Underground: Hacking, madness and obsession on the electronic frontier Part 58

Then he asked her how to spell the word 'phreak'.

Later that day, after Judge Ross had read the other judges' sentences, he gave Mendax a sentence similar to Prime Suspect's--a recorded conviction on all counts, a reparation payment of $2100 to ANU and a three-year good behaviour bond.

There were two variations. Prime Suspect and Trax both received $500 good behaviour bonds; Judge Ross ordered a $5000 bond for Mendax.

Further, Judge Lewis had given Prime Suspect almost twelve months to pay his $2100 reparation. Judge Ross ordered Mendax to pay within three months.

Judge Ross told Mendax, 'I repeat what I said before. I thought initially that these were offences which justified a jail sentence, but the mitigatory circ.u.mstances would have converted that to a suspended sentence. The sentence given to your co-offender caused me to alter that view, however.' He was concerned, he said, 'that highly intelligent individuals ought not to behave like this and I suspect it is only highly intelligent individuals who can do what you did'.

The word 'addiction' did not appear anywhere in the sentencing transcript.

Chapter 10 -- Anthrax -- The Outsider.

They had a gun at my head and a knife at my back; Don't wind me up too tight.

-- from 'Powderworks' (also called The Blue Alb.u.m).

Anthrax didn't like working as part of a team. He always considered other people to be the weakest link in the chain.

Although people were never to be trusted completely, he socialised with many hackers and phreakers and worked with a few of them now and again on particular projects. But he never formed intimate partners.h.i.+ps with any of them. Even if a fellow hacker dobbed him in to the police, the informant couldn't know the full extent of his activities. The nature of his relations.h.i.+ps was also determined, in part, by his isolation. Anthrax lived in a town in rural Victoria.

Despite the fact that he never joined a hacking partners.h.i.+p like The Realm, Anthrax liked people, liked to talk to them for hours at a time on the telephone. Sometimes he received up to ten international calls a day from his phreaker friends overseas. He would be over at a friend's house, and the friend's mother would knock on the door of the bedroom where the boys were hanging out, listening to new music, talking.

The mother would poke her head in the door, raise an eyebrow and point at Anthrax. 'Phone call for you. Someone from Denmark.' Or sometimes it was Sweden. Finland. The US. Wherever. Though they didn't say anything, his friends' parents thought it all a bit strange. Not many kids in country towns got international calls trailing them around from house to house. But then not many kids were master phreakers.

Anthrax loved the phone system and he understood its power. Many phreakers thought it was enough to be able to call their friends around the globe for free. Or make hacking attack phone calls without being traced. However, real power for Anthrax lay in controlling voice communications systems--things that moved conversations around the world. He cruised through people's voice mailbox messages to piece together a picture of what they were doing. He wanted to be able to listen into telephone conversations. And he wanted to be able to reprogram the telephone system, even take it down. That was real power, the kind that lots of people would notice.

The desire for power grew throughout Anthrax's teenage years. He ached to know everything, to see everything, to play with exotic systems in foreign countries. He needed to know the purpose of every system, what made them tick, how they fitted together. Understanding how things worked would give him control.

His obsession with telephony and hacking began early in life. When he was about eleven, his father had taken him to see the film War Games.

All Anthrax could think of as he left the theatre was how much he wanted to learn how to hack. He had already developed a fascination for computers, having received the simplest of machines, a Sinclair ZX81 with 1 k of memory, as a birthday present from his parents.

Rummaging through outdoor markets, he found a few second-hand books on hacking. He read Out of the Inner Circle by Bill Landreth, and Hackers by Steven Levy.

By the time he was fourteen, Anthrax had joined a Melbourne-based group of boys called The Force. The members swapped Commodore 64 and Amiga games. They also wrote their own demos--short computer programs--and delighted in cracking the copy protections on the games and then trading them with other crackers around the world. It was like an international penpal group. Anthrax liked the challenge provided by cracking the protections, but few teenagers in his town shared an interest in his unusual hobby. Joining The Force introduced him to a whole new world of people who thought as he did.

When Anthrax first read about phreaking he wrote to one of his American cracking contacts asking for advice on how to start. His friend sent him a list of AT&T calling card numbers and a toll-free direct-dial number which connected Australians with American operators. The card numbers were all expired or cancelled, but Anthrax didn't care. What captured his imagination was the fact that he could call an operator all the way across the Pacific for free. Anthrax began trying to find more special numbers.

He would hang out at a pay phone near his house. It was a seedy neighbourhood, home to the most downtrodden of all the town's residents, but Anthrax would stand at the pay phone for hours most evenings, oblivious to the clatter around him, hand-scanning for toll-free numbers. He dialled 0014--the prefix for the international toll-free numbers--followed by a random set of numbers. Then, as he got more serious, he approached the task more methodically. He selected a range of numbers, such as 300 to 400, for the last three digits. Then he dialled over and over, increasing the number by one each time he dialled. 301. 302. 303. 304. Whenever he hit a functioning phone number, he noted it down. He never had to spend a cent since all the 0014 numbers were free.

Anthrax found some valid numbers, but many of them had modems at the other end. So he decided it was time to buy a modem so he could explore further. Too young to work legally, he lied about his age and landed an after-school job doing data entry at an escort agency. In the meantime, he spent every available moment at the pay phone, scanning and adding new numbers to his growing list of toll-free modem and operator-a.s.sisted numbers.

The scanning became an obsession. Often Anthrax stayed at the phone until 10 or 11 p.m. Some nights it was 3 a.m. The pay phone had a rotary dial, making the task laborious, and sometimes he would come home with blisters on the tips of his fingers.

A month or so after he started working, he had saved enough money for a modem.

Hand scanning was boring, but no more so than school. Anthrax attended his state school regularly, at least until year 10. Much of that was due to his mother's influence. She believed in education and in bettering oneself, and she wanted to give her son the opportunities she had been denied. It was his mother, a psychiatric nurse, who scrimped and saved for months to buy him his first real computer, a $400 Commodore 64. And it was his mother who took out a loan to buy the more powerful Amiga a few years later in 1989. She knew the boy was very bright. He used to read her medical textbooks, and computers were the future.

Anthrax had always done well in school, earning distinctions every year from year 7 to year 10. But not in maths. Maths bored him. Still, he had some apt.i.tude for it. He won an award in year 6 for designing a pendulum device which measured the height of a building using basic trigonometry--a subject he had never studied. However, Anthrax didn't attend school so much after year 10. The teachers kept telling him things he already knew, or things he could learn much faster from reading a book. If he liked a topic, he wandered off to the library to read about it.

Things at home became increasingly complicated around that time. His family had struggled from the moment they arrived in Australia from England, when Anthrax was about twelve. They struggled financially, they struggled against the roughness of a country town, and, as Indians, Anthrax, his younger brother and their mother struggled against racism.

The town was a violent place, filled with racial hatred and ethnic tension. The ethnics had carved out corners for themselves, but incursions into enemy territory were common and almost always resulted in violence. It was the kind of town where people ended up in fist fights over a soccer game. Not an easy place for a half-Indian, half-British boy with a violent father.

Anthrax's father, a white Englishman, came from a farming family. One of five sons, he attended an agricultural college where he met and married the sister of an Indian student on a scholars.h.i.+p. Their marriage caused quite a stir, even making the local paper under the headline 'Farmer Marries Indian Woman'. It was not a happy marriage and Anthrax often wondered why his father had married an Indian.

Perhaps it was a way of rebelling against his dominating father.

Perhaps he had once been in love. Or perhaps he simply wanted someone he could dominate and control. Whatever the reason, the decision was an unpopular one with Anthrax's grandfather and the mixed-race family was often excluded from larger family gatherings.

When Anthrax's family moved to Australia, they had almost no money.

Eventually, the father got a job as an officer at Melbourne's Pentridge prison, where he stayed during the week. He only received a modest income, but he seemed to like his job. The mother began working as a nurse. Despite their new-found financial stability, the family was not close. The father appeared to have little respect for his wife and sons, and Anthrax had little respect for his father.

As Anthrax entered his teenage years, his father became increasingly abusive. On weekends, when he was home from work, he used to hit Anthrax, sometimes throwing him on the floor and kicking him. Anthrax tried to avoid the physical abuse but the scrawny teenager was little match for the beefy prison officer. Anthrax and his brother were quiet boys. It seemed to be the path of least resistance with a rough father in a rough town. Besides, it was hard to talk back in the painful stutter both boys shared through their early teens.

One day, when Anthrax was fifteen, he came home to find a commotion at his house. On entering the house, Anthrax went to his parents'

bedroom. He found his mother there, and she was very upset and emotionally distressed. He couldn't see his father anywhere, but found him relaxing on the sofa in the lounge room, watching TV.

Disgust consumed Anthrax and he retreated into the kitchen. When his father came in not long after to prepare some food Anthrax watched his back with revulsion. Then he noticed a carving knife resting on the counter. As Anthrax reached for the knife, an ambulance worker appeared in the doorway. Anthrax put the knife down and walked away.

But he wasn't so quiet after that. He started talking back, at home and at school, and that marked the beginning of the really big problems. In primary school and early high school he had been beaten up now and again. Not any more. When a fellow student hauled Anthrax up against the wall of the locker shed and started shaking him and waving his fist, Anthrax lost it. He saw, for a moment, his father's face instead of the student's and began to throw punches in a frenzy that left his victim in a terrible state.

At home, Anthrax's father learned how to bait his son. The bully always savours a morsel of resistance from the victim, which makes going in for the kill a little more fun. Talking back gave the father a good excuse to get violent. Once he nearly broke his son's neck.

Another time it was his arm. He grabbed Anthrax and twisted his arm behind his back. There was an eerie sound of cracking cartilage, and then pain. Anthrax screamed for his father to stop. His father twisted Anthrax's arm harder, then pressed on his neck. His mother shrieked at her husband to let go of her son. He wouldn't.

'Look at you crying,' his father sneered. 'You disgusting animal.'

'You're the disgusting animal,' Anthrax shouted, talking back again.

His father threw Anthrax on the floor and began kicking him in the head, in the ribs, all over.

Anthrax ran away. He went south to Melbourne for a week, sleeping anywhere he could, in the empty night-time s.p.a.ces left over by day workers gone to orderly homes. He even crashed in hospital emergency rooms. If a nurse asked why he was there, he would answer politely, 'I received a phone call to meet someone here'. She would nod her head and move on to someone else.

Eventually, when Anthrax returned home, he took up martial arts to become strong. And he waited.

Anthrax was poking around a MILNET gateway when he stumbled on the door to System X.* He had wanted to find this system for months, because he had intercepted email about it which had aroused his curiosity.

Anthrax telnetted into the gateway. A gateway binds two different networks. It allows, for example, two computer networks which talk different languages to communicate. A gateway might allow someone on a system running DECNET to login to a TCP/IP based system, like a Unix.

Anthrax was frustrated that he couldn't seem to get past the System X gateway and on to the hosts on the other side.

Using normal address formats for a variety of networks, he tried telling the gateway to make a connection. X.25. TCP/IP. Whatever lay beyond the gateway didn't respond. Anthrax looked around until he found a sample of addresses in a help file. None of them worked, but they offered a clue as to what format an address might take.

Each address had six digits, the first three numbers of which corresponded to telephone area codes in the Was.h.i.+ngton DC area. So he picked one of the codes and started guessing the last three digits.

Hand scanning was a pain, as ever, but if he was methodical and persistent, something should turn up. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. On it went. Eventually he connected to something--a Sunos Unix system--which gave him a full IP address in its login message. Now that was handy.

With the full IP address, he could connect to System X again through the Internet directly--avoiding the gateway if he chose to. It's always helpful in covering your tracks to have a few different routing options. Importantly, he could approach System X through more than just its front door.

Anthrax spiralled through the usual round of default usernames and pa.s.swords. Nothing. This system required a more strategic attack.

He backed out of the login screen, escaped from the gateway and went to another Internet site to have a good look at System X from a healthy distance. He 'fingered' the site, pulling up any bit of information System X would release to the rest of the Internet when asked. He probed and prodded, looking for openings. And then he found one. Sendmail.