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MANAGERS of computer networks in the US and Australia have sent out
warnings that ‘hackers’ may try to get revenge for recent attempts by police
to crack down on computer crime.

Earlier this month police in Melbourne, Australia, arrested two students
from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and another computer programmer.
The students, Richard Jones, Nahshon Even-Chaim, and David Woodcock were
charged with using Australia’s telephone system to break into computers
and damage data. The three could face a maximum penalty of 10 years in jail.
Another six people are still being investigated by the police in the hacking
episode.

The day after the arrests, Robert Elz, one of Australia’s leading computer
scientists, sent an electronic message to his colleagues urging them to
‘make sure that your system security is as tight as possible. Fix everything,
these people know all of the bugs.’

According to another specialist on the security of computer networks,
members of the computer underground in the US have also threatened to retaliate
if Robert Morris receives a harsh sentence. Morris unleashed a computer
‘worm’ in 1988 that temporarily shut down Internet, one of the largest computer
networks in the US. He will be sentenced on 5 May.

In February this year six computer hackers in the US were charged with
breaking into telephone company computers, stealing valuable software, and
disrupting telephone services. According to court documents, the hackers
had found their way into computers controlling telephone traffic across
a large area of the southern US. They were able to misdirect telephone calls,
monitor phone conversations, and steal or modify information in credit card
accounts kept by the phone company.

If they are convicted, the hackers could face jail sentences of up to
30 years under a law passed in 1986. According to Gene Spafford, a professor
at Purdue University in Indiana, the hackers in Australia and the US share
secrets of how to break into specific computers. ‘It amounts to a criminal
conspiracy,’ said Spafford.

Since autumn last year, there has been a sharp increase in the number
of attempts to break into computers on the Internet. The number of reported
break-in attempts then levelled off again, according to the Computer Emergency
Response Team, a national clearing house of information on computer viruses
and security.

It has become fairly common for hackers to mount ‘dictionary attacks’
on password files. They use a program with a specially constructed dictionary,
containing words from several languages, acronyms, names of people and rock
groups, and computer jargon. The program tries each word until a valid password
turns up. The hacker then enters the computer masquerading as a valid user.

* * *

HOW ‘DAVE’ BROKE INTO THE CUCKOO’S NEST

THE AUSTRALIAN hackers made a special point of breaking into the computer
of Cliff Stoll, an astronomer at Harvard University’s Center for Astrophysics.
When they got in, they wanted the astronomer to know it. In 1987 Stoll followed
a hacker’s electronic trail from Berkeley in California to Hannover, West
Germany. He then wrote a best-selling book about the experience, called
The Cuckoo’s Egg.

On 18 March, Stoll arrived at work, and found a message on his own computer:
‘Now the Cuckoo has egg on his face’. It was a taunt from an intruder in
the computer system, only a few days after all the computer passwords at
the centre had been changed.

After analysing what had happened, Stoll realised the worst: the hacker
had been able to manipulate the computer into accepting him as the system’s
manager. This gave him the power to roam at will through the computer’s
operating system.

The Center for Astrophysics cut its entire computer off from all communication
for two weeks while Stoll and others made a painstaking inventory of the
files it contained. The inventory revealed a multitude of changes that the
hacker had left in the computer’s software that were designed to let him
come in and out at will.

In the middle of this, the hacker decided to ring Stoll up from Australia.
‘Hi, I’m Dave,’ he announced. ‘I left that message on your computer.’ According
to Stoll, ‘Dave’ wanted to get something off his chest: ‘It’s obvious from
your book that you hate hackers,’ he said. ‘But you shouldn’t . You should
respect us because we are smart enough to get into your computer.’

‘Dave’ is generally thought to be one of the Australians now awaiting
trial. But Stoll feels little sympathy for him. ‘He felt he’d done no damage,’
recalled Stoll. ‘He didn’t understand that the effect was to make us pull
our computer off the net. We don’t want secure systems. We want to be able
to share our data.’