But the IS hackers had no intention of committing information espionage. In fact, despite their poor financial status as students or, in the case of Trax, as a young man starting his career at the bottom of the totem pole, none of them would have sold information they gained from hacking. In their view, such behaviour was dirty and deserving of contempt--it soiled the adventure and was against their ethics. They considered themselves explorers, not paid corporate spies. Although the NorTel network was firewalled, there was one link to the Internet. The link was through a system called BNRGATE, Bell-Northern Research's gateway to the Internet. Bell-Northern is NorTel's R&D subsidiary. The connection to the outside electronic world was very restricted, but it looked interesting. The only problem was how to get there. Mendax began hunting around for a doorway. His password cracking program had not turned up anything for this system, but there were other, more subtle ways of getting a password than the brute force of a cracking program. System administrators sometimes sent passwords through email. Normally this would be a major security risk, but the NorTel system was firewalled from the Internet, so the admins thought they had no real reason to be concerned about hackers. Besides, in such a large corporation spanning several continents, an admin couldn't always just pop downstairs to give a new company manager his password in person. And an impatient manager was unlikely to be willing to wait a week for the new password to arrive courtesy of snail mail. In the NorTel network, a mail spool, where email was stored, was often shared between as many as twenty computer systems. This structure offered considerable advantages for Mendax. All he needed to do was break into the mail spool and run a keyword search through its contents. Tell the computer to search for word combinations such as `BNRGATE' and `password', or to look for the name of the system admin for BNRGATE, and likely as not it would deliver tender morsels of information such as new passwords. Mendax used a password he found through this method to get into BNRGATE and look around. The account he was using only had very restricted privileges, and he couldn't get root on the system. For example, he could not FTP files from outside the NorTel network in the normal way. Among Internet users FTP (file transfer protocol) is both a noun and a verb: to FTP a program is to slurp a copy of it off one computer site into your own. There is nothing illegal about FTP-ing something per se, and millions of people across the Internet do so quite legitimately.