Underground: Hacking, madness and obsession on the electronic frontier Part 31

Then Phoenix noticed something else. Another file. Curiosity got the better of him and he zoomed in to have a quick look. This one contained a pa.s.sphrase--the pa.s.sphrase. The phrase the Australians needed to decrypt the original copy of Deszip they had stolen from the Bear computer at Dartmouth three months earlier. Phoenix couldn't believe the pa.s.sphrase. It was so simple, so obvious. But he caught himself. This was no time to cry over spilled milk. He had to get Deszip out of the machine quickly, before anyone noticed he was there.

But as Phoenix began typing in commands, his screen appeared to freeze up. He checked. It wasn't his computer. Something was wrong at the other end. He was still logged into Spaf's machine. The connection hadn't been killed. But when he typed commands, the computer in West Lafayette, Indiana, didn't respond. Spaf's machine just sat there, deaf and dumb.

Phoenix stared at his computer, trying to figure out what was happening. Why wouldn't Spaf's machine answer? There were two possibilities. Either the network--the connection between the first machine he penetrated at Purdue and Spaf's own machine--had gone down accidentally. Or someone had pulled the plug.

Why pull the plug? If they knew he was in there, why not just kick him out of the machine? Better still, why not kick him out of Purdue all together? Maybe they wanted to keep him on-line to trace which machine he was coming from, eventually winding backwards from system to system, following his trail.

Phoenix was in a dilemma. If the connection had crashed by accident, he wanted to stay put and wait for the network to come back up again.

The FTP hole in Spaf's machine was an incredible piece of luck.

Chances were that someone would find evidence of his break-in after he left and plug it. On the other hand, he didn't want the people at Purdue tracing his connections.

He waited a few more minutes, trying to hedge his bets. Feeling nervy as the extended silence emanating from Spaf's machine wore on, Phoenix decided to jump. With the lost treasures of Aladdin's cave fading in his mind's eye like a mirage, Phoenix killed his connection.

Electron and Phoenix talked on the phone, moodily contemplating their losses. It was a blow, but Electron reminded himself that getting Deszip was never going to be easy. At least they had the pa.s.sphrase to unlock the encrypted Deszip taken from Dartmouth.

Soon, however, they discovered a problem. There had to be one, Electron thought. They couldn't just have something go off without a hitch for a change. That would be too easy. The problem this time was that when they went searching for their copy from Dartmouth, which had been stored several months before, it had vanished. The Dartmouth system admin must have deleted it.

It was maddening. The frustration was unbearable. Each time they had Deszip just within their grasp, it slipped away and disappeared. Yet each time they lost their grip, it only deepened their desire to capture the elusive prize. Deszip was fast becoming an all-consuming obsession for Phoenix and Electron.

Their one last hope was the second copy of the encrypted Dartmouth Deszip file they had given to Gandalf, but that hope did not burn brightly. After all, if the Australians' copy had been deleted, there was every likelihood that the Brit's copy had suffered the same fate.

Gandalf's copy hadn't been stored on his own computer. He had put it on some dark corner of a machine in Britain.

Electron and Phoenix logged onto Altos and waited for Pad or Gandalf to show up.

Phoenix typed .s for a list of who was on-line. He saw that Pad was logged on:

No Chan User

0 Guest

1 Phoenix

2 Pad

Guest 0 was Electron. He usually logged on as Guest, partly because he was so paranoid about being busted and because he believed operators monitored his connections if they knew it was Electron logging in.

They seemed to take great joy in sniffing the pa.s.sword to his own account on Altos. Then, when he had logged off, they logged in and changed his pa.s.sword so he couldn't get back under the name Electron.

Nothing was more annoying. Phoenix typed, 'Hey, Pad. How's it going?'

Pad wrote back, 'Feeny! Heya.'

'Do you and Gand still have that encrypted copy of Deszip we gave you a few months ago?'

'Encrypted copy ... hmm. Thinking.' Pad paused. He and Gandalf hacked dozens of computer systems regularly. Sometimes it was difficult to recall just where they had stored things.

'Yeah, I know what you mean. I don't know. It was on a system on JANET,' Pad said. Britain's Joint Academic Network was the equivalent of Australia's AARNET, an early Internet based largely on a backbone of universities and research centres.

'I can't remember which system it was on,' Pad continued.

If the Brits couldn't recall the inst.i.tution, let alone the machine where they had hidden Deszip, it was time to give up all hope. JANET comprised hundreds, maybe thousands, of machines. It was far too big a place to randomly hunt around for a file which Gandalf would no doubt have tried to disguise in the first place.

'But the file was encrypted, and you didn't have the pa.s.sword,' Pad wrote. 'How come you want it?'

'Because we found the pa.s.sword. ' That was the etiquette on Altos. If you wanted to suggest an action, you put it in <>.

'Gr8!' Pad answered.

That was Pad and Gandalf's on-line style. The number eight was the British hackers' hallmark, since their group was called 8lgm, and they used it instead of letters. Words like 'great', 'mate' and 'later'

became 'gr8', 'm8' and 'l8r'.

When people logged into Altos they could name a 'place' of origin for others to see. Of course, if you were logging from a country which had laws against hacking, you wouldn't give your real country. You'd just pick a place at random. Some people logged in from places like Argentina, or Israel. Pad and Gandalf logged in from 8lgm.

'I'll try to find Gandalf and ask him if he knows where we stashed the copy,' Pad wrote to Phoenix.

'Good. Thanks.'

While Phoenix and Electron waited on-line for Pad to return, Par showed up on-line and joined their conversation. Par didn't know who Guest 0 was, but Guest certainly knew who Par was. Time hadn't healed Electron's old wounds when it came to Par. Electron didn't really admit to himself the bad blood was still there over Theorem. He told himself that he couldn't be bothered with Par, that Par was just a phreaker, not a real hacker, that Par was lame.

Phoenix typed, 'Hey, Par. How's it going?'

'Feenster!' Par replied. 'What's happening?'

'Lots and lots.'

Par turned his attention to the mystery Guest 0. He didn't want to discuss private things with someone who might be a security guy hanging around the chat channel like a bad smell.

'Guest, do you have a name?' Par asked.

'Yeah. It's "Guest--#0".'

'You got any other names?'

There was a long pause.

Electron typed, 'I guess not.'

'Any other names besides d.i.c.khead that is?'

Electron sent a 'whisper'--a private message--to Phoenix telling him not to tell Par his ident.i.ty.

'OK. Sure,' Phoenix whispered back. To show he would play along with whatever Electron had in mind, Phoenix added a sideways smiley face at the end: ':-)'.

Par didn't know Electron and Phoenix were whispering to each other. He was still waiting to find out the ident.i.ty of Guest. 'Well, speak up, Guest. Figured out who you are yet?'

Electron knew Par was on the run at the time. Indeed, Par had been on the run from the US Secret Service for more than six months by the beginning of 1990. He also knew Par was highly paranoid.

Electron took aim and fired.

'Hey, Par. You should eat more. You're looking underFED these days.'