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APPROACHING ZERO

To get the codes he wanted Pat employed a device known as ‘war dialling’. This is a program that instructs the computer to continue calling permutations of five digits until it hits on a ‘good’ one — an access code. The system is crude but effective. A few hours spent war dialling can garner a good few Sprint codes.

Pat needed the long-distance codes because of the time-consuming nature of his interest. It takes patience and persistence to break into a target computer; once in, there is a myriad of menus and routes to explore, to say nothing of other linked computers to jump to.

Pat’s target was an ARPANET-linked computer at MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This was a favourite for hackers because security was light. In common with many other universities, MIT allowed a more-or-less open access, believing that its computers were there to be used. The dilemma for MIT, and other computer operators, is that if security is light the computers are abused; if security is tight, they become more difficult for even authorized users to access.

Authorized users of computers, of course, are given a personal ID and a password. The means by which hackers collect these valid user log-ins and codes include pirate bulletin boards, peering over someone’s shoulder in an office, and ‘dumpster diving’. But there is another method which alleviates the whole problem. When computers are manufactured a number of default log-ins and passwords are programmed into the machines. A common one is ‘sysmaint’, for systems maintenance, used as both the log-in and the password. Accessing a machine with this default would require no more than typing ‘sysmaint’ at the log-in prompt and then at the password prompt. Computer operators are supposed to remove the default access codes when they take delivery of the computer, but many forget or don’t bother — as Nick Whiteley discovered when he hacked into the QMC computer the first time. Experienced hackers also know that common commands such as ‘test’ or ‘help’ are also often used as IDs and passwords.

It was by using a default code that Pat first accessed ARPANET. ‘Back then there was no real need for security,’ he says now. ‘It was all incredibly simple. Computers were developed for human beings to use. They have to be simple to access because humans are idiots.’

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