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APPROACHING ZERO

drug problem. He was in no danger of being prosecuted for his part in the 'Soviet hacker' affair: like Pengo, Koch would have been a witness for the prosecution, protected from punishment by the terms of the amnesty provision. After the trial he would have resumed his life (like Pengo, now married and living in Vienna).

Some who knew Koch think the young hacker got in over his head. He and Pengo and Hess were pawns in the espionage game, amateur spies recruited by the Soviets to break into Western computers. It is now thought possible that the Soviets were running other hackers at the same time, testing one gang against the other. For the KGB, it was low-risk espionage: they paid for programs, documents and codes that would otherwise have been inaccessible — unless of course their own operatives were prepared to sit for hours, days or even weeks in front of a VDU, learning the rudiments of hacking.

It was an opportunistic intelligence-gathering operation. The Soviet hacker gang had quite literally walked through the KGB's front door, offering to sell military secrets. Given that the agency paid DM100,000 for the data, it must be assumed they were satisfied with what they had received.

Espionage is a curious trade. Those who claim to know how espionage agencies work say that computer penetration has become a new and useful tool for latter-day spies. The Americans are said to be involved, through the NSA, as are the British, through GCHQ, the General Communications Headquarters, which gathers intelligence from diverse sources. Hacking, at this rarefied level, becomes a matter of national security.

Nor are the Americans and the British the only ones suspected of involvement. Mossad, the Israeli secret service, is said to have penetrated the computer systems of French defence contractors who had developed weapons for sale to its enemies in the Middle East. The Israeli service then altered some of the data for the weaponry, rendering it vulnerable to their own defence systems.

In this case, the Israelis may have been merely copying the French. During the confrontation in the Gulf it was widely reported that certain French missiles — the Exocets, of Falklands War fame, which had previously been sold to the Iraqis — included back doors to their

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