Underground by Suelette Dreyfus (books to get back into reading txt) 📖

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 reassured 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 associating 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 scum-sucking pig.’

`Huh?’ Phoenix answered, only half paying attention.

`Piece of shit machine. I did all this editing and the damn 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. Fucking hell. 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 password 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 password cracking program. The larger the dictionary, the longer it took the computer to crack a list of passwords. If he could weed out obscure words—words that people were unlikely to pick as passwords—then he could make his cracker run faster.

An efficient password cracker was a valuable tool. Electron would feed his home computer a password 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 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