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into a bank's central computer quite anonymously, access the sector dealing with cash transfers, then quickly move the money to an account that he controls, possibly in a false name. However, in practice the procedure is more complex. Banks use codes to authenticate transfers; in addition, transactions must be confirmed electronically by the recipient of the funds. Because of such safeguards, the plunder-ing is probably limited.⁷

But the threat from hackers is still real. There may be twenty hackers in Britain, and perhaps a hundred in the US, with the necessary skills to break into a bank and carry off funds. That's a sizeable number of potential bank robbers. And of course it would be the dream hack, the one that justifies all that time spent staring at a VDU, all those hours learning the craft.

The most successful bank robbery ever carried out by hackers may have occurred two years ago. The target was a branch of a major bank in New York. The identity of the two hackers is unknown, though they are thought to be in their late teens or early twenties.

The scheme began when the two became aware that certain financial institutions, including banks, use their connections on the various X.25 networks – the computer networks operated by commercial carriers like Telenet or Sprint⁸ – to transfer money from one account to another and from one bank to another. The process is known as Electronic Fund Transfer, or EFT. The two decided that if the funds could be intercepted in mid-transfer and diverted into another account – in this case, a computer file hidden within the system – then they could be redirected, and withdrawn, before the error was noticed.

The hackers began by investigating Telenet. They knew that their target bank had two 'address prefixes' of its own – 223 and 224 – on the network; these were the prefixes for the seven-digit numbers (or 'addresses') that denoted the bank's links to the system. By churning through sequential numbers they found a series of addresses for the bank's computer terminals; many of them were VAXen (the popular computers manufactured by Digital). On a weekend, they hacked into eight of the VAXen and found their way to the bank's DECNET, an internal Digital network linking the computers; from there they

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