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THE ILLUMINATI CONSPIRACY

that hackers broke into Digital and amended VMS to make it more hospitable. Or perhaps it was a programmer who put the commands in without the knowledge of the company so he could access any VAX machine anywhere without IDs or passwords. A more intriguing theory is that the back door was put in by the National Security Agency, for its own use - though this presupposes that the NSA is in the business of spying on computer users.

Some people do suppose precisely that. In their view it is a myth that the NSA is interested in protecting computer security. Instead the NSA is actively engaged in penetrating computers - or more bluntly, hacking - both in the US and abroad. Its interest isn't security at all, but rather the exploitation of back doors that only the agency knows about.

It is likely, though, that had the NSA been involved in the VAX scheme it would have chosen a more devious means of access. Whoever put the back door in, and whatever the purpose, it was certainly not intended for German hackers. But by 1986, when Koch and Pengo were trawling for information about VAX, the secret of the back door had travelled across the Atlantic and had become known by a small group of hackers in Germany. Bach and Handel, the two students who broke into the SCICON company's VAX, are generally thought to have been among the first to exploit the trick. It would later be learned that their mentor was a student at Karlsruhe University named Steffen Weihruch.

That same year, Karl Koch made contact with Weihruch as well. He had managed to track down the VAX wizard to Karlsruhe, and had prevailed on him to tell him his technique. It wasn't difficult: Weihruch was known to be obliging and he was rather pleased that his discovery was useful. Peer recognition is an important bolster to the hacker ego.

Weihruch had also perfected a 'tool' to make hacking VAXen even easier. The problem with the back door was that it didn't entirely bypass all security checks: a would-be hacker still had to contend with the security log, which collated the IDs of all users as they entered the system. It was this log - which was kept on a computer file and could be examined by the system operator or manager - that

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