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
The only hope was to call Phoenix and get him to login to the
Melbourne Uni accounts to see if the mail had arrived safely. If so,
he could download it with his faster modem before the CSIRO admin had
time to warn the Melbourne Uni admin, who would change the passwords.
Electron got on the phone to Phoenix. They had long since stopped
caring about what time of day they rang each other. 10 p.m. 2 a.m.
4.15 a.m. 6.45 a.m.
`Yeah.' Electron greeted Phoenix in the usual way.
`Yup,' Phoenix responded.
Electron told Phoenix what happened and gave him the two accounts at
Melbourne University where he had mailed the Zardoz bundle.
Phoenix hung up and rang back a few minutes later. Both accounts were
dead. Someone from Melbourne University had gone in and changed the
passwords within 30 minutes of Electron being booted off the CSIRO
computer. Both hackers were disturbed by the implications of this
event. It meant someone--in fact probably several people--were onto
them. But their desperation to get Zardoz overcame their fear.
Electron had one more account on the CSIRO computer. He didn't want to
give it to Phoenix, but he didn't have a choice. Still, the whole
venture was filled with uncertainty. Who knew if the Zardoz bundle was
still there? Surely an admin who bothered to kick Electron out would
move Zardoz to somewhere inaccessible. There was, however, a single
chance.
When Electron read off the password and username, he told Phoenix to
copy the Zardoz bundle to a few other machines on the Internet instead
of trying to download it to his own computer. It would be much
quicker, and the CSIRO admin wouldn't dare break into someone else's
computers to delete the copied file. Choosing overseas sites would
make it even harder for the admin to reach the admins of those
machines and warn them in time. Then, once Zardoz was safely tucked
away in a few back-up sites, Phoenix could download it over the
Internet from one of those with less risk of being booted off the
machine halfway through the process.
Sitting at his home in Kelvin Grove, Thornbury, just two suburbs north
of the CSIRO machine, Ian Mathieson watched the hacker break into his
computer again. Awoken by a phone call at 2.30 a.m. telling him there
was a suspected hacker in his computer, Mathieson immediately logged
in to his work system, DITMELA, via his home computer and modem. The
call, from David Hornsby of the Melbourne University Computer Science
Department, was no false alarm.
After watching the unknown hacker, who had logged in through a
Melbourne University machine terminal server, for about twenty
minutes, Mathieson booted the hacker off his system. Afterwards he
noticed that the DITMELA computer was still trying to execute a
command issued by the hacker. He looked a little closer, and
discovered DITMELA was trying to deliver mail to two Melbourne
University accounts.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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