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Digital’s own operating system, much to the computer giant’s chagrin. It made users less dependent upon Digital, an unfortunate trend as far as any profit-conscious computer manufacturer was concerned.

Neither Koch nor Pengo knew anything about UNIX. They needed to recruit yet another hacker to their team. Once again, Kahl and Koch did the rounds of hacker meets. They soon found Marcus Hess; at the time he was working for a specialist UNIX systems company in Hannover. He was an ideal choice: local, experienced and with an addiction almost as potent as drugs – he loved fast sports cars.

Now they were three. Hess soon became invaluable; shortly after he became a member, he was able to download a copy of the UNIX source code. Kahl took it to the Soviets, who seemed impressed; at any rate, they paid Kahl DM25,000, the most he had ever received from them.

Hess soon discovered that many American computer users were relaxed about security. Indeed, if their computers contained nothing secret or classified, some US sites actually tolerated an occasional visiting hacker; sometimes system operators would even have time for a chat. In America, nucleus of the mythical Worldnet, there was a concept of the ‘Global Village’ where everybody would be friendly neighbours, courtesy of the computer networks. It was easy to forget that computers which themselves don’t contain classified information can provide entry points to a network with more interesting machines. That was what Hess was looking for.

He soon found a particularly hospitable computer in California. It contained no classified material but did provide a convenient launching pad to other systems. For the cost of a domestic phone call, Hess could hack into the University of Bremen, where computer security was slack, hop across the Atlantic by satellite at the university’s expense, and from the hospitality of the computers at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories, at the University of California in Berkeley, travel to other sites.

Some system operators (sysops) tolerate hackers, some threaten them, but most don’t even know they’ve got them. Very few actually chase them: it’s a very time-consuming and generally unrewarding task. Clifford Stoll, the system admin manager at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories, detected the activities of Hess in August 1986, after

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