Underground: Hacking, madness and obsession on the electronic frontier Part 27

German court proceedings were under way when Hagbard's body was found.

Did he commit suicide or was he murdered? No-one knew for sure, but the news shook the computer underground around the world. Hackers discussed the issue in considerable depth. On the one hand, Hagbard had a long history of mental instability and drug use, having spent time in psychiatric hospitals and detoxification centres off and on since the beginning of 1987. On the other hand, if you were going to kill yourself, would you really want to die in the agony of a petrol fire? Or would you just take a few too many pills or a quick bullet?

Whether it was murder or suicide, the death of Hagbard loomed large before Phoenix. Who were the American law enforcement agencies after in Australia? Did they want him?

No. Force rea.s.sured him, they were after Electron. The problem for Phoenix was that he kept talking to Electron on the phone--in voice conversations. If Phoenix continued a.s.sociating with Electron, he too would be scooped up in the AFP's net.

The message to Phoenix was crystal clear.

Stay away from Electron.

'Listen, you miserable sc.u.m-sucking pig.'

'Huh?' Phoenix answered, only half paying attention.

'Piece of s.h.i.t machine. I did all this editing and the d.a.m.n thing didn't save the changes,' Electron growled at the Commodore Amiga, with its 512 k of memory, sitting on the desk in his bedroom.

It was January 1990 and both Phoenix and Electron were at home on holidays before the start of university.

'Yeah. Wish I could get this thing working. f.u.c.king h.e.l.l. Work you!'

Phoenix yelled. Electron could hear him typing at the other end of the phone while he talked. He had been struggling to get AUX, the Apple version of Unix, running on his Macintosh SE30 for days.

It was difficult to have an uninterrupted conversation with Phoenix.

If it wasn't his machine crashing, it was his grandmother asking him questions from the doorway of his room.

'You wanna go through the list? How big is your file?' Phoenix asked, now more focused on the conversation.

'Huh? Which file?'

'The dictionary file. The words to feed into the pa.s.sword cracker,'

Phoenix replied.

Electron pulled up his list of dictionary words and looked at it. I'm going to have to cut this list down a bit, he thought. The dictionary was part of the pa.s.sword cracking program.

The larger the dictionary, the longer it took the computer to crack a list of pa.s.swords. If he could weed out obscure words--words that people were unlikely to pick as pa.s.swords--then he could make his cracker run faster.

An efficient pa.s.sword cracker was a valuable tool. Electron would feed his home computer a pa.s.sword file from a target computer, say from Melbourne University, then go to bed. About twelve hours later, he would check on his machine's progress.

If he was lucky, he would find six or more accounts--user names and their pa.s.swords--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 pa.s.swords 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. Pa.s.swords, kept in pa.s.sword 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 pa.s.sword file. Second, take a list of commonly used pa.s.swords, such as users' names from the pa.s.sword 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 pa.s.sword.

However, there was one important complication: salts. A salt changed the way a pa.s.sword 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 pa.s.sword. The computer chooses a salt randomly when it encrypts a user's pa.s.sword. Only one is used, and there are 4096 different salts. All Unix computers use salts in their pa.s.sword encryption process.

Salts were intended to make pa.s.sword cracking far more difficult, so a hacker couldn't just encrypt a dictionary once and then compare it to every list of encrypted pa.s.swords 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 pa.s.swords.

On any one system penetrated by Electron, there might be only 25 users, and therefore only 25 pa.s.swords, most likely using 25 different salts. Since the salt characters were stored immediately before the encrypted pa.s.sword, he could easily see which salt was being used for a particular pa.s.sword. 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 s.p.a.ce for a basic home computer. And that was just the dictionary. The most sophisticated cracking programs also produced 'intelligent guesses' of pa.s.swords. 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 d.a.m.n 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 pa.s.swords. A smaller dictionary, however, also meant fewer guesses and so a reduced chance of cracking the pa.s.sword 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 f.u.c.k is a Cabbala?'

'Dunno. Yeah. I've got those. Not Cabbala. OK, Cabaret. Cabbage. f.u.c.k, I hate cabbage. Who'd pick Cabbage as their pa.s.sword?'

'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 a.s.sociating 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 h.e.l.l is a Cabriolet? Do you know?'