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BREAKING AND ENTERING

had been at the college since 1968, first as a physics student, then staying on to work full time at the QMC computer centre after gaining his degree in 1971.

He worked from a large office in the top floor of the computer science block, a nondescript, functional concrete shell of a building of mid-1960s design off Mile End Road in east London. His office was near the computer centre, a cramped room packed with mainframes, some of them ICLs. In the centre were eight consoles set up on adjoining desks. These allowed all the activities on the mainframes to be monitored, but were usually unmanned, particularly at night.

Bob first realized he had been attacked by a hacker on 19 February 1988. He had heard reports from colleagues at the Universities of Glasgow and Hull that their own systems had been hacked by someone calling himself Alan Dolby. What Bob saw on his computer was a series of files that had been incorrectly stored in the memory. One of the files had been labelled 'AD'. He began to search further. He was looking for signs of 'unauthorized access and tampering', he said, and he soon found it: the four OLAD user files Nick had created to give himself a smooth path into the QMC computer. The files appeared to have been created a month previously.

Jones reported the intrusion to his superior, Jeremy Brandon, the director of the computer centre. They recognized that they had a problem. They could lock their hacker out by closing the OLAD files but that might force him to try more devious back-door methods to regain access. If he came through a back door they might not be able to find him again - and he might do some real damage. They decided to leave the files as they were and watch him. They did, however, remove the Mad Hacker's sysman status.

When Bob came into the office on the morning of 30 March he found that there had been no work processed on the computer since about 2 a.m. when the scheduler had failed. Its failure coincided with a successful hack of the system made by OLAD028.

Jones and Brandon decided to record future intrusions on a dedicated journal within the computer. They also decided to wipe out three of the user-names, leaving only OLAD028, the one the hacker had consistently employed. By leaving one user-name available the

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