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
At the front of the police entourage was Detective Sergeant Ken Day,
head of the AFP's Computer Crimes Unit in the southern region. The two
knew all about each other, but had never met in person. Day spoke
first.
`I'm Ken Day. I believe you've been expecting me.'
Mendax and his fellow IS hackers had been expecting the AFP. For weeks
they had been intercepting electronic mail suggesting that the police
were closing the net. So when Day turned up saying, `I believe you've
been expecting me,' he was completing the information circle. The
circle of the police watching the hackers watching the police watch
them.
It's just that Mendax didn't expect the police at that particular
moment. His mind was a tangle and he looked in disbelief at the band
of officers on his front step. Dazed, he looked at Day and then spoke
out loud, as if talking to himself, `But you're too short to be a
cop.'
Day looked surprised. `Is that meant to be an insult?' he said.
It wasn't. Mendax was in denial and it wasn't until the police had
slipped past him into the house that the reality of the situation
slowly began to sink in. Mendax's mind started to work again.
The disks. The damn disks. The beehive.
An avid apiarist, Mendax kept his own hive. Bees fascinated him. He
liked to watch them interact, to see their sophisticated social
structure. So it was with particular pleasure that he enlisted their
help in hiding his hacking activities. For months he had meticulously
secreted the disks in the hive. It was the ideal location--unlikely,
and well guarded by 60000 flying things with stings. Though he hadn't
bought the hive specifically for hiding stolen computer account
passwords for the likes of the US Air Force 7th Command Group in the
Pentagon, it appeared to be a secure hiding place.
He had replaced the cover of the super box, which housed the
honeycomb, with a sheet of coloured glass so he could watch the bees
at work. In summer, he put a weather protector over the glass. The
white plastic cover had raised edges and could be fastened securely to
the glass sheet with metal clasps. As Mendax considered his
improvements to the bee box, he realised that this hive could provide
more than honey. He carefully laid out the disks between the glass and
the weather protector. They fitted perfectly in the small gap.
Mendax had even trained the bees not to attack him as he removed and
replaced the disks every day. He collected sweat from his armpits on
tissues and then soaked the tissues in a sugar water solution. He fed
this sweaty nectar to the bees. Mendax wanted the bees to associate
him with flowers instead of a bear, the bees' natural enemy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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