Book Review: "Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier"

The book "Underground" by Suelette Dreyfus, written in 1997 with Julian Assange.

I made very few notes on this book, so I'll briefly cover the key events without much detail. Also, the book emphasizes that it's a story about Australian hackers (which isn't quite accurate), and I don't like it when things are divided by regional affiliation when it comes to the global network. All events unfold from the late 80s to the mid 90s.

As of 2010, the book had sold 10,000 copies. The author made the electronic edition freely available in 2001 after the store server selling the book crashed due to demand. Over two years, the book was downloaded 400,000 times.

The book "Underground" is interesting because it tells not about technology, but about people and their fates. About how hacker culture was born, how ordinary people viewed them, and how legislation regarding computer break-ins and network intrusions was formed.

The book begins with the story of the WANK worm's intrusion into the SPAN network

SPAN — Space Physics Analysis Network, connecting 100,000 computer terminals worldwide. Unlike the Internet, now accessible to anyone, SPAN only connected NASA scientists, the Department of Energy, and research institutes, such as university centers. SPAN computers also differed from most Internet computers in a crucial technical feature — they used a different operating system. Large Internet computers mostly ran Unix, while SPAN consisted of VAX computers running VMS. This network worked almost like the Internet, but the computers spoke a different language. The Internet "communicates" using the TCP/IP protocol, while SPAN used DECNET.

belonging to NASA in 1989, just before the launch of the spacecraft "Galileo". WANK is the most famous worm in the history of computer networks. It was the first worm with a political message (its developer opposed the launch of Galileo because it was equipped with a nuclear component). WANK became an example of life imitating art — the computer term "worm" was borrowed from John Brunner's science fiction novel "The Shockwave Rider" about a worm used as a weapon against oligarchy.

And why "worms"? A strange mascot for a revolutionary group, given that worms are at the very bottom of the biological pyramid. As the saying goes, "like a worm in the dust." Who would choose a worm as a symbol of power?

The world's first worm was created by Robert Morris in 1988 and paralyzed 6,200 computers in the US (these numbers don't impress today, but by the standards of those years it was an enormous figure).

The NASA site had the password SYSTEM for the highest-level SYSTEM account. This was simply incredible. NASA, perhaps the world's largest community of specialists, had such a sloppy computer security system that any teenager with even a modest understanding of computers could easily crack it. This colossus was brought down by a computer program resembling a plate of spaghetti (an allegory meaning the worm was simple to the point of absurdity)

Worms were also used for good — several helper worms were developed by researchers at Xerox who wanted to use computers more efficiently. They developed a "messenger worm" that moved through the network delivering important messages. Their "diagnostic worm" stayed in the network, identifying emerging problems.

Why did computer hackers start appearing in the first place, and why during this period? The answer is simple: in the late 80s, inexpensive home computers like the Apple II and Commodore 64 could be afforded by ordinary suburban families. Although these computers weren't widely distributed, the price made them quite accessible to dedicated computer enthusiasts. This is what formed the computer underground. The currency of the underground wasn't money, but information. People exchanged and shared information not to get rich financially — they did it to earn respect and admiration.

And so, the first haven for computer enthusiasts were BBS bulletin board systems.

BBS users were of fairly high intelligence — usually technically inclined — and were obsessed with their hobby. They had to be obsessed. Often they'd spend 40–45 minutes just dialing a single BBS phone number, only to stay logged into the computer system for just half an hour. Most BBS fans did this several times a day.

In 1988, there were between sixty and a hundred active BBS systems in Melbourne. Estimates are vague because it's impossible to count moving targets. The amateur nature of the systems — often a tangled mess of wires and second-hand circuit boards soldered together in some garage — meant a system's lifespan was no longer than the period a teenager remained interested in it.

The two most prominent places in the Australian underground between 1987 and 1988 were called Pacific Island and Zen. A 23-year-old admin calling himself Craig Bowen ran both systems from his bedroom.

The resources were visited by about 800 users, 200 of whom were constantly logged into the system.

Hacker sections were hidden from outsiders, and to get in you needed a reputation, unique information, or access to some servers.

For more advanced hackers, there was the international chat channel Altos Chat. Computer systems at Altos in Hamburg had a conference feature on one of their machines. It was similar to the early days of IRC. The company surely never imagined its system would become a meeting place for the most serious hackers on the planet, but that's exactly what happened.

Altos was vastly different from illegal BBS systems — the latter could disappear forever at any moment, while Altos was always there. It was alive. It provided instant connections to dozens of hackers from the most exotic countries. And all these people not only shared your interest in computer networks but also held enormous contempt for authority at every level. Yet Altos was harder to access than an ordinary underground BBS.

The hacker community was constantly changing. For example, one telephone company, Telecom, was planning to switch to per-minute billing for local calls. This meant BBS users could no longer spend an hour on a bulletin board for the price of a single local call. Against this backdrop, hackers began engaging in phreaking. Later, hacker Craig Bowen developed a network scanner, which another hacker under the nickname Force modified. Force accidentally stumbled upon a completely open server — CitiSaudi and CitiGreece — containing credit card numbers. These were the beginnings of carding.

Although hackers considered carding unethical, they would trade credit card numbers for information. Thus these numbers spread across the network in no time.

Many hackers believed carding was little better than pickpocketing. Hacking was also controversial from a moral standpoint, but in 1988 there was still nothing criminal about it. Carding, however, was questionable both morally and legally. They acknowledged that many people tended to view hacking as a form of theft — stealing other people's computer resources — but there was another side to their argument. What if nobody needed those computer resources at two in the morning? As long as the hacker never permanently took anyone's property, hacking should be treated like an innocent childish prank, albeit a very cheeky one. Carding was different.

More surprisingly, hackers in that period had their own etiquette — don't damage computer systems you break into (let alone destroy them); don't alter information in those systems (except for changing logs to cover tracks); share information with others. For most early hackers, visiting someone's system was akin to a trip to a national park. Leave everything as it was before you arrived. Hackers would often fix bugs on the servers they breached.

One of the first heroes of the book — Par — specialized in X.25 networks. He was the first hacker from the US who managed to evade federal agents across the country for two years. I thought only Mitnick pulled off such tricks.

The next heroes are the Phoenix and Electron team. Watching the network adventures of these guys was particularly interesting. They launched targeted attacks against security professionals, hacked their email (to stay one step ahead of the police), scoured the entire network for exclusive information, specifically the Zardoz mailing list.

Zardoz was a worldwide security mailing list containing articles and warnings from computer security industry experts. They discussed new bugs in computer systems that could be used for intrusion or gaining primary access to a machine. The beauty of the bugs published in Zardoz was that they worked on any computer system using the programs or operating systems described in the digest. Every university, every military system, every research institute using software described in Zardoz was vulnerable.

They hunted for special software that would enable attacks previously unavailable to them, such as Deszip. But what doomed them was a sense of impunity. Phoenix also gave an interview to an American magazine, boasting about his criminal achievements. What's also surprising — in real life they couldn't stand each other, but their obsession with hacking brought them together.

Their case became the first prosecution of hackers under Australian federal computer crime legislation, which came into effect in June 1989. Moreover, it was the first time in the world that police obtained a conviction based on evidence gathered through remote computer and modem surveillance. For 6 weeks before the raid, AFP (Australian Federal Police) computer crime investigators, using the police telephone interception division, recorded Phoenix's actions online. His conversations, intercepted continuously for eight weeks before the raid, formed the basis of evidence against both accomplices, as they freely discussed their hacking targets and boasted about their exploits.

Gandalf and Pad. A team from the UK. These guys observed every precaution — they didn't coordinate their attacks by phone, never met in the real world. Gandalf, possessing a great sense of humor, often joked in conversations with Pad on Altos that they were destined to first meet at the police station. And that's exactly what happened — the police introduced them at the station. After meeting, they became even closer friends and, after serving their sentences, founded a company that advised organizations on network security.

The team known as The International Subversives, consisting of Prime Suspect, Mendax, and Trax. This team had a division of responsibilities — the first two were hackers, Trax was a phreaker who invented multi-frequency code phreaking. By sending special tones — generated by a computer program — over a phone line, he could control certain functions of the telephone switch. Trax discovered that he could make free calls, and no one would have to pay at all. These were not only free but also "untraceable" calls: they couldn't be tracked. Trax wrote a 48-page treatise on his discovery and called it the Australian Phreakers Manual Volumes. However, he grew worried about what might happen if he released it into the underground, so he decided to show it only to the other two hackers from International Subversive.

Prime Suspect and Mendax were always very concerned about traces of connections from university modems they used as launch pads. So Trax's phreaking talents were a godsend for them.

The team had their own electronic journal dedicated to network vulnerabilities. It had a simple editorial policy: only those who wrote an article for it could receive a copy. This policy provided excellent protection from outside eyes and stimulated information exchange among hackers.

After reading the book, it turned out that Mendax was none other than Julian Assange. The book describes in detail how he hacked NIC.

NIC assigned domain names — .com or .net at the end of network addresses — across the entire Internet. NIC also controlled the US Army's internal defense data network, known as MILNET.

All the book's heroes have a lot in common — they are the same age (16-23), all from dysfunctional families and/or from the provinces where attitudes toward the establishment are sharply negative. After charges were filed and sentences handed down, they began abusing alcohol and drugs from stress (except for Gandalf and Pad). Hacking allowed them to fill an inner void or escape from the gray reality of their lives. Electron even had to undergo a long rehabilitation program for drug addiction and spent some time in a psychiatric hospital.

All of them managed to avoid prison sentences (again, except for Gandalf and Pad, who had to serve six months). They were helped by an unusual strategy from their lawyers, who argued that the defendants suffered from an addiction to hacking. Also working in their favor was the fact that their cases were the first under the new hacker law in the judges' practice. The judges (often elderly) simply couldn't understand what these guys had actually done and how serious their crime was.

It was a great relief for me when, at the end of the book, the author talked about meeting all the book's heroes and assured that their lives turned out well. Except perhaps for Par — he couldn't recover from being pursued and still travels around the country, taking on any temporary work. Mostly simple, mind-numbing data processing jobs. It turned out that it's much easier to avoid computer crime charges than to shake off the consequences of a life on the run.

Details of the police investigation that identified Phoenix and Electron, as well as their arrest and prosecution, are contained in the book "The Hunt for Australia's Most Infamous Computer Cracker," written by Bill Apro, the AFP computer crime investigator who led the investigation, and "In the Realm of the Hackers," a film by Kevin Anderson.