📸

convenience of Prestel’s engineers, who would need to know them to roam through the system. The test service, after all, was itself supposedly secured by a ten-digit ID and a four-digit password. Pres-tel had no idea that the test service’s security had already been blown. Now it was doubly blown, because the system manager’s codes would allow Triludan to explore anywhere he wanted throughout the entire Prestel network.

The system manager, or ‘sysman’, is the person in control of a computer installation. Like the manager of a large building who has keys to all the offices and knows the combinations to all the secure areas, the sysman has the keys – IDs and passwords – to all areas of his system: he controls and changes on-line data, updates indexes, assigns mailboxes and oversees security. With his system manager status, Triludan the Warrior had become king of Prestel. He could do anything: he could run up bills for any of the 50,000 subscribers, tamper with information, delete files and read anything in the mailboxes.

It was at the meeting in the Chinese restaurant in November 1984 that Triludan told the rest of the group that he had captured sysman status on Prestel. The news galvanized them. In 1984 British hacking was in its infancy; English hackers, unlike their colleagues in America, had never managed to pull off any of the spectacular stunts that attracted press and publicity. Their access to Prestel seemed like the ideal opportunity to put British hacking on the map. They discussed plans and schemes: they knew well that with system manager status they could easily cripple the system. But none of them was malicious. Pranks seemed more fun.

Accordingly they broke into the mailbox of His Royal Highness, the Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Philip – and were rewarded by seeing the message ‘Good Evening, HRH Duke of Edinburgh’ come up on the computer screen. They left a message for the real sysman, in his mailbox, saying: ‘I do so enjoy puzzles and games. Ta. Ta. Pip! Pip! HRH Royal Hacker.’ They modified the foreign exchange page on Prestel, provided by the Financial Times, so that for a few hours on the 2 November the pound to dollar exchange rate was a glorious ‘£1 = $50’.

Triludan himself capped all the tricks. When subscribers dial into

📸