Underground: Hacking, madness and obsession on the electronic frontierDreyfus, Suelette
Science
Underground: Hacking, madness and obsession on the electronic frontier
Dreyfus, Suelette
Computer crimes -- Australia; Computer hackers -- Australia -- Biography; Computer security -- Australia
When he found a complete collection of Zardoz in Worsley's directory,
Electron was tempted to try a grab and run. The problem was that, with
his slow modem, he couldn't run very quickly. Downloading Zardoz would
take several hours. Quashing his overwhelming desire to reach out and
grab Zardoz then and there, he slipped out of the machine noiselessly.
Early next morning, an excited and impatient Electron crept back into
DITMELA and headed straight for Worsley's directory. Zardoz was still
there. And a sweet irony. Electron was using a security bug he had
found on an early issue of Zardoz to break into the computer which
would surrender the entire archive to him.
Getting Zardoz out of the CSIRO machine was going to be a little
difficult. It was a big archive and at 300 baud--30 characters per
second--Electron's modem would take five hours to siphon off an entire
copy. Using the CAT command, Electron made copies of all the Zardoz
issues and bundled them up into one 500 k file. He called the new file
.t and stored it in the temporary directory on DITMELA.
Then he considered what to do next. He would mail the Zardoz bundle to
another account outside the CSIRO computer, for safe-keeping. But
after that he had to make a choice: try to download the thing himself
or hang up, call Phoenix and ask him to download it.
Using his 2400 baud modem, Phoenix would be able to download the
Zardoz bundle eight times faster than Electron could. On the other
hand, Electron didn't particularly want to give Phoenix access to the
CSIRO machine. They had both been targeting the machine, but he hadn't
told Phoenix that he had actually managed to get in. It wasn't that he
planned on withholding Zardoz when he got it. Quite the contrary,
Electron wanted Phoenix to read the security file so they could bounce
ideas off each other. When it came to accounts, however, Phoenix had a
way of messing things up. He talked too much. He was simply not
discreet.
While Electron considered his decision, his fingers kept working at
the keyboard. He typed quickly, mailing copies of the Zardoz bundle to
two hacked student accounts at Melbourne University. With the
passwords to both accounts, he could get in whenever he wanted and he
wasn't taking any chances with this precious cargo. Two accounts were
safer than one--a main account and a back-up in case someone changed
the password on the first one.
Then, as the DITMELA machine was still in the process of mailing the
Zardoz bundle off to the back-up sites, Electron's connection suddenly
died.
The CSIRO machine had hung up on him, which probably meant one thing.
The admin had logged him off. Electron was furious. What the hell was
a system administrator doing on a computer at this hour? The admin was
supposed to be asleep! That's why Electron logged on when he did. He
had seen Zardoz on the CSIRO machine the day before but he had been so
patient refusing to touch it because the risk of discovery was too
great. And now this.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account