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list of top-secret defence contractors and installations. The list continued with names of companies in the UK and Japan. The KGB stipulated that it was interested in micro-electronics projects for military and industrial purposes, and specifically in programs for designing megachips, the electronic brains that were controlling the military strength of the Western allies. Two French companies in particular attracted the KGB's attention: Philips-France and SGS-Thomson, both known to be involved in megachip research.

Koch knew that on the sites picked by the KGB he would be confronted with VAX computers, the top of the range models produced by Digital. Koch had no experience with VMS, the proprietary operating system used by VAXen. It was VAX expertise he was hunting for at the Chaos congress: someone to make up for the skills he lacked.

It was lucky, then, that he met a seventeen-year-old hacker from West Berlin named Hans Hubner. Hubner, a tall, slender young man with the paleness that comes from staring at VDUs too long, had been fascinated by computers since he was a child. He was also addicted to an arcade game which involved a little penguin-like character called 'Pengo'. He liked it so much that he adopted Pengo as his handle.

When he met Koch, Pengo was unemployed and needed money. He also shared Koch's liking for drugs. But more importantly, Pengo had experience with VMS. Since 1985 he had been playing on Tymnet, an international computer network run by the American defence contractor McDonnell Douglas, and he had learned to use the VAX default passwords - the standard account names that are included with the machines when they're shipped out from the manufacturer. The default passwords are supposed to be changed by the purchaser but, as we have seen, often aren't. Pengo was also one of the first German hackers to break into CERN, the European Nuclear Research Centre in Geneva, Switzerland, and was a caller to the Altos bulletin board in Munich - where he had, coincidentally, been in contact with Fry Guy, the Indiana hacker.

Koch befriended the young Berliner, invited him to Hannover and introduced him to Peter Kahl. Before long Pengo had become the second member of the gang, operating from what was then West

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