Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession from the Electronic Frontier (53 page)

Not that these bases were any secret to the locals, or indeed to many Americans. Anthrax knew that anyone could discover a base existed through perfectly legal means. The vast majority of people never thought to look. But once they saw such a list, particularly from the environment of a military computer’s bowels, it tended to drive the point home. The point being that the US military seemed to be everywhere.

Anthrax logged out of System X, killed all his connections and hung up the phone. It was time to move on. Routing through a few out-of-the-way connections, he called one of the numbers on the list.

The username-password combination worked. He looked around. It was as he expected. This wasn’t a computer. It was a telephone exchange. It looked like a NorTel DMS 100.

Hackers and phreakers usually have areas of expertise. In Australian terms, Anthrax was a master of the X.25 network and a king of voice mailbox systems, and others in the underground recognised him as such.

He knew Trilogues better than most company technicians. He knew Meridian VMB systems better than almost anyone in Australia. In the phreaking community, he was also a world-class expert in Aspen VMB

systems. He did not, however, have any expertise in DMS 100s.

Anthrax quickly hunted through his hacking disks for a text file on DMS 100s he had copied from an underground BBS. The pressure was on.

He didn’t want to spend long inside the exchange, maybe only fifteen or twenty minutes tops. The longer he stayed without much of a clue about how the thing operated, the greater the risk of his being traced. When he found the disk with the text file, he began sorting through it while still on-line at the telephone exchange. The phreakers’ file showed him some basic commands, things which let him gently prod the exchange for basic information without disturbing the system too much. He didn’t want to do much more for fear of inadvertently mutilating the system.

Although he was not an authority on DMS 100s, Anthrax had an old hacker friend overseas who was a real genius on NorTel equipment. He gave the list to his friend. Yes, the friend confirmed it was indeed a DMS 100 exchange at a US military base. It was not part of the normal telephone system, though. This exchange was part of a military phone system.

In times of war, the military doesn’t want to be dependent on the civilian telephone system. Even in times of peace, voice communications between military staff are more secure if they don’t talk on an exchange used by civilians. For this and a variety of other reasons, the military have separate telephone networks, just as they have separate networks for their data communications. These networks operate like a normal network and in some cases can communicate to the outside world by connecting through their own exchanges to civilian ones.

When Anthrax got the word from the expert hacker, he made up his mind quickly. Up went the sniffer. System X was getting more interesting by the hour and he didn’t want to miss a precious minute in the information gathering game when it came to this system.

The sniffer, a well-used program rumoured to be written by a Sydney-based Unix hacker called Rockstar, sat on System X under an innocuous name, silently tracking everyone who logged in and out of the system. It recorded the first 128 characters of every telnet connection that went across the ethernet network cable to which System X was attached. Those 128 bytes included the username and the passwords people used to log in. Sniffers were effective, but they needed time. Usually, they grew like an embryo in a healthy womb, slowly but steadily.

Anthrax resolved to return to System X in twelve hours to check on the baby.

[ ]

‘Why are you two watching those nigger video clips?’

It was an offensive question, but not atypical for Anthrax’s father.

He often breezed through the house, leaving a trail of disruption in his wake.

Soon, however, Anthrax began eroding his father’s authority. He discovered his father’s secrets hidden on the Commodore 64 computer.

Letters--lots of them--to his family in England. Vicious, racist, horrid letters telling how his wife was stupid. How she had to be told how to do everything, like a typical Indian. How he regretted marrying her. There were other matters too, things unpleasant to discuss.

Anthrax confronted his father, who denied the allegations at first, then finally told Anthrax to keep his mouth shut and mind his own business. But Anthrax told his mother. Tensions erupted and, for a time, Anthrax’s parents saw a marriage counsellor.

But his father did not give up writing the letters. He put a password protection program on the word processor to keep his son out of his business. It was a futile effort. His father had chosen the wrong medium to record his indiscretions.

Anthrax showed his mother the new letters and continued to confront his father. When the tension in the house grew, Anthrax would escape with his friends. One night they were at a nightclub when someone started taunting Anthrax, calling him ‘curry muncher’ and worse.

That was it. The anger which had been simmering below the surface for so long exploded as Anthrax violently attacked his taunter, hitting, kicking and punching him, using the tai kwon do combinations he had been learning. There was blood and it felt good. Vengeance tasted sweet.

After that incident, Anthrax often lashed out violently. He was out of control and it sometimes scared him. However, at times he went looking for trouble. Once he tracked down a particularly seedy character who had tried to rape one of his girlfriends. Anthrax pulled a knife on the guy, but the incident had little to do with the girl. The thing that made him angry was the disrespect. This guy knew the girl was with Anthrax. The attempted rape was like spitting in his face.

Perhaps that’s what appealed to Anthrax about Islam--the importance of respect. At sixteen he found Islam and it changed his life. He discovered the Qu’raan in the school library while researching an assignment on religion. About the same time, he began listening to a lot of rap music. More than half the American rappers in his music collection were Muslim, and many sang about the Nation of Islam and the sect’s charismatic leader, Minister Louis Farrakhan. Their songs described the injustices whites inflicted on blacks. They told blacks to demand respect.

Anthrax found a magazine article about Farrakhan and began reading books like the Autobiography of Malcolm X. Then he rang up the Nation of Islam head office in Chicago and asked them to send some information. The Final Call, the NOI newsletter, arrived one day, followed by other literature which began appearing around Anthrax’s home. Under the TV guide. On the coffee table. Amid the pile of newspapers. On top of his computer. Anthrax often took time to read articles aloud to his mother while she did housework.

In the middle of 1990, when Anthrax was in year 11, his father suggested the boy attend Catholic boarding school in Melbourne. The school was inexpensive and the family could scrape and save to pay the fees. Anthrax disliked the idea, but his father insisted.

Anthrax and his new school proved a bad match. The school thought he asked too many questions, and Anthrax thought the school answered too few of them. The hypocrisy of the Catholic church riled Anthrax and pushed him further into the arms of NOI. How could he respect an institution which had sanctioned slavery as a righteous and progressive method of converting people? The school and Anthrax parted on less than friendly terms after just one semester.

The Catholic school intensified a feeling of inferiority Anthrax had felt for many years. He was an outsider. The wrong colour, the wrong size, too intelligent for his school. Yet, NOI’s Minister Farrakhan told him that he wasn’t inferior at all. ‘I know that you have been discriminated against because of your colour,’ Farrakhan told Anthrax from the tape player. ‘Let me tell you why. Let me tell you about the origins of the white race and how they were put on this earth to do evil. They have shown themselves to be nothing but an enemy of the East. Non-whites are the original people of the earth.’

Anthrax found some deep veins of truth in NOI’s teachings. Interracial marriages don’t work. A white man marries a non-white woman because he wants a slave, not because he loves and respects her. Islam respects women in more meaningful ways than Western religions. Perhaps it wasn’t the type of respect that Western men were used to giving women, but he had seen that kind of respect in his own home and he didn’t think much of it.

Anthrax read the words of the Honourable Elijah Muhammad, founder of NOI: ‘The enemy does not have to be a real devil. He could be your father, mother, brother, husband, wife or children. Many times they’re in your own household. Today is the great time of separation of the righteous Muslim and the wicked white race.’ Anthrax looked inside his own household and saw what seemed to be a devil. A white devil.

NOI fed Anthrax’s mind. He followed up the lists of literature included in every issue of The Final Call. Books like Black Athena by Martin Bernel and Deterring Democracy by Noam Chomsky had common themes of conspiracy and oppression by the haves against the have-nots. Anthrax read them all.

The transformation of Anthrax occurred over a period of six months. He didn’t talk about it much with his parents. It was a private matter.

But his mother later told him his adoption of the religion didn’t surprise her. His great-grandfather had been a Muslim scholar and cleric in India. It was fate. His conversion presented a certain sense of closure, of completing the circle.

His interest in Islam found secular outlets. A giant black and white poster of Malcolm X appeared on Anthrax’s bedroom wall. A huge photo of Los Angeles Black Panther leader Elmer Pratt followed soon after.

The photo was captioned, ‘A coward dies a million deaths, a brave man dies but one’. The last bit of wall was covered in posters of hip-hop bands from ceiling to floor. A traditional Indian sword adorned the top of one of the many bookcases. It complemented the growing collection of books on martial arts. A well-loved copy of The Art of War by Sun Tzu sat on the shelf next to Homer’s Ulysses, The Lord of The Rings, The Hobbit, a few old Dungeons and Dragons books, works of mythology from India and Egypt. The shelves did not contain a single work of science fiction. Anthrax shaved his head. His mother may not have been surprised by the conversion to Islam, but the head shaving went a bit over the top.

Anthrax pursued NOI with the same vigour with which he attacked hacking. He memorised whole speeches of Farrakhan and began speaking like him, commenting casually on ‘those caucasian, blue-eyed devils’.

He quoted people he had discovered through NOI. People who described the US Federal Reserve Bank as being controlled by Jews. People who spoke of those hooked-nose, bagel-eating, just-crawled-out-of-a-cave Jews. Anthrax denied the existence of the Holocaust.

‘You’re shaping up to be quite a little Hitler,’ his father told Anthrax.

His father disliked the NOI literature showing up at the house. It seemed to frighten him. Receiving blueprints in the mail for overthowing governments didn’t sit well with the neighbours in the quiet suburban street of the provincial town.

‘Watch out,’ he warned his son. ‘Having these thing turn up in your mailbox can be dangerous. It will probably earmark you for some sort of investigation. They will follow you around.’

[ ]

The traffic raced. The ethernet cables attached to System X were a regular speedway. People whizzed in and out of the mystery site like a swarm of bees. In only twelve hours, the sniffer file topped 100 k.

Many of the connections went from System X to the major telecommunications company. Anthrax headed in that direction.

He considered how to route the attack. He could go through a few diverters and other leapfrog devices to cover his trail, thus hitting the company’s system from a completely separate source. The advantage of this route was anonymity. If the admin managed to detect his entry, Anthrax would only lose access to the phone company’s system, not to System X. Alternatively, if he went in to the company through the gateway and System X, he risked alarms being raised at all three sites. However, his sniffer showed so much traffic running on this route, he might simply disappear in the flow. The established path was obviously there for a reason. One more person logging into the gateway through System X and then into the company’s machine would not raise suspicions. He chose to go through System X.

Anthrax logged into the company using a sniffed username and password.

Trying the load-module bug again, he got root on the system and installed his own login patch. The company’s system looked far more normal than System X. A few hundred users. Lots of email, far too much to read. He ran a few key word searches on all the email, trying to piece together a better picture of the project being developed on System X.

The company did plenty of defence work, mostly in telecommunications.

Different divisions of the company seemed to be working on different segments of the project. Anthrax searched through people’s home directories, but nothing looked very interesting because he couldn’t get a handle on the whole project. People were all developing different modules of the project and, without a centralised overview, the pieces didn’t mean much.

He did find a group of binary files--types of programs--but he had no idea what they were for. The only real way to find out what they did was to take them for a test drive. He ran a few binaries. They didn’t appear to do anything. He ran a few more. Again, nothing. He kept running them, one after another. Still no results. All he received was error messages.

The binaries seemed to need a monitor which could display graphics.

They used XII, a graphical display common on Unix systems. Anthrax’s inexpensive home computer didn’t have that sort of graphical display operating system. He could still run the binaries by telling System X

to run them on one of its local terminals, but he wouldn’t be able to see the output on his home computer. More importantly, it was a risky course of action. What if someone happened to be sitting at the terminal where he chose to run the binary? The game would be up.