Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession from the Electronic Frontier (40 page)

The inmates of HM Prison Kirkham, on the north-west coast of England, near Preston, had heard all about Pad and Gandalf by the time they arrived. They greeted the hackers by name. They’d seen the reports on telly, especially about how Gandalf had hacked NASA--complete with footage of the space shuttle taking off. Some TV reporter’s idea of subtle irony--‘Two hackers were sent down today’ as the space shuttle went up.

Kirkham was far better than Brixton, where the hackers had spent the first days of their sentence while awaiting transfer. Brixton was what Pad always envisioned prison would look like, with floors of barred cells facing onto an open centre and prisoners only allowed out of their cells for scheduled events such as time in the yard. It was a place where hard-core criminals lived. Fortunately, Pad and Gandalf had been placed in the same cell while they waited to be assigned to their final destination.

After ten days inside Brixton Pad and Gandalf were led from their cell, handcuffed and put in a coach heading toward the windy west coast.

During the drive, Pad kept looking down at his hand, locked in shiny steel to Gandalf’s hand, then he looked back up again at his fellow hacker. Clearing his throat and turning away from Gandalf’s difficult grin--his friend now on the edge of laughing himself--Pad struggled.

He tried to hold down the muscles of his face, to pull them back from laughter.

A minimum security prison holding up to 632 prisoners, Kirkham looked vaguely like a World War II RAF base with a large collection of free-standing buildings around the grounds. There were no real walls, just a small wire fence which Pad soon learned prisoners routinely jumped when the place started to get to them.

For a prison, Kirkham was pretty good. There was a duck pond, a bowling green, a sort of mini-cinema which showed films in the early evenings, eight pay phones, a football field, a cricket pavilion and, best of all, lots of fields. Prisoners could have visits on weekday afternoons between 1.10 and 3.40, or on the weekend.

Luck smiled on the two hackers. They were assigned to the same billet and, since none of the other prisoners objected, they became room-mates. Since they were sentenced in May, they would serve their time during summer. If they were ‘of good behaviour’ and didn’t get into trouble with other prisoners, they would be out in three months.

Like any prison, Kirkham had its share of prisoners who didn’t get along with each other. Mostly, prisoners wanted to know what you were in for and, more particularly, if you had been convicted of a sex crime. They didn’t like sex crime offenders and Pad heard about a pack of Kirkham prisoners who dragged one of their own, screaming, to a tree, where they tried to hang him for being a suspected rapist. In fact, the prisoner hadn’t been convicted of anything like rape. He had simply refused to pay his poll tax.

Fortunately for Pad and Gandalf, everyone else in Kirkham knew why they were there. At the end of their first week they returned to their room one afternoon to find a sign painted above their door. It said,

‘NASA HQ’.

The other minimum security prisoners understood hacking--and they had all sorts of ideas about how you could make money from it. Most of the prisoners in Kirkham were in for petty theft, credit card fraud, and other small-time crimes. There was also a phreaker, who arrived the same day as Pad and Gandalf. He landed eight months in prison--two more than the 8lgm hackers--and Pad wondered what kind of message that sent the underground.

Despite their best efforts, the 8lgm twosome didn’t fit quite the prison mould. In the evenings, other prisoners spent their free time shooting pool or taking drugs. In the bedroom down the hall, Gandalf lounged on his bed studying a book on VMS internals. Pad read a computer magazine and listened to some indie music--often his ‘Babes in Toyland’ tape. In a parody of prison movies, the two hackers marked off their days inside the prison with cross-hatched lines on their bedroom wall--four marks, then a diagonal line through them. They wrote other things on the walls too.

The long, light-filled days of summer flowed one into the other, as Pad and Gandalf fell into the rhythm of the prison. The morning check-in at 8.30 to make sure none of the prisoners had gone walkabout. The dash across the bowling green for a breakfast of beans, bacon, eggs, toast and sausage. The walk to the greenhouses where the two hackers had been assigned for work detail.

The work wasn’t hard. A little digging in the pots. Weeding around the baby lettuce heads, watering the green peppers and transplanting tomato seedlings. When the greenhouses became too warm by late morning, Pad and Gandalf wandered outside for a bit of air. They often talked about girls, cracking crude, boyish jokes about women and occasionally discussing their girlfriends more seriously. As the heat settled in, they sat down, lounging against the side of the greenhouse.

After lunch, followed by more time in the greenhouse, Pad and Gandalf sometimes went off for walks in the fields surrounding the prison.

First the football field, then the paddocks dotted with cows beyond it.

Pad was a likeable fellow, largely because of his easygoing style and relaxed sense of humour. But liking him wasn’t the same as knowing him, and the humour often deflected deeper probing into his personality. But Gandalf knew him, understood him. Everything was so easy with Gandalf. During the long, sunny walks, the conversation flowed as easily as the light breeze through the grass.

As they wandered in the fields, Pad often wore his denim jacket. Most of the clothes on offer from the prison clothing office were drab blue, but Pad had lucked onto this wonderful, cool denim jacket which he took to wearing all the time.

Walking for hours on end along the perimeters of the prison grounds, Pad saw how easy it would be to escape, but in the end there didn’t seem to be much point. They way he saw it, the police would just catch you and put you back in again. Then you’d have to serve extra time.

Once a week, Pad’s parents came to visit him, but the few precious hours of visiting time were more for his parents’ benefit than his own. He reassured them that he was OK, and when they looked him in the face and saw it was true, they stopped worrying quite so much. They brought him news from home, including the fact that his computer equipment had been returned by one of the police who had been in the original raid.

The officer asked Pad’s mother how the hacker was doing in prison.

‘Very well indeed,’ she told him. ‘Prison’s not nearly so bad as he thought.’ The officer’s face crumpled into a disappointed frown. He seemed to be looking for news that Pad was suffering nothing but misery.

At the end of almost three months, with faces well tanned from walking in the meadows, Pad and Gandalf walked free.

[ ]

To the casual witness sitting nearby in the courtroom, the tension between Phoenix’s mother and father was almost palpable. They were not sitting near each other but that didn’t mitigate the silent hostility which rose through the air like steam. Phoenix’s divorced parents provided a stark contrast to Nom’s adopted parents, an older, suburban couple who were very much married.

On Wednesday, 25 August 1993 Phoenix and Nom pleaded guilty to fifteen and two charges respectively. The combined weight of the prosecution’s evidence, the risk and cost of running a full trial and the need to get on with their lives had pushed them over the edge. Electron didn’t need to come to court to give evidence.

At the plea hearing, which ran over to the next day, Phoenix’s lawyer, Dyson Hore-Lacy, spent considerable time sketching the messy divorce of his client’s parents for the benefit of the judge. Suggesting Phoenix retreated into his computer during the bitter separation and divorce was the best chance of getting him off a prison term. Most of all, the defence presented Phoenix as a young man who had strayed off the correct path in life but was now back on track--holding down a job and having a life.

The DPP had gone in hard against Phoenix. They seemed to want a jail term badly and they doggedly presented Phoenix as an arrogant braggart. The court heard a tape-recording of Phoenix ringing up security guru Edward DeHart of the Computer Emergency Response Team at Carnegie Mellon University to brag about a security exploit. Phoenix told DeHart to get onto his computer and then proceeded to walk him step by step through the ‘passwd -f’ security bug. Ironically, it was Electron who had discovered that security hole and taught it to Phoenix--a fact Phoenix didn’t seem to want to mention to DeHart.

The head of the AFP’s Southern Region Computer Crimes Unit, Detective Sergeant Ken Day was in court that day. There was no way he was going to miss this. The same witness noting the tension between Phoenix’s parents might also have perceived an undercurrent of hostility between Day and Phoenix--an undercurrent which did not seem to exist between Day and either of the other Realm hackers.

Day, a short, careful man who gave off an air of bottled intensity, seemed to have an acute dislike for Phoenix. By all observations the feeling was mutual. A cool-headed professional, Day would never say anything in public to express the dislike--that was not his style. His dislike was only indicated by a slight tightness in the muscles of an otherwise unreadable face.

On 6 October 1993, Phoenix and Nom stood side by side in the dock for sentencing. Wearing a stern expression, Judge Smith began by detailing both the hackers’ charges and the origin of The Realm. But after the summary, the judge saved his harshest rebuke for Phoenix.

‘There is nothing ... to admire about your conduct and every reason why it should be roundly condemned. You pointed out [weaknesses] to some of the system administrators ... [but] this was more a display of arrogance and a demonstration of what you thought was your superiority rather than an act of altruism on your part.

‘You ... bragged about what you had done or were going to do ... Your conduct revealed ... arrogance on your part, open defiance, and an intention to the beat the system. [You] did cause havoc for a time within the various targeted systems.’

Although the judge appeared firm in his views while passing sentence, behind the scenes he had agonised greatly over his decision. He had attempted to balance what he saw as the need for deterrence, the creation of a precedence for sentencing hacking cases in Australia, and the individual aspects of this case. Finally, after sifting through the arguments again and again, he had reached a decision.

‘I have no doubt that some sections of our community would regard anything than a custodial sentence as less than appropriate. I share that view. But after much reflection ... I have concluded that an immediate term of imprisonment is unnecessary.’

Relief rolled across the faces of the hackers’ friends and relatives as the judge ordered Phoenix to complete 500 hours of community service work over two years and assigned him a $1000 twelve-month good behaviour bond. He gave Nom 200 hours, and a $500, six-month bond for good behaviour.

As Phoenix was leaving the courtroom, a tall, skinny young man, loped down the aisle towards him.

‘Congratulations,’ the stranger said, his long hair dangling in delicate curls around his shoulders.

‘Thanks,’ Phoenix answered, combing his memory for the boyish face which couldn’t be any older than his own. ‘Do I know you?’

‘Sort of,’ the stranger answered. ‘I’m Mendax. I’m about to go through what you did, but worse.’

_________________________________________________________________

All around

an eerie sound

-- from ‘Maralinga’, on 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 by Midnight Oil Prime Suspect rang Mendax, offering an adventure. He had discovered a strange system called NMELH1 (pronounced N-Melly-H-1) and it was time to go exploring. He read off the dial-up numbers, found in a list of modem phone numbers on another hacked system.

Mendax looked at the scrap of paper in his hand, thinking about the name of the computer system.

The ‘N’ stood for Northern Telecom, a Canadian company with annual sales of $8 billion. NorTel, as the company was known, sold thousands of highly sophisticated switches and other telephone exchange equipment to some of the world’s largest phone companies. The ‘Melly’

undoubtedly referred to the fact that the system was in Melbourne. As for the ‘H-1’, well, that was anyone’s guess, but Mendax figured it probably stood for ‘host-1’--meaning computer site number one.

Prime Suspect had stirred Mendax’s interest. Mendax had spent hours experimenting with commands inside the computers which controlled telephone exchanges. In the end, those forays were all just guesswork--trial and error learning, at considerable risk of discovery. Unlike making a mistake inside a single computer, mis-guessing a command inside a telephone exchange in downtown Sydney or Melbourne could take down a whole prefix--10000 or more phone lines--and cause instant havoc.

This was exactly what the International Subversives didn’t want to do.

The three IS hackers--Mendax, Prime Suspect and Trax--had seen what happened to the visible members of the computer underground in England and in Australia. The IS hackers had three very good reasons to keep their activities quiet.

Phoenix. Nom. And Electron.

But, Mendax thought, what if you could learn about how to manipulate a million-dollar telephone exchange by reading the manufacturer’s technical documentation? How high was the chance that those documents, which weren’t available to the public, were stored inside NorTel’s computer network?

Better still, what if he could find NorTel’s original source code--the software designed to control specific telephone switches, such as the DMS-100 model. That code might be sitting on a computer hooked into the worldwide NorTel network. A hacker with access could insert his own backdoor--a hidden security flaw--before the company sent out software to its customers.

With a good technical understanding of how NorTel’s equipment worked, combined with a backdoor installed in every piece of software shipped with a particular product, you could have control over every new NorTel DMS telephone switch installed from Boston to Bahrain. What power! Mendax thought, what if you you could turn off 10000 phones in Rio de Janeiro, or give 5000 New Yorkers free calls one afternoon, or listen into private telephone conversations in Brisbane. The telecommunications world would be your oyster.