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
But on this fateful day in 1988, Par didn't want DEFCON. He wanted the
secret Force had just discovered, but held so very close to his chest.
And the Australian didn't want to give it to him.
Force was a meticulous hacker. His bedroom was remarkably tidy, for a
hacker's room. It had a polished, spartan quality. There were a few
well-placed pieces of minimalist furniture:
a black enamel metal single bed, a modern black bedside
table and a single picture on the wall--a photographic poster of
lightning, framed in glass. The largest piece of furniture was a
blue-grey desk with a return, upon which sat his computer, a printer
and an immaculate pile of print-outs. The bookcase, a tall modern
piece matching the rest of the furniture, contained an extensive
collection of fantasy fiction books, including what seemed to be
almost everything ever written by David Eddings. The lower shelves
housed assorted chemistry and programming books. A chemistry award
proudly jutted out from the shelf housing a few Dungeons and Dragons
books.
He kept his hacking notes in an orderly set of plastic folders, all
filed in the bottom of his bookcase. Each page of notes, neatly
printed and surrounded by small, tidy handwriting revealing updates
and minor corrections, had its own plastic cover to prevent smudges or
stains.
Force thought it was inefficient to hand out his DEFCON program and
have ten people scan the same network ten different times. It wasted
time and resources. Further, it was becoming harder to get access to
the main X.25 sites in Australia, like Minerva. Scanning was the type
of activity likely to draw the attention of a system admin and result
in the account being killed. The more people who scanned, the more
accounts would be killed, and the less access the Australian hackers
would have. So Force refused to hand over DEFCON to hackers outside
The Realm, which is one thing that made it such a powerful group.
Scanning with DEFCON meant using Netlink, a program which legitimate
users didn't often employ. In his hunt for hackers, an admin might
look for people running Netlink, or he might just examine which
systems a user was connecting to. For example, if a hacker connected
directly to Altos from Minerva without hopping through a respectable
midpoint, such as another corporate machine overseas, he could count
on the Minerva admins killing off the account.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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