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THE ILLUMINATI CONSPIRACY

Berlin, while Koch continued his activities from Hannover. Kahl later involved a contact in West Berlin, Dirk Brescinsky, whose job it became to run Pengo.

Koch and Pengo had some early successes hacking into VAX machines. They discovered that Digital’s Singapore computer centre was exceptionally lax about security. From there they were able to copy a VMS program called Securepack, which allowed system managers to alter user status.

It was a useful piece of software for the KGB. But it wasn’t military data. To get into defence sites Pengo and Koch knew they needed to find a more certain way into VAXen.

They didn’t have long to wait: within six months security on VAX systems worldwide would be blown wide open.

It was his peripheral involvement in compromising VAX security that got Steffen into the whole mess. In the autumn of 1986 Hans Gliss, the editor of Datenschutz-Berater, who had been so helpful to Chaos over the Btx affair, contacted Steffen. Gliss needed help, and told the young hacker the following story.

Gliss had been working as a consultant for SCICON, one of the largest computer software companies in Germany. SCICON had been awarded a hugely lucrative contract by the government. The work was classified, Gliss said, and was ‘very important, high security, requiring maximum reliability.’ It involved three networked VAX computers in three locations, with the head office in Hamburg.

During the final phase of testing, SCICON was contacted by a computer manager in northern Germany and asked to explain the messages – short bursts of characters and digits in no discernable order – that had been seen on his computers. From the computerized routeing information it was clear that the messages were emanating from SCICON in Hamburg, but they made no sense to him or anyone at his institute. Nor did they make sense to anyone at SCICON, said Gliss. None of the staff had any idea where they had come from or what they were about.

The SCICON researchers checked through their security logs – computer files which record all the comings and goings of users on the system – to see if the dated and timed messages could be related

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