We held our breath until the file was successfully transferred, then gave
each other electronic high-fives over chat.
JSZ moved a copy of the file to a system in Europe in case some Well
system admin happened to find the huge file and delete it. I also copied the
file to a couple of other locations.
JSZ kept telling me that finding the simple backdoor he had set up for
my access would be easy for Shimmy. I agreed: it was too easy to find. I
suggested that we consider placing a more sophisticated backdoor in the
operating
system itself, where it would be much harder to detect.
“He’ll find it,” JSZ countered.
“Yeah, we could always get back in later the same way,” I said.
I logged off the system,
and JSZ cleaned up, removing the simple
backdoor and deleting all logs of our activity.
It was a very exciting moment. We had gotten into the security expert’s
server—in my case, for the
second
time in little over a year. JSZ and I
decided we would each examine Shimmy’s
files independently and then
report back to the other on what we found.
But no matter how careful we were to erase our tracks, I figured it was
almost certain that Shimmy would stumble onto some telltale sign we had
overlooked.
Sifting through Shimmy’s old emails, I came across messages back and
forth between him and my nemesis,
New York Times
technology scribe John
Markoff. The two of them had been exchanging emails going back to early
1991 about me—trading bits of information on what I was up to, as in an
exchange in early ’92 that showed Shimmy had gone to the trouble of
researching online
for my ham radio license, call sign N6NHG. He also
emailed Markoff asking whether the FCC had a rule against issuing ham
radio licenses to a person convicted of a felony.
Why the two of them had such an interest in me was still a mystery. I
had never met Shimmy, never interacted with him in any way except for the
recent hacks into his system.
So why would the two of them be so interested in what I was doing?
I was right about one thing: Shimmy very quickly learned of our break-
in. Because JSZ and I were both so focused on getting a copy of his files,
we didn’t notice that he was running “tcpdump”—a
network monitoring
tool to capture all network traffic. We also didn’t notice that a program
called “cron” was periodically emailing his system logs to Andrew Gross,
Shimmy’s assistant. Gross realized the logs were getting smaller and tipped
off Shimmy that something suspicious was going on. As soon as Shimmy
looked through the logs, he realized he had been hacked.
It didn’t matter much.
We had his files, and we would spend the days
and weeks ahead carefully examining them.
Why would Shimmy be running a network monitoring tool to capture
everything going through his server? Paranoia? Or was it a bait machine?
Because he was so high-profile in the computer security world, he knew it
was just a matter of time before someone would nail his butt with a clever
new attack. I thought
maybe it was a bait machine, left accessible so he
could monitor all the incoming attacks and profile the methods being used.
But in that case, why would he leave all his files on this machine, and even
a network wiretapping tool called “bpf”—for Berkeley Packet Filter—that
he had created for the United States Air Force,
which could insert itself
directly into an operating system without requiring a reboot?
Maybe he just underestimated his opponents and assumed no one would
ever get in. It’s still a mystery.
Many people credit me with being the guy who developed the program that
was used to hack into Shimmy’s servers using the IP spoofing attack. I’d be
proud if I really had been the one who managed that rather astounding feat,
and I’d be glad to take credit for it. But the credit’s not mine. Instead, that
honor belongs to the wickedly clever JSZ, the guy who actually participated
in developing the tool and used it for our Christmas Day break-in to
Shimmy’s server.
I had enjoyed my time back in Denver for the holidays, especially because
we were able to get into Shimmy’s system. But time was up: I needed to put
that grand city behind me and push off for my next destination.
I was still elated about the success of the Shimmy hack. But I would live
to regret it. Those few hours would eventually lead to my undoing. I had
unleashed a hacker vigilante who would stop at nothing to get even with
me.
