They had a gun at my head and a knife at my back; Don't wind me up too tight.
-- from `Powderworks' (also called The Blue Album).
Anthrax didn't like working as part of a team. He always considered
other people to be the weakest link in the chain.
Although people were never to be trusted completely, he socialised
with many hackers and phreakers and worked with a few of them now and
again on particular projects. But he never formed intimate
partnerships with any of them. Even if a fellow hacker dobbed him in
to the police, the informant couldn't know the full extent of his
activities. The nature of his relationships was also determined, in
part, by his isolation. Anthrax lived in a town in rural Victoria.
Despite the fact that he never joined a hacking partnership like The
Realm, Anthrax liked people, liked to talk to them for hours at a time
on the telephone. Sometimes he received up to ten international calls
a day from his phreaker friends overseas. He would be over at a
friend's house, and the friend's mother would knock on the door of the
bedroom where the boys were hanging out, listening to new music,
talking.
The mother would poke her head in the door, raise an eyebrow and point
at Anthrax. `Phone call for you. Someone from Denmark.' Or sometimes
it was Sweden. Finland. The US. Wherever. Though they didn't say
anything, his friends' parents thought it all a bit strange. Not many
kids in country towns got international calls trailing them around
from house to house. But then not many kids were master phreakers.
Anthrax loved the phone system and he understood its power. Many
phreakers thought it was enough to be able to call their friends
around the globe for free. Or make hacking attack phone calls without
being traced. However, real power for Anthrax lay in controlling voice
communications systems--things that moved conversations around the
world. He cruised through people's voice mailbox messages to piece
together a picture of what they were doing. He wanted to be able to
listen into telephone conversations. And he wanted to be able to
reprogram the telephone system, even take it down. That was real
power, the kind that lots of people would notice.
The desire for power grew throughout Anthrax's teenage years. He ached
to know everything, to see everything, to play with exotic systems in
foreign countries. He needed to know the purpose of every system, what
made them tick, how they fitted together. Understanding how things
worked would give him control.
His obsession with telephony and hacking began early in life. When he
was about eleven, his father had taken him to see the film War Games.
All Anthrax could think of as he left the theatre was how much he
wanted to learn how to hack. He had already developed a fascination
for computers, having received the simplest of machines, a Sinclair
ZX81 with 1 k of memory, as a birthday present from his parents.
Rummaging through outdoor markets, he found a few second-hand books on
hacking. He read Out of the Inner Circle by Bill Landreth, and Hackers
by Steven Levy.
By the time he was fourteen, Anthrax had joined a Melbourne-based
group of boys called The Force. The members swapped Commodore 64 and
Amiga games. They also wrote their own demos--short computer
programs--and delighted in cracking the copy protections on the games
and then trading them with other crackers around the world. It was
like an international penpal group. Anthrax liked the challenge
provided by cracking the protections, but few teenagers in his town
shared an interest in his unusual hobby. Joining The Force introduced
him to a whole new world of people who thought as he did.
When Anthrax first read about phreaking he wrote to one of his American
cracking contacts asking for advice on how to start. His friend sent him
a list of AT&T calling card numbers and a toll-free direct-dial number
which connected Australians with American operators. The card numbers
were all expired or cancelled, but Anthrax didn't care. What captured
his imagination was the fact that he could call an operator all the way
across the Pacific for free. Anthrax began trying to find more special
numbers.
He would hang out at a pay phone near his house. It was a seedy
neighbourhood, home to the most downtrodden of all the town's
residents, but Anthrax would stand at the pay phone for hours most
evenings, oblivious to the clatter around him, hand-scanning for
toll-free numbers. He dialled 0014--the prefix for the international
toll-free numbers--followed by a random set of numbers. Then, as he
got more serious, he approached the task more methodically. He
selected a range of numbers, such as 300 to 400, for the last three
digits. Then he dialled over and over, increasing the number by one
each time he dialled. 301. 302. 303. 304. Whenever he hit a
functioning phone number, he noted it down. He never had to spend a
cent since all the 0014 numbers were free.
Anthrax found some valid numbers, but many of them had modems at the
other end. So he decided it was time to buy a modem so he could explore
further. Too young to work legally, he lied about his age and landed an
after-school job doing data entry at an escort agency. In the meantime,
he spent every available moment at the pay phone, scanning and adding
new numbers to his growing list of toll-free modem and operator-assisted
numbers.
The scanning became an obsession. Often Anthrax stayed at the phone
until 10 or 11 p.m. Some nights it was 3 a.m. The pay phone had a
rotary dial, making the task laborious, and sometimes he would come
home with blisters on the tips of his fingers.
A month or so after he started working, he had saved enough money for
a modem.
Hand scanning was boring, but no more so than school. Anthrax attended
his state school regularly, at least until year 10. Much of that was
due to his mother's influence. She believed in education and in
bettering oneself, and she wanted to give her son the opportunities
she had been denied. It was his mother, a psychiatric nurse, who
scrimped and saved for months to buy him his first real computer, a
$400 Commodore 64. And it was his mother who took out a loan to buy
the more powerful Amiga a few years later in 1989. She knew the boy
was very bright. He used to read her medical textbooks, and computers
were the future.
Anthrax had always done well in school, earning distinctions every
year from year 7 to year 10. But not in maths. Maths bored him. Still,
he had some aptitude for it. He won an award in year 6 for designing a
pendulum device which measured the height of a building using basic
trigonometry--a subject he had never studied. However, Anthrax didn't
attend school so much after year 10. The teachers kept telling him
things he already knew, or things he could learn much faster from
reading a book. If he liked a topic, he wandered off to the library to
read about it.
Things at home became increasingly complicated around that time. His
family had struggled from the moment they arrived in Australia from
England, when Anthrax was about twelve. They struggled financially,
they struggled against the roughness of a country town, and, as
Indians, Anthrax, his younger brother and their mother struggled
against racism.
The town was a violent place, filled with racial hatred and ethnic
tension. The ethnics had carved out corners for themselves, but
incursions into enemy territory were common and almost always resulted
in violence. It was the kind of town where people ended up in fist
fights over a soccer game. Not an easy place for a half-Indian,
half-British boy with a violent father.
Anthrax's father, a white Englishman, came from a farming family. One
of five sons, he attended an agricultural college where he met and
married the sister of an Indian student on a scholarship. Their
marriage caused quite a stir, even making the local paper under the
headline `Farmer Marries Indian Woman'. It was not a happy marriage
and Anthrax often wondered why his father had married an Indian.
Perhaps it was a way of rebelling against his dominating father.
Perhaps he had once been in love. Or perhaps he simply wanted someone
he could dominate and control. Whatever the reason, the decision was
an unpopular one with Anthrax's grandfather and the mixed-race family
was often excluded from larger family gatherings.
When Anthrax's family moved to Australia, they had almost no money.
Eventually, the father got a job as an officer at Melbourne's
Pentridge prison, where he stayed during the week. He only received a
modest income, but he seemed to like his job. The mother began working
as a nurse. Despite their new-found financial stability, the family
was not close. The father appeared to have little respect for his wife
and sons, and Anthrax had little respect for his father.
As Anthrax entered his teenage years, his father became increasingly
abusive. On weekends, when he was home from work, he used to hit
Anthrax, sometimes throwing him on the floor and kicking him. Anthrax
tried to avoid the physical abuse but the scrawny teenager was little
match for the beefy prison officer. Anthrax and his brother were quiet
boys. It seemed to be the path of least resistance with a rough father
in a rough town. Besides, it was hard to talk back in the painful
stutter both boys shared through their early teens.
One day, when Anthrax was fifteen, he came home to find a commotion at
his house. On entering the house, Anthrax went to his parents'
bedroom. He found his mother there, and she was very upset and
emotionally distressed. He couldn't see his father anywhere, but found
him relaxing on the sofa in the lounge room, watching TV.
Disgust consumed Anthrax and he retreated into the kitchen. When his
father came in not long after to prepare some food Anthrax watched his
back with revulsion. Then he noticed a carving knife resting on the
counter. As Anthrax reached for the knife, an ambulance worker
appeared in the doorway. Anthrax put the knife down and walked away.
But he wasn't so quiet after that. He started talking back, at home and
at school, and that marked the beginning of the really big problems. In
primary school and early high school he had been beaten up now and
again. Not any more. When a fellow student hauled Anthrax up against the
wall of the locker shed and started shaking him and waving his fist,
Anthrax lost it. He saw, for a moment, his father's face instead of the
student's and began to throw punches in a frenzy that left his victim in
a terrible state.
At home, Anthrax's father learned how to bait his son. The bully
always savours a morsel of resistance from the victim, which makes
going in for the kill a little more fun. Talking back gave the father
a good excuse to get violent. Once he nearly broke his son's neck.
Another time it was his arm. He grabbed Anthrax and twisted his arm
behind his back. There was an eerie sound of cracking cartilage, and
then pain. Anthrax screamed for his father to stop. His father twisted
Anthrax's arm harder, then pressed on his neck. His mother shrieked at
her husband to let go of her son. He wouldn't.
`Look at you crying,' his father sneered. `You disgusting animal.'
`You're the disgusting animal,' Anthrax shouted, talking back again.
His father threw Anthrax on the floor and began kicking him in the
head, in the ribs, all over.
Anthrax ran away. He went south to Melbourne for a week, sleeping
anywhere he could, in the empty night-time spaces left over by day
workers gone to orderly homes. He even crashed in hospital emergency
rooms. If a nurse asked why he was there, he would answer politely, `I
received a phone call to meet someone here'. She would nod her head
and move on to someone else.
Eventually, when Anthrax returned home, he took up martial arts to
become strong. And he waited.
Anthrax was poking around a MILNET gateway when he stumbled on the
door to System X.* He had wanted to find this system for months,
because he had intercepted email about it which had aroused his
curiosity.
Anthrax telnetted into the gateway. A gateway binds two different
networks. It allows, for example, two computer networks which talk
different languages to communicate. A gateway might allow someone on a
system running DECNET to login to a TCP/IP based system, like a Unix.
Anthrax was frustrated that he couldn't seem to get past the System X
gateway and on to the hosts on the other side.
Using normal address formats for a variety of networks, he tried
telling the gateway to make a connection. X.25. TCP/IP. Whatever lay
beyond the gateway didn't respond. Anthrax looked around until he
found a sample of addresses in a help file. None of them worked, but
they offered a clue as to what format an address might take.
Each address had six digits, the first three numbers of which
corresponded to telephone area codes in the Washington DC area. So he
picked one of the codes and started guessing the last three digits.
Hand scanning was a pain, as ever, but if he was methodical and
persistent, something should turn up. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. On it
went. Eventually he connected to something--a Sunos Unix system--which
gave him a full IP address in its login message. Now that was handy.
With the full IP address, he could connect to System X again through
the Internet directly--avoiding the gateway if he chose to. It's
always helpful in covering your tracks to have a few different routing
options. Importantly, he could approach System X through more than
just its front door.
Anthrax spiralled through the usual round of default usernames and
passwords. Nothing. This system required a more strategic attack.
He backed out of the login screen, escaped from the gateway and went
to another Internet site to have a good look at System X from a
healthy distance. He `fingered' the site, pulling up any bit of
information System X would release to the rest of the Internet when
asked. He probed and prodded, looking for openings. And then he found
one. Sendmail.
The version of Sendmail run by System X had a security hole Anthrax
could exploit by sending himself a tiny backdoor program. To do this,
he used System X's mail-processing service to send a `letter' which
contained a tiny computer program. System X would never have allowed
the program to run normally, but this program worked like a letter
bomb. When System X opened the letter, the program jumped out and
started running. It told System X that anyone could connect to port
2001--to an interactive shell--of the computer without using a
password.
A port is a door to the outside world. TCP/IP computers use a standard
set of ports for certain services. Port 25 for mail. Port 79 for
Finger. Port 21 for FTP. Port 23 for Telnet. Port 513 for Rlogin. Port
80 for the World Wide Web. A TCP/IP based computer system has 65535
ports but most of them go unused. Indeed, the average Unix box uses
only 35, leaving the remaining 65500 ports sitting idle. Anthrax
simply picked one of these sleepy ports, dusted off the cobwebs and
plugged in using the backdoor created by his tiny mail-borne program.
Connecting directly to a port created some problems, because the
system wouldn't recognise certain keystrokes from the port, such as
the return key. For this reason, Anthrax had to create an account for
himself which would let him telnet to the site and login like any
normal user. To do this, he needed root privileges in order to create
an account and, ultimately, a permanent backdoor into the system.
He began hunting for vulnerabilities in System X's security. There was
nothing obvious, but he decided to try out a bug he had successfully
used elsewhere. He had first learned about it on an international
phone conference, where he had traded information with other hackers
and phreakers. The security hole involved the system's relatively
obscure load-module program. The program added features to the running
system but, more importantly, it ran as root, meaning that it had a
free run on the system when it was executed. It also meant that any
other programs the load-module program called up also ran as root. If
Anthrax could get this program to run one of his own programs--a
little Trojan--he could get root on System X.
The load-module bug was by no means a sure thing on System X. Most
commercial systems--computers run by banks or credit agencies, for
example--had cleaned up the load-module bug in their Sunos computers
months before. But military systems consistently missed the bug. They
were like turtles--hard on the outside, but soft and vulnerable on the
inside. Since the bug couldn't be exploited unless a hacker was
already inside a system, the military's computer security officials
didn't seem to pay much attention to it. Anthrax had visited a large
number of military systems prior to System X, and in his experience
more than 90 per cent of their Sunos computers had never fixed the
bug.
With only normal privileges, Anthrax couldn't force the load-module
program to run his backdoor Trojan program. But he could trick it into
doing so. The secret was in one simple keyboard character: /.
Unix-based computer systems are a bit like the protocols of the
diplomatic corps; the smallest variation can change something's
meaning entirely. Hackers, too, understand the implications of subtle
changes.
A Unix-based system reads the phrase:
/bin/program
very differently from:
bin program
One simple character--the `/'--makes an enormous difference. A Unix
computer reads the `/' as a road sign. The first phrase tells the
computer, `Follow the road to the house of the user called "bin" and
when you get there, go inside and fetch the file called "program" and
run it'. A blank space, however, tells the computer something quite
different. In this case, Anthrax knew it told the computer to execute
the command which proceeded the space. That second phrase told the
machine, `Look everywhere for a program called "bin" and run it'.
Anthrax prepared for his attack on the load-module program by
installing his own special program, named `bin', into a temporary
storage area on System X. If he could get System X to run his program
with root privileges, he too would have procured root level access to
the system. When everything was in place, Anthrax forced the system to
read the character `/' as a blank space. Then he ran the load-module
program, and watched. When System X hunted around for a program named
`bin', it quickly found Anthrax's Trojan and ran it.
The hacker savoured the moment, but he didn't pause for long. With a
few swift keystrokes, he added an entry to the password file, creating
a basic account for himself. He exited his connection to port 2001,
circled around through another route, using the 0014 gateway, and
logged into System X using his newly created account. It felt good
walking in through the front door.
Once inside, Anthrax had a quick look around. The system startled him.
There were only three human users. Now that was definitely odd. Most
systems had hundreds of users. Even a small system might serve 30 or
40 people, and this was not a small system. He concluded that System X
wasn't just some machine designed to send and receive email. It was
operational. It did something.
Anthrax considered how to clean up his footsteps and secure his
position. While he was hardly broadcasting his presence, someone might
discover his arrival simply by looking at who was logged in on the
list of accounts in the password file. He had given his backdoor root
account a bland name, but he could reasonably assume that these three
users knew their system pretty well. And with only three users, it was
probably the kind of system that had lots of babysitting. After all
that effort, Anthrax needed a watchful nanny like a hole in the head.
He worked at moving into the shadows.
He removed himself from the WTMP and UTMP files, which listed who had
been on-line and who was still logged in. Anthrax wasn't invisible,
but an admin would have to look closely at the system's network
connections and list of processes to find him. Next stop: the login
program.
Anthrax couldn't use his newly created front-door account for an
extended period--the risk of discovery was too great. If he accessed
the computer repeatedly in this manner, a prying admin might
eventually find him and delete his account. An extra account on a
system with only three users was a dead give-away. And losing access
to System X just as things were getting interesting was not on his
agenda.
Anthrax leaned back in his chair and stretched his shoulders. His
hacking room was an old cloakroom, though it was barely recognisable
as such. It looked more like a closet--a very messy closet. The whole
room was ankle-deep in scrap papers, most of them with lists of
numbers on the back and front. Occasionally, Anthrax scooped up all
the papers and piled them into heavy-duty garbage bags, three of which
could just fit inside the room at any one time. Anthrax always knew
roughly where he had `filed' a particular set of notes. When he needed
it, he tipped the bag onto the floor, searched through the mound and
returned to the computer. When the sea of paper reached a critical
mass, he jammed everything back into the garbage bag again.
The computer--an Amiga 500 box with a cheap Panasonic TV as the
monitor--sat on a small desk next to his mother's sewing machine
cabinet. The small bookcase under the desk
was stuffed with magazines like Compute and Australian Communications,
along with a few Commodore, Amiga and Unix reference manuals. There
was just enough space for Anthrax's old stereo and his short-wave
radio. When he wasn't listening to his favourite show, a hacking
program broadcast from a pirate station in Ecuador, he tuned into
Radio Moscow or the BBC's World Service.
Anthrax considered what to do with System X. This system had aroused
his curiosity and he intended to visit it frequently.
It was time to work on the login patch. The patch replaced the
system's normal login program and had a special feature: a master
password. The password was like a diplomatic passport. It would let
him do anything, go anywhere. He could login as any user using the
master password. Further, when he logged in with the master password,
he wouldn't show up on any log files--leaving no trail. But the beauty
of the login patch was that, in every other way, it ran as the normal
login program. The regular computer users--all three of them--could
login as usual with their passwords and would never know Anthrax had
been in the system.
He thought about ways of setting up his login patch. Installing a
patch on System X wasn't like mending a pair of jeans. He couldn't
just slap on a swath from an old bandanna and quick-stitch it in with
a thread of any colour. It was more like mending an expensive cashmere
coat. The fabric needed to be a perfect match in colour and texture.
And because the patch required high-quality invisible mending, the
size also needed to be just right.
Every file in a computer system has three dates: the date it was
created, the date it was last modified and the date it was last
accessed. The problem was that the login patch needed to have the same
creation and modification dates as the original login program so that
it would not raise suspicions. It wasn't hard to get the dates but it
was difficult to paste them onto the patch. The last access date
wasn't important as it changed whenever the program was run
anyway--whenever a user of the System X logged in.
If Anthrax ripped out the original login program and stitched his
patch in its place, the patch would be stamped with a new creation
date. He knew there was no way to change a creation date short of
changing the clock for the whole system--something which would cause
problems elsewhere in System X.
The first thing a good system admin does when he or she suspects a
break-in is search for all files created or modified over the previous
few days. One whiff of an intruder and a good admin would be all over
Anthrax's login patch within about five minutes.
Anthrax wrote the modification and creation dates down on a bit of
paper. He would need those in a moment. He also jotted down the size
of the login file.
Instead of tearing out the old program and sewing in a completely new
one, Anthrax decided to overlay his patch by copying it onto the top
of the old program. He uploaded his own login patch, with his master
password encased inside it, but he didn't install it yet. His patch
was called `troj'--short for Trojan. He typed:
cat<troj>/bin/login
The cat command told the computer: `go get the data in the file called
"troj" and put it in the file "/bin/login"'. He checked the piece of
paper where he had scribbled down the original file's creation and
modification dates, comparing them to the new patch. The creation date
and size matched the original. The modification date was still wrong,
but he was two-thirds of the way home.
Anthrax began to fasten down the final corner of the patch by using a
little-known feature of the command:
/usr/5bin/date
Then he changed the modification date of his login patch to the
original login file's date.
He stepped back to admire his work from a distance. The newly
installed patch matched the original perfectly. Same size. Same
creation date. Same modification date. With patch in place, he deleted
the root account he had installed while visiting port 2001. Always
take your garbage with you when you leave.
Now for the fun bit. Snooping around. Anthrax headed off for the
email, the best way to work out what a system was used for. There were
lots of reports from underlings to the three system users on buying
equipment, progress reports on a certain project, updates. What was
this project?
Then Anthrax came across a huge directory. He opened it and there,
couched inside, were perhaps 100 subdirectories. He opened one of
them. It was immense, containing hundreds of files. The smallest
subfile had perhaps 60 computer screens' worth of material, all of it
unintelligible. Numbers, letters, control codes. Anthrax couldn't make
head nor tail of the files. It was as if he was staring at a group of
binary files. The whole subdirectory was filled with thousands of
pages of mush. He thought they looked like data files for some
database.
As he didn't have the program he needed to interpret the mush, Anthrax
cast around looking for a more readable directory.
He pried open a file and discovered it was a list. Names and phone
numbers of staff at a large telecommunications company. Work phone
numbers. Home numbers. Well, at least that gave him a clue as to the
nature of the project. Something to do with telecommunications. A
project important enough that the military needed the home phone
numbers of the senior people involved.
The next file confirmed it. Another list, a very special list. A pot
of gold at the end of the rainbow. The find of a career spent hacking.
If the US government had had any inkling what was happening at that
moment, heads would have rolled. If it had known that a foreigner, and
a follower of what mainstream American media termed an extremist
religious group, had this information in his possession, the defence
agency would have called in every law enforcement agency it could
enlist.
As John McMahon might have said, a lot of yelling and screaming would
have occurred.
Anthrax's mother had made a good home for the family, but his father
continued to disrupt it with his violence. Fun times with his friends
shone like bright spots amidst the decay of Anthrax's family life.
Practical jokes were his specialty. Even as a small child, he had
delighted in trickery and as he grew up, the jokes became more
sophisticated. Phreaking was great. It let him prank people all over
the world. And pranking was cool.
Most of the fun in pranking was sharing it with friends. Anthrax
called into a voice conference frequented by phreakers and hackers.
Though he never trusted others completely when it came to working on
projects together, it was OK to socialise. The phreaking methods he
used to get onto the phone conference were his own business. Provided
he was discreet in how much he said in the conference, he thought
there wasn't too much risk.
He joined the conference calls using a variety of methods. One
favourite was using a multinational corporation's Dialcom service.
Company employees called in, gave their ID numbers, and the operator
put them through to wherever they wanted to go, free of charge. All
Anthrax needed was a valid ID number.
Sometimes it was hard work, sometimes he was lucky. The day Anthrax
tried the Dialcom service was a lucky day. He dialled from his
favourite pay phone.
`What is your code, sir?' The operator asked.
`Yes, well, this is Mr Baker. I have a sheet with a lot of numbers
here. I am new to the company. Not sure which one it is.' Anthrax
shuffled papers on top of the pay phone, near the receiver. `How many
digits is it?'
`Seven.'
That was helpful. Now to find seven digits. Anthrax looked across the
street at the fish and chips shop. No numbers there. Then a car
licence plate caught his eye. He read off the first three digits, then
plucked the last four numbers from another car's plate.
`Thank you. Putting your call through, Mr Baker.'
A valid number! What amazing luck. Anthrax milked that number for all
it was worth. Called party lines. Called phreakers' bridges. Access
fed the obsession.
Then he gave the number to a friend in Adelaide, to call overseas. But
when that friend read off the code, the operator jumped in.
`YOU'RE NOT MR BAKER!'
Huh? `Yes I am. You have my code.'
`You are definitely not him. I know his voice.'
The friend called Anthrax, who laughed his head off, then called into
Dialcom and changed his code! It was a funny incident. Still, it
reminded him how much safer it was working by himself.
Living in the country was hard for a hacker and Anthrax became a
phreaker out of necessity, not just desire. Almost everything involved
a long-distance call and he was always searching for ways to make
calls for free. He noticed that when he called certain 008
numbers--free calls--the phone would ring a few times, click, and then
pause briefly before ringing some more. Eventually a company
representative or answering service picked up the call. Anthrax had
read about diverters, devices used to forward calls automatically, in
one of the many telecommunications magazines and manuals he was
constantly reading. The click suggested the call was going through a
diverter and he guessed that if he punched in the right tones at the
right moment, he could make the call divert away from a company's
customer service agent. Furthermore, any line trace would end up at
the company.
Antrax collected some 008 numbers and fiddled with them. He discovered
that if he punched another number in very quickly over the top of the
ringing--just after the click--he could make the line divert to where
he wanted it to go. He used the 008 numbers to ring phone conferences
around the world, where he hung out with other phreakers, particularly
Canadians such as members of the Toronto-based UPI or the Montreal
group, NPC, which produced a phreakers' manual in French. The
conversation on the phreaker's phone conferences, or phone bridges as
they are often called, inevitably turned to planning a prank. And
those Canadian guys knew how to prank!
Once, they rang the emergency phone number in a major Canadian city.
Using the Canadian incarnation of his social engineering accents,
Anthrax called in a `police officer in need of assistance'. The
operator wanted to know where. The phreakers had decided on the Blue
Ribbon Ice-Cream Parlour. They always picked a spot within visual
range of at least one member, so they could see what was happening.
In the split second of silence which followed, one of the five other
phreakers quietly eavesdropping on the call coughed. It was a short,
sharp cough. The operator darted back on the line.
`Was that A GUN SHOT? Are you SHOT? Hello? John?' The operator leaned
away from her receiver for a moment and the phreakers heard her
talking to someone else in the background. `Officer down.'
Things moved so fast when pranking. What to do now?
`Ah, yeah. Yeah.' It was amazing how much someone squeezing laughter
back down his oesophagus can sound like someone who has been shot.
`John, talk to me. Talk to me,' the operator pleaded into the phone,
trying to keep John alert.
`I'm down. I'm down,' Anthrax strung her along.
Anthrax disconnected the operator from the conference call. Then the
phreaker who lived near the ice-cream parlour announced the street had
been blocked off by police cars. They had the parlour surrounded and
were anxiously searching for an injured fellow officer. It took
several hours before the police realised someone had played a mean
trick on them.
However, Anthrax's favourite prank was Mr McKenny, the befuddled
southern American hick. Anthrax had selected the phone number at
random, but the first prank was such fun he kept coming back for more.
He had been ringing Mr McKenny for years. It was always the same
conversation.
`Mr McKenny? This is Peter Baker. I'd like my shovel back, please.'
`I don't have your shovel.'
`Yeah, I lent it to you. Lent it to you like two years ago. I want it
back now.'
`I never borrowed no shovel from you. Go away.'
`You did. You borrowed that shovel of mine. And if you don't give it
back I'm a gonna come round and get it myself. And you won't like it.
Now, when you gonna give me that shovel back?'
`Damn it! I don't have your goddamn shovel!'
`Give me my shovel!'
`Stop calling me! I've never had your friggin' shovel. Let me be!'
Click.
Nine in the morning. Eight at night. Two a.m. There would be no peace
for Mr McKenny until he admitted borrowing that shovel from a boy half
his age and half a world away.
Sometimes Anthrax pranked closer to home. The Trading Post, a weekly
rag of personals from people selling and buying, served as a good
place to begin. Always the innocent start, to lure them in.
`Yes, sir, I see you advertised that you wanted to buy a bathtub.'
Anthrax put on his serious voice. `I have a bathtub for sale.'
`Yeah? What sort? Do you have the measurements, and the model number?'
And people thought phreakers were weird.
`Ah, no model number. But its about a metre and a half long, has feet,
in the shape of claws. It's older style, off-white. There's only one
problem.' Anthrax paused, savouring the moment.
`Oh? What's that?'
`There's a body in it.'
Like dropping a boulder in a peaceful pond.
The list on System X had dial-up modem numbers, along with usernames
and password pairs for each address. These usernames were not words
like `jsmith' or `jdoe', and the passwords would not have appeared in
any dictionary. 12[AZ63. K5M82L. The type of passwords and usernames
only a computer would remember.
This, of course, made sense, since a computer picked them out in the
first place. It generated them randomly. The list wasn't particularly
user-friendly. It didn't have headers, outlining what each item
related to. This made sense too. The list wasn't meant to be read by
humans.
Occasionally, there were comments in the list. Programmers often
include a line of comment in code, which is delineated in such a way
that the computer skips over the words when interpreting the commands.
The comments are for other programmers examining the code. In this
case, the comments were places. Fort Green. Fort Myers. Fort Ritchie.
Dozens and dozens of forts. Almost half of them were not on the
mainland US. They were in places like the Philippines, Turkey,
Germany, Guam. Places with lots of US military presence.
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.
He leaned away from his keyboard and stretched. Exhaustion was
beginning to set in. He hadn't slept in almost 48 hours. Occasionally,
he had left his computer terminal to eat, though he always brought the
food back to the screen. His mother popped her head in the doorway
once in a while and shook her head silently. When he noticed her
there, he tried to ease her concerns. `But I'm learning lots of
things,' he pleaded. She was not convinced.
He also broke his long hacking session to pray. It was important for a
devout Muslim to practice salat--to pray at least five times a day
depending on the branch of Islam followed by the devotee. Islam allows
followers to group some of their prayers, so Anthrax usually grouped
two in the morning, prayed once at midday as normal, and grouped two
more at night. An efficient way to meet religious obligations.
Sometimes the time just slipped away, hacking all night. When the
first hint of dawn snuck up on him, he was invariably in the middle of
some exciting journey. But duty was duty, and it had to be done. So he
pressed control S to freeze his screen, unfurled the prayer mat with
its built-in compass, faced Mecca, knelt down and did two sets of
prayers before sunrise. Ten minutes later he rolled the prayer mat up,
slid back into his chair, typed control Q to release the pause on his
computer and picked up where he left off.
This company's computer system seemed to confirm what he had begun to
suspect. System X was the first stage of a project, the rest of which
was under development. He found a number of tables and reports in
System X's files. The reports carried headers like `Traffic Analysis',
`calls in' and `calls out', `failure rate'. It all began to make sense
to Anthrax.
System X called up each of the military telephone exchanges in that
list. It logged in using the computer-generated name and password.
Once inside, a program in System X polled the exchange for important
statistics, such as the number of calls coming in and out of the base.
This information was then stored on System X. Whenever someone wanted
a report on something, for example, the military sites with the most
incoming calls over the past 24 hours, he or she would simply ask
System X to compile the information. All of this was done
automatically.
Anthrax had read some email suggesting that changes to an exchange,
such as adding new telephone lines on the base, had been handled
manually, but this job was soon to be done automatically by System X.
It made sense. The maintenance time spent by humans would be cut
dramatically.
A machine which gathers statistics and services phone exchanges
remotely doesn't sound very sexy on the face of it, until you begin to
consider what you could do with something like that. You could sell it
to a foreign power interested in the level of activity at a certain
base at a particular time. And that is just the beginning.
You could tap any unencrypted line going in or out of any of the 100
or so exchanges and listen in to sensitive military discussions. Just
a few commands makes you a fly on the wall of a general's conversation
to the head of a base in the Philippines. Anti-government rebels in
that country might pay a pretty penny for getting intelligence on the
US forces.
All of those options paled next to the most striking power wielded by
a hacker who had unlimited access to System X and the 100 or so
telephone exchanges. He could take down that US military voice
communications system almost overnight, and he could do it
automatically. The potential for havoc creation was breathtaking. It
would be a small matter for a skilled programmer to alter the
automated program used by System X. Instead of using its dozen or more
modems to dial all the exchanges overnight and poll them for
statistics, System X could be instructed to call them overnight and
reprogram the exchanges.
What if every time General Colin Powell picked up his phone, he was be
automatically patched through to some Russian general's office? He
wouldn't be able to dial any other number from his office phone. He'd
pick up his phone to dial and there would be the Russian at the other
end. And what if every time someone called into the general's number,
they ended up talking to the stationery department? What if none of the
phone numbers connected to their proper telephones? No-one would be
able to reach one another. An important part of the US military machine
would be in utter disarray. Now, what if all this happened in the first
few days of a war? People trying to contact each other with vital
information wouldn't be able to use the telephone exchanges reprogrammed
by System X.
THAT was power.
It wasn't like Anthrax screaming at his father until his voice turned
to a whisper, all for nothing. He could make people sit up and take
notice with this sort of power.
Hacking a system gave him a sense of control. Getting root on a system
always gave him an adrenalin rush for just that reason. It meant the
system was his, he could do whatever he wanted, he could run whatever
processes or programs he desired, he could remove other users he
didn't want using his system. He thought, I own the system. The word
`own' anchored the phrase which circled through his thoughts again and
again when he successfully hacked a system.
The sense of ownership was almost passionate, rippled with streaks of
obsession and jealousy. At any given moment, Anthrax had a list of
systems he owned and that had captured his interest for that moment.
Anthrax hated seeing a system administrator logging onto one of those
systems. It was an invasion. It was as though Anthrax had just got
this woman he had been after for some time alone in a room with the
door closed. Then, just as he was getting to know her, this other guy
had barged in, sat down on the couch and started talking to her.
It was never enough to look at a system from a distance and know he
could hack it if he wanted to. Anthrax had to actually hack the
system. He had to own it. He needed to see what was inside the system,
to know exactly what it was he owned.
The worst thing admins could do was to fiddle with system security.
That made Anthrax burn with anger. If Anthrax was on-line, silently
observing the admins' activities, he would feel a sudden urge to log
them off. He wanted to punish them. Wanted them to know he was into
their system. And yet, at the same time, he didn't want them to know.
Logging them off would draw attention to himself, but the two desires
pulled at him from opposite directions. What Anthrax really wanted was
for the admins to know he controlled their system, but for them not to
be able to do anything about it. He wanted them to be helpless.
Anthrax decided to keep undercover. But he contemplated the power of
having System X's list of telephone exchange dial-ups and their
username-password combinations. Normally, it would take days for a
single hacker with his lone modem to have much impact on the US
military's communications network. Sure, he could take down a few
exchanges before the military wised up and started protecting
themselves. It was like hacking a military computer. You could take
out a machine here, a system there. But the essence of the power of
System X was being able to use its own resources to orchestrate
widespread pandemonium quickly and quietly.
Anthrax defines power as the potential for real world impact. At that
moment of discovery and realisation, the real world impact of hacking
System X looked good. The telecommunications company computer seemed
like a good place to hang up a sniffer, so he plugged one into the
machine and decided to return in a little while. Then he logged out
and went to bed.
When he revisited the sniffer a day or so later, Anthrax received a
rude shock. Scrolling through the sniffer file, he did a double take
on one of the entries. Someone had logged into the company's system
using his special login patch password.
He tried to stay calm. He thought hard. When was the last time he had
logged into the system using that special password? Could his sniffer
have logged himself on an earlier hacking session? It did happen
occasionally. Hackers sometimes gave themselves quite a fright. In the
seamless days and nights of hacking dozens of systems, it was easy to
forget the last time you logged into a particular system using the
special password. The more he thought, the more he was absolutely
sure. He hadn't logged into the system again.
Which left the obvious question. Who had?
Sometimes Anthrax pranked, sometimes he punished. Punishment could be
severe or mild. Generally it was severe. And unlike pranking, it was
not done randomly.
Different things set him off. The librarian, for example. In early
1993 Anthrax had enrolled in Asia-Pacific and Business Studies at a
university in a nearby regional city. Ever since he showed up on the
campus, he had been hassled by a student who worked part-time at the
university library. On more than one occasion, Anthrax had been
reading at a library table when a security guard came up and asked to
search his bags. And when Anthrax looked over his shoulder to the
check-out desk, that librarian was always there, the one with the bad
attitude smeared across his face.
The harassment became so noticeable, Anthrax's friends began
commenting on it. His bag would be hand-searched when he left the
library, while other students walked through the electronic security
boom gate unbothered. When he returned a book one day late, the
librarian--that librarian--insisted he pay all sorts of fines.
Anthrax's pleas of being a poor student fell on deaf ears. By the time
exam period rolled around at the end of term, Anthrax decided to
punish the librarian by taking down the library's entire computer
system.
Logging in to the library computer via modem from home, Anthrax
quickly gained root privileges. The system had security holes a mile
wide. Then, with one simple command, he deleted every file in the
computer. He knew the system would be backed up somewhere, but it
would take a day or two to get the system up and running again. In the
meantime, every loan or book search had to be conducted manually.
During Anthrax's first year at university, even small incidents
provoked punishment. Cutting him off while he was driving, or swearing
at him on the road, fit the bill. Anthrax would memorise the licence
plate of the offending driver, then social engineer the driver's
personal details. Usually he called the police to report what appeared
to be a stolen car and then provided the licence plate number. Shortly
after, Anthrax tuned into to his police scanner, where he picked up
the driver's name and address as it was read over the airways to the
investigating police car. Anthrax wrote it all down.
Then began the process of punishment. Posing as the driver, Anthrax rang
the driver's electricity company to arrange a power disconnection. The
next morning the driver might return home to find his electricity cut
off. The day after, his gas might be disconnected. Then his water. Then
his phone.
Some people warranted special punishment--people such as Bill. Anthrax
came across Bill on the Swedish Party Line, an English-speaking
telephone conference. For a time, Anthrax was a regular fixture on the
line, having attempted to call it by phreaking more than 2000 times
over just a few months. Of course, not all those attempts were
successful, but he managed to get through at least half the time. It
required quite an effort to keep a presence on the party line, since
it automatically cut people off after only ten minutes. Anthrax made
friends with the operators, who sometimes let him stay on-line a while
longer.
Bill, a Swedish Party Line junkie, had recently been released from
prison, where he had served time for beating up a Vietnamese boy at a
railway station. He had a bad attitude and he often greeted the party
line by saying, `Are there any coons on the line today?' His attitude
to women wasn't much better. He relentlessly hit on the women who
frequented the line. One day, he made a mistake. He gave out his phone
number to a girl he was trying to pick up. The operator copied it down
and when her friend Anthrax came on later that day, she passed it on
to him.
Anthrax spent a few weeks social engineering various people, including
utilities and relatives whose telephone numbers appeared on Bill's
phone accounts, to piece together the details of his life. Bill was a
rough old ex-con who owned a budgie and was dying of cancer. Anthrax
phoned Bill in the hospital and proceeded to tell him all sorts of
personal details about himself, the kind of details which upset a
person.
Not long after, Anthrax heard that Bill had died. The hacker felt as
though he had perhaps gone a bit too far.
The tension at home had eased a little by the time Anthrax left to
attend university. But when he returned home during holidays he found
his father even more unbearable. More and more, Anthrax rebelled
against his father's sniping comments and violence. Eventually, he
vowed that the next time his father tried to break his arm he would
fight back. And he did.
One day Anthrax's father began making bitter fun of his younger son's
stutter. Brimming with biting sarcasm, the father mimicked Anthrax's
brother.
`Why are you doing that?' Anthrax yelled. The bait had worked once
again.
It was as though he became possessed with a spirit not his own. He
yelled at his father, and put a fist into the wall. His father grabbed
a chair and thrust it forward to keep Anthrax at bay, then reached
back for the phone. Said he was calling the police. Anthrax ripped the
phone from the wall. He pursued his father through the house, smashing
furniture. Amid the crashing violence of the fight, Anthrax suddenly
felt a flash of fear for his mother's clock--a much loved, delicate
family heirloom. He gently picked it up and placed it out of harm's
way. Then he heaved the stereo into the air and threw it at his
father. The stereo cabinet followed in its wake. Wardrobes toppled
with a crash across the floor.
When his father fled the house, Anthrax got a hold of himself and
began to look around. The place was a disaster area. All those things
so tenderly gathered and carefully treasured by his mother, the things
she had used to build her life in a foreign land of white people
speaking an alien tongue, lay in fragments scattered around the house.
Anthrax felt wretched. His mother was distraught at the destruction
and he was badly shaken by how much it upset her. He promised to try
and control his temper from that moment on. It proved to be a constant
battle. Mostly he would win, but not always. The battle still simmered
below the surface.
Sometimes it boiled over.
Anthrax considered the possibilities of who else would be using his
login patch. It could be another hacker, perhaps someone who was
running another sniffer that logged Anthrax's previous login. But it
was more likely to be a security admin. Meaning he had been found out.
Meaning that he might be being traced even as he leap-frogged through
System X to the telecommunications company's computer.
Anthrax made his way to the system admin's mailboxes. If the game was
up, chances were something in the mailbox would give it away.
There it was. The evidence. They were onto him all right, and they
hadn't wasted any time. The admins had mailed CERT, the Computer
Emergency Response Team at Carnegie Mellon University, reporting a
security breach. CERT, the nemesis of every Internet hacker, was bound
to complicate matters. Law enforcement would no doubt be called in
now.
It was time to get out of this system, but not before leaving in a
blaze of glory. A prank left as a small present.
CERT had written back to the admins acknowledging the incident and
providing a case number. Posing as one of the admins, Anthrax drafted
a letter to CERT. To make the thing look official, he added the case
number `for reference'. The letter went something like this:
`In regard to incident no. XXXXX, reported on this date, we have since
carried out some additional investigations on the matter. We have
discovered the security incident was caused by a disgruntled employee
who was fired for alcoholism and decided to retaliate against the
company in this manner.
`We have long had a problem with alcohol and drug abuse due to the
stressful nature of the company environment. No further investigation
is necessary.'
At his computer terminal, Anthrax smiled. How embarrassing was that
going to be? Try scraping that mud off. He felt very pleased with
himself.
Anthrax then tidied up his things in the company's computer, deleted
the sniffer and moved out.
Things began to move quickly after that. He logged into System X later
to check the sniffer records, only to find that someone had used his
login patch password on that system as well. He became very nervous.
It was one thing goofing around with a commercial site, and quite
another being tracked from a military computer.
A new process had been added to System X, which Anthrax recognised. It
was called `-u'. He didn't know what it did, but he had seen it before
on military systems. About 24 hours after it appeared, he found
himself locked out of the system. He had tried killing off the -u
process before. It disappeared for a split-second and reappeared. Once
it was in place, there was no way to destroy it.
Anthrax also unearthed some alarming email. The admin at a site
upstream from both System X and the company's system had been sent a
warning letter: `We think there has been a security incident at your
site'. The circle was closing in on him. It was definitely time to get
the hell out. He packed up his things in a hurry. Killed off the
remaining sniffer. Moved his files. Removed the login patch. And
departed with considerable alacrity.
After he cut his connection, Anthrax sat wondering about the admins.
If they knew he was into their systems, why did they leave the
sniffers up and running? He could understand leaving the login patch.
Maybe they wanted to track his movements, determine his motives, or
trace his connection. Killing the patch would have simply locked him
out of the only door the admins could watch. They wouldn't know if he
had other backdoors into their system. But the sniffer? It didn't make
any sense.
It was possible that they simply hadn't seen the sniffer. Leaving it
there had been an oversight. But it was almost too glaring an error to
be a real possibility. If it was an error, it implied the admins
weren't actually monitoring the connections in and out of their
systems. If they had been watching the connections, they would
probably have seen the sniffer. But if they weren't monitoring the
connections, how on earth did they find out his special password for
the login patch? Like all passwords on the system, that one was
encrypted. There were only two ways to get that password. Monitor the
connection and sniff it, or break the encryption with a brute-force
attack.
Breaking the encryption would probably have taken millions of dollars
of computer time. He could pretty well rule that option out. That left
sniffing it, which would have alerted them to his own sniffer. Surely
they wouldn't have left his sniffer running on purpose. They must have
known he would learn they were watching him through his sniffer. The
whole thing was bizarre.
Anthrax thought about the admins who were chasing him. Thought about
their moves, their strategies. Wondered why. It was one of the
unsolved mysteries a hacker often faced--an unpleasant side of
hacking. Missing the answers to certain questions, the satisfaction of
a certain curiosity. Never being able to look over the fence at the
other side.