Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession from the Electronic Frontier (26 page)

If he was lucky, he would find six or more accounts--user names and their passwords--waiting for him in a file. The process was completely automated. Electron could then log into Melbourne University using the cracked accounts, all of which could be used as jumping-off points for hacking into other systems for the price of a local telephone call.

Cracking Unix passwords wasn’t inordinately difficult, provided the different components of the program, such as the dictionary, had been set up properly. However, it was time-consuming.

The principle was simple. Passwords, kept in password files with their corresponding user names, were encrypted. It was as impossible to reverse the encryption process as it was to unscramble an omelette.

Instead, you needed to recreate the encryption process and compare the results.

There were three basic steps. First, target a computer and get a copy of its password file. Second, take a list of commonly used passwords, such as users’ names from the password file or words from a dictionary, and encrypt those into a second list. Third, put the two lists side by side and compare them. When you have a match, you have found the password.

However, there was one important complication: salts. A salt changed the way a password was encrypted, subtly modifying the way the DES

encryption algorithm worked. For example, the word ‘Underground’

encrypts two different ways with two different salts: ‘kyvbExMcdAOVM’

or ‘lhFaTmw4Ddrjw’. The first two characters represent the salt, the others represent the password. The computer chooses a salt randomly when it encrypts a user’s password. Only one is used, and there are 4096 different salts. All Unix computers use salts in their password encryption process.

Salts were intended to make password cracking far more difficult, so a hacker couldn’t just encrypt a dictionary once and then compare it to every list of encrypted passwords he came across in his hacking intrusions. The 4096 salts mean that a hacker would have to use 4096

different dictionaries--each encrypted with a different salt--to discover any dictionary word passwords.

On any one system penetrated by Electron, there might be only 25

users, and therefore only 25 passwords, most likely using 25 different salts. Since the salt characters were stored immediately before the encrypted password, he could easily see which salt was being used for a particular password. He would therefore only have to encrypt a dictionary 25 different times.

Still, even encrypting a large dictionary 25 times using different salts took up too much hard-drive space for a basic home computer. And that was just the dictionary. The most sophisticated cracking programs also produced ‘intelligent guesses’ of passwords. For example, the program might take the user’s name and try it in both upper- and lower-case letters. It might also add a ‘1’ at the end. In short, the program would create new guesses by permutating, shuffling, reversing and recombining basic information such as a user’s name into new

‘words’.

‘It’s 24000 words. Too damn big,’ Electron said. Paring down a dictionary was a game of trade-offs. The fewer words in a cracking dictionary, the less time it was likely to take a computer to break the encrypted passwords. A smaller dictionary, however, also meant fewer guesses and so a reduced chance of cracking the password of any given account.

‘Hmm. Mine’s 24328. We better pare it down together.’

‘Yeah. OK. Pick a letter.’

‘C. Let’s start with the Cs.’

‘Why C?’

‘C. For my grandmother’s cat, Cocoa.’

‘Yeah. OK. Here goes. Cab, Cabal. Cabala. Cabbala.’ Electron paused.

‘What the fuck is a Cabbala?’

‘Dunno. Yeah. I’ve got those. Not Cabbala. OK, Cabaret. Cabbage. Fuck, I hate cabbage. Who’d pick Cabbage as their password?’

‘A Pom,’ Electron answered.

‘Yeah,’ Phoenix laughed before continuing.

Phoenix sometimes stopped to think about Force’s warning, but usually he just pushed it to one side when it crept, unwelcomed, into his thoughts. Still, it worried him. Force took it seriously enough. Not only had he stopped associating with Electron, he appeared to have gone very, very quiet.

In fact, Force had found a new love: music. He was writing and performing his own songs. By early 1990 he seemed so busy with his music that he had essentially put The Realm on ice. Its members took to congregating on a machine owned by another Realm member, Nom, for a month or so.

Somehow, however, Phoenix knew that wasn’t all of the story. A hacker didn’t pick up and walk away from hacking just like that. Especially not Force. Force had been obsessed with hacking. It just didn’t make sense. There had to be something more. Phoenix comforted himself with the knowledge that he had followed Force’s advice and had stayed away from Electron. Well, for a while anyway.

He had backed right off, watched and waited, but nothing happened.

Electron was as active in the underground as ever but he hadn’t been busted. Nothing had changed. Maybe Force’s information had been wrong.

Surely the feds would have busted Electron by now if they were going to do anything. So Phoenix began to rebuild his relationship with Electron. It was just too tempting. Phoenix was determined not to let Force’s ego impede his own progress.

By January 1990, Electron was hacking almost all the time. The only time he wasn’t hacking was when he was sleeping, and even then he often dreamed of hacking. He and Phoenix were sailing past all the other Melbourne hackers. Electron had grown beyond Powerspike’s expertise just as Phoenix had accelerated past Force. They were moving away from X.25 networks and into the embryonic Internet, which was just as illegal since the universities guarded computer accounts--Internet access--very closely.

Even Nom, with his growing expertise in the Unix operating system which formed the basis of many new Internet sites, wasn’t up to Electron’s standard. He didn’t have the same level of commitment to hacking, the same obsession necessary to be a truly cutting-edge hacker. In many ways, the relationship between Nom and Phoenix mirrored the relationship between Electron and Powerspike: the support act to the main band.

Electron didn’t consider Phoenix a close friend, but he was a kindred spirit. In fact he didn’t trust Phoenix, who had a big mouth, a big ego and a tight friendship with Force--all strikes against him. But Phoenix was intelligent and he wanted to learn. Most of all, he had the obsession. Phoenix contributed to a flow of information which stimulated Electron intellectually, even if more information flowed toward Phoenix than from him.

Within a month, Phoenix and Electron were in regular contact, and during the summer holidays they were talking on the phone--voice--all the time, sometimes three or four times a day. Hack then talk. Compare notes. Hack some more. Check in again, ask a few questions. Then back to hacking.

The actual hacking was generally a solo act. For a social animal like Phoenix, it was a lonely pursuit. While many hackers revelled in the intense isolation, some, such as Phoenix, also needed to check in with fellow humanity once in a while. Not just any humanity--those who understood and shared in the obsession.

‘Caboodle. Caboose, ‘Electron went on, ‘Cabriolet. What the hell is a Cabriolet? Do you know?’

‘Yeah,’ Phoenix answered, then rushed on. ‘OK. Cacao. Cache. Cachet

...’

‘Tell us. What is it?’ Electron cut Phoenix off.

‘Cachinnation. Cachou ...’

‘Do you know?’ Electron asked again, slightly irritated. As usual, Phoenix was claiming to know things he probably didn’t.

‘Hmm? Uh, yeah,’ Phoenix answered weakly. ‘Cackle. Cacophony ...’

Electron knew that particular Phoenix ‘yeah’--the one which said ‘yes’

but meant ‘no, and I don’t want to own up to it either so let’s drop it’.

Electron made it a habit not to believe most of the things Phoenix told him. Unless there was some solid proof, Electron figured it was just hot air. He didn’t actually like Phoenix much as a person, and found talking to him difficult at times. He preferred the company of his fellow hacker Powerspike.

Powerspike was both bright and creative. Electron clicked with him.

They often joked about the other’s bad taste in music. Powerspike liked heavy metal, and Electron liked indie music. They shared a healthy disrespect for authority. Not just the authority of places they hacked into, like the US Naval Research Laboratories or NASA, but the authority of The Realm. When it came to politics, they both leaned to the left. However, their interest tended more toward anarchy--opposing symbols of the military-industrial complex--than to joining a political party.

After their expulsion from The Realm, Electron had been a little isolated for a time. The tragedy of his personal life had contributed to the isolation. At the age of eight, he had seen his mother die of lung cancer. He hadn’t witnessed the worst parts of her dying over two years, as she had spent some time in a German cancer clinic hoping for a reprieve. She had, however, come home to die, and Electron had watched her fade away.

When the phone call from hospital came one night, Electron could tell what had happened from the serious tones of the adults. He burst into tears. He could hear his father answering questions on the phone. Yes, the boy had taken it hard. No, his sister seemed to be OK. Two years younger than Electron, she was too young to understand.

Electron had never been particularly close to his sister. He viewed her as an unfeeling, shallow person--someone who simply skimmed along the surface of life. But after their mother’s death, their father began to favour Electron’s sister, perhaps because of her resemblance to his late wife. This drove a deeper, more subtle wedge between brother and sister.

Electron’s father, a painter who taught art at a local high school, was profoundly affected by his wife’s death. Despite some barriers of social class and money, theirs had been a marriage of great affection and love and they made a happy home. Electron’s father’s paintings hung on almost every wall in the house, but after his wife’s death he put down his brushes and never took them up again. He didn’t talk about it. Once, Electron asked him why he didn’t paint any more. He looked away and told Electron that he had ‘lost the motivation’.

Electron’s grandmother moved into the home to help her son care for his two children, but she developed Alzheimer’s disease. The children ended up caring for her. As a teenager, Electron thought it was maddening caring for someone who couldn’t even remember your name.

Eventually, she moved into a nursing home.

In August 1989, Electron’s father arrived home from the doctor’s office. He had been mildly ill for some time, but refused to take time off work to visit a doctor. He was proud of having taken only one day’s sick leave in the last five years. Finally, in the holidays, he had seen a doctor who had conducted numerous tests. The results had come in.

Electron’s father had bowel cancer and the disease had spread. It could not be cured. He had two years to live at the most.

Electron was nineteen years old at the time, and his early love of the computer, and particularly the modem, had already turned into a passion. Several years earlier his father, keen to encourage his fascination with the new machines, used to bring one of the school’s Apple IIes home over weekends and holidays. Electron spent hours at the borrowed machine. When he wasn’t playing on the computer, he read, plucking one of his father’s spy novels from the over-crowded bookcases, or his own favourite book, The Lord of The Rings.

Computer programming had, however, captured the imagination of the young Electron years before he used his first computer. At the age of eleven he was using books to write simple programs on paper--mostly games--despite the fact that he had never actually touched a keyboard.

His school may have had a few computers, but its administrators had little understanding of what to do with them. In year 9, Electron had met with the school’s career counsellor, hoping to learn about career options working with computers.

‘I think maybe I’d like to do a course in computer programming ...’

His voice trailed off, hesitantly.

‘Why would you want to do that?’ she said. ‘Can’t you think of anything better than that?’

‘Uhm ...’ Electron was at a loss. He didn’t know what to do. That was why he had come to her. He cast around for something which seemed a more mainstream career option but which might also let him work on computers. ‘Well, accounting maybe?’

‘Oh yes, that’s much better,’ she said.

‘You can probably even get into a university, and study accounting there. I’m sure you will enjoy it,’ she added, smiling as she closed his file.

The borrowed computers were, in Electron’s opinion, one of the few good things about school. He did reasonably well at school, but only because it didn’t take much effort. Teachers consistently told his father that Electron was underachieving and that he distracted the other students in class. For the most part, the criticism was just low-level noise. Occasionally, however, Electron had more serious run-ins with his teachers. Some thought he was gifted. Others thought the freckle-faced, Irish-looking boy who helped his friends set fire to textbooks at the back of the class was nothing but a smart alec.

When he was sixteen, Electron bought his own computer. He used it to crack software protection, just as Par had done. The Apple was soon replaced by a more powerful Amiga with a 20 megabyte IBM compatible sidecar. The computers lived, in succession, on one of the two desks in his bedroom. The second desk, for his school work, was usually piled high with untouched assignments.

The most striking aspect of Electron’s room was the ream after ream of dot matrix computer print-out which littered the floor. Standing at almost any point in the simply furnished room, someone could reach out and grab at least one pile of print-outs, most of which contained either usernames and passwords or printed computer program code. In between the piles of print-outs, were T-shirts, jeans, sneakers and books on the floor. It was impossible to walk across Electron’s room without stepping on something.