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
That part was definitely true. Everything was self-taught. Well,
almost everything. He did take one programming class at uni, but he
failed it. He went to the library to do extra research, used in his
final project for the course. Most of his classmates wrote simple
200-line programs with few functions; his ran to 500 lines and had
lots of special functions. But the lecturer flunked him. She told him,
`The functions in your program were not taught in this course'.
Sexton asked Anthrax if he was into carding, which he denied
emphatically. Then Sexton headed back into scanning. How much had
Anthrax done? Had he given scanned numbers to other hackers? Anthrax
was evasive, and both cops were getting impatient.
`What I am trying to get at is that I believe that, through your
scanning, you are helping other people break the law by promoting this
sort of thing.' Sexton had shown his hand.
`No more than a telephone directory would be assisting someone,
because it's really just a list. I didn't actually break anything. I
just looked at it.'
`These voice mailbox systems obviously belong to people. What would
you do when you found a VMB?'
`Just play with it. Give it to someone and say, "Have a look at this.
It is interesting," or whatever.'
`When you say play with it you would break the code out to the VMB?'
`No. Just have a look around. I'm not very good at breaking VMBs.'
Sexton tried a different tack. `What are 1-900 numbers? On the back of
that document there is a 1-900 number. What are they generally for?'
Easy question. `In America they like cost $10 a minute. You can ring
them up, I think, and get all sorts of information, party lines, etc.'
`It's a conference type of call?'
`Yes.'
`Here is another document, contained in a clear plastic sleeve
labelled AS/AB/S/1. Is this a scan? Do you recognise your
handwriting?'
`Yes, it's in my handwriting. Once again it's the same sort of scan.
It's just dialling some commercial numbers and noting them.'
`And once you found something, what would you do with it?'
Anthrax had no intention of being painted as some sort of ringleader
of a scanning gang. He was a sociable loner, not a part of a team.
`I'd just look at it, like in the case of this one here--630. I just
punched in a few numbers and it said that 113 diverts somewhere, 115
says goodbye, etc. I'd just do that and I probably never came back to
it again.'
`And you believe that if I pick up the telephone book, I would get all
this information?'
`No. It's just a list of numbers in the same sense that a telephone
book is.'
`What about a 1-800 number?'
`That is the same as a 0014.'
`If you rang a 1-800 number, where would you go?'
Anthrax wondered if the Computer Crimes Unit gained most of its
technical knowledge from interviews with hackers.
`You can either do 0014 or you can do 1-800. It's just the same.'
`Is it Canada--0014?'
`It's everywhere.' Oops. Don't sound too cocky. `Isn't it?'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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