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 mail, however, hadn't been completely delivered. It was still
sitting in the mail spool, a temporary holding pen for undelivered
mail. Curious as to what the hacker would want so much from his
system, Mathieson moved the file into a subdirectory to look at it. He
was horrified to find the entire Zardoz archive, and he knew exactly
what it meant. These were no ordinary hackers--they were precision
fliers. Fortunately, Mathieson
consoled himself, he had stopped the mail before it had been sent out
and secured it.
Unfortunately, however, Mathieson had missed Electron's original
file--the bundle of Zardoz copies. When Electron had mailed the file,
he had copied it, leaving the original intact. They were still sitting
on DITMELA under the unassuming name .t. Mailing a file didn't delete
it--the computer only sent a copy of the original. Mathieson was an
intelligent man, a medical doctor with a master's degree in computer
science, but he had forgotten to check the temporary directory, one of
the few places a hacker could store files on a Unix system if he
didn't have root privileges.
At exactly 3.30 a.m. Phoenix logged into DITMELA from the University
of Texas. He quickly looked in the temporary directory. The .t file
was there, just as Electron had said it would be. The hacker quickly
began transferring it back to the University of Texas.
He was feeling good. It looked like the Australians were going to get
the entire Zardoz collection after all. Everything was going extremely
well--until the transfer suddenly died. Phoenix had forgotten to check
that there was enough disk space available on the University of Texas
account to download the sizeable Zardoz bundle. Now, as he was logged
into a very hot machine, a machine where the admin could well be
watching his every move, he discovered there wasn't enough room for
the Zardoz file.
Aware that every second spent on-line to DITMELA posed a serious risk,
Phoenix logged off the CSIRO machine immediately. Still connected to
the Texas computer, he fiddled around with it, deleting other files
and making enough room to pull the whole 500 k Zardoz file across.
At 3.37 a.m. Phoenix entered DITMELA again. This time, he vowed,
nothing would go wrong. He started up the file transfer and waited.
Less than ten minutes later, he logged off the CSIRO computer and
nervously checked the University of Texas system. It was there.
Zardoz, in all its glory. And it was his! Phoenix was ecstatic.
He wasn't done yet and there was no time for complacency. Swiftly, he
began compressing and encrypting Zardoz. He
compressed it because a smaller file was less obvious on the Texas
machine and was faster to send to a back-up machine. He encrypted it
so no-one nosing around the file would be able to see what was in it.
He wasn't just worried about system admins; the Texas system was
riddled with hackers, in part because it was home to his friend,
Legion of Doom hacker Erik Bloodaxe, a
student at the university.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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