Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession from the Electronic Frontier by Suelette Dreyfus Read Free Book Online Page A

someone pointed out that New Zealand’s worldwide claim to fame was that it was a nuclear-free zone.

    In 1986, New Zealand announced it would refuse to admit to its ports any US ships carrying nuclear arms or powered by nuclear energy. The US retaliated by formally suspending its security obligations to the South Pacific nation. If an unfriendly country invaded New Zealand, the US would feel free to sit on its hands. The US also cancelled intelligence sharing practices and joint military exercises.

    Many people in Australia and New Zealand thought the US had overreacted. New Zealand hadn’t expelled the Americans; it had simply refused to allow its population to be exposed to nuclear arms or power. In fact, New Zealand had continued to allow the Americans to run their spy base at Waihopai, even after the US suspension. The country wasn’t anti-US, just anti-nuclear.

    And New Zealand had very good reason to be anti-nuclear. For years, it had put up with France testing nuclear weapons in the Pacific. Then in July 1985 the French blew up the Greenpeace anti-nuclear protest ship as it sat in Auckland harbour. The Rainbow Warrior was due to sail for Mururoa Atoll, the test site, when French secret agents bombed the ship, killing Greenpeace activist Fernando Pereira.

    For weeks, France denied everything. When the truth came out--that President Mitterand himself had known about the bombing plan--the French were red-faced. Heads rolled. French Defence Minister Charles Hernu was forced to resign. Admiral Pierre Lacoste, director of France’s intelligence and covert action bureau, was sacked. France apologised and paid $NZ13 million compensation in exchange for New Zealand handing back the two saboteurs, who had each been sentenced to ten years’ prison in Auckland.
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    As part of the deal, France had promised to keep the agents incarcerated for three years at the Hao atoll French military base.
    Both agents walked free by May 1988 after serving less than two years.
    After her return to France, one of the agents, Captain Dominique Prieur, was promoted to the rank of commandant.

    Finally, McMahon thought. Something that made sense. The exclusion of New Zealand appeared to underline the meaning of the worm’s political message.

    When the WANK worm invaded a computer system, it had instructions to copy itself and send that copy out to other machines. It would slip through the network and when it came upon a computer attached to the network, it would poke around looking for a way in. What it really wanted was to score a computer account with privileges, but it would settle for a basic-level, user-level account.

    VMS systems have accounts with varying levels of privilege. A high-privilege account holder might, for example, be able to read the electronic mail of another computer user or delete files from that user’s directory. He or she might also be allowed to create new computer accounts on the system, or reactivate disabled accounts. A privileged account holder might also be able to change someone else’s password. The people who ran computer systems or networks needed accounts with the highest level of privilege in order to keep the system running smoothly. The worm specifically sought out these sorts of accounts because its creator knew that was where the power lay.

    The worm was smart, and it learned as it went along. As it traversed the network, it created a masterlist of commonly used account names.
    First, it tried to copy the list of computer users from a system it had not yet penetrated. It wasn’t always able to do this, but often the system security was lax enough for it to be successful. The worm then compared that list to the list of users on its current host. When it found a match--an account name common to both lists--the worm added that name to the masterlist it carried around inside it, making a note to try that account when breaking into a new system in future.

    It was a clever method of attack, for the