also from the north of England. Wandii never played much of a part in the international computer underground, but he did spend a lot of time hacking European computers. Wandii and Pad got along pleasantly but they were never close. They were acquaintances, bound by ties to Gandalf in the underground.

By the middle of June 1991, Pad, Gandalf and Wandii were peaking. At least one of them--and often more--had already broken into systems belonging to the European Community in Luxembourg, The Financial Times (owners of the FTSE 100 share index), the British Ministry of Defence, the Foreign Office, NASA, the investment bank SG Warburg in London, the American computer database software manufacturer Oracle, and more machines on the JANET network than they could remember. Pad had also penetrated a classified military network containing a NATO system.

They moved through British Telecom’s Packet Switched Stream Network (PSS), which was similar to the Tymnet X.25 network, with absolute ease.3

Gandalf’s motto was, ‘If it moves, hack it’.

[ ]

On 27 June 1991, Pad was sitting in the front room of his parent’s comfortable home in greater Manchester watching the last remnants of daylight disappear on one of the longest days of the year. He loved summer, loved waking up to streaks of sunlight sneaking through the cracks in his bedroom curtain. He often thought to himself, it doesn’t get much better than this.

Around 11 p.m. he flicked on his modem and his Atari 520 ST computer in the front sitting room. There were two Atari computers in the house--indicative of his deep enthusiasm for computers since neither his siblings nor his parents had any interest in programming. Most of the time, however, Pad left the older Atari alone. His elder brother, an aspiring chemist, used it for writing his PhD thesis.

Before dialling out, Pad checked that no-one was on the house’s single phone line. Finding it free, he went to check his email on Lutzifer. A few minutes after watching his machine connect to the German board, he heard a soft thud, followed by a creaking. Pad stopped typing, looked up from his machine and listened. He wondered if his brother, reading in their bedroom upstairs, or his parents, watching telly in the back lounge room, could hear the creaking.

The sound became more pronounced and Pad swung around and looked toward the hallway. In a matter of seconds, the front door frame had been cracked open, prising the door away from its lock. The wood had been torn apart by some sort of car jack, pumped up until the door gave way.

Suddenly, a group of men burst through from the front doorstep, dashed down the long hallway and shot up the carpeted stairs to Pad’s bedroom.

Still sitting at his computer downstairs, Pad swiftly flicked his modem, and then his computer, off--instantly killing his connection and everything on his screen. He turned back toward the door leading to the sitting room and strained to hear what was happening upstairs.

If he wasn’t so utterly surprised, he would almost have laughed. He realised that when the police had dashed up to his bedroom, they had been chasing every stereotype about hackers they had probably ever read. The boy. In his bedroom. Hunched over his computer. Late at night.

They did find a young man in the bedroom, with a computer. But it was the wrong one, and for all intents and purposes the wrong computer. It took the police almost ten minutes of quizzing Pad’s brother to work out their mistake.

Hearing a commotion, Pad’s parents had rushed into the hallway while Pad peered from the doorway of the front sitting room. A uniformed police officer ushered everyone back into the room, and began asking Pad questions.