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BREAKING AND ENTERING

It took him two or three months to learn about communications, he explained later. Part of that came from his reading, part from dialling into a number of electronic bulletin boards. About 20 per cent of them had hacker sections, Nick found. With the information from the Handbook and from the boards he learned how to find the access phone numbers for computers (called dial-ups), how to deal with IDs and passwords. The Handbook was especially useful: it contained a list of dial-ups, including dedicated computer numbers that gave access to JANET.

JANET is the earnestly friendly acronym for the Joint Academic Network, a system that links computers in eighty to ninety universities, polytechnics and research centres throughout the UK. Because it is designed to be used by students and researchers the network needs to be relatively open, and tries to present a friendly face to users: hence the feminine acronym and the useful tutorial and guide provided by the system when a user types ‘help’. The network's various data banks also contain a wealth of information on subjects as dissimilar as military research and theoretical physics. For Nick, however, the chief appeal of JANET was that it linked a number of ICLs on different sites in the UK. By accessing JANET he could play around on his favourite computers from his home, just by using his little Commodore.

By January 1988 Nick was ready to try his first hack. He first dialled up a number for the computer centre at Queen Mary College, where he knew they had an ICL 2988. Because QMC is not far from Nick's home the telephone charges would be lower; also, most colleges are easy targets because of their generally weak security. He got the dial-up from The Hacker's Handbook – but that, as he knew, would only get him to the front door. Access to the QMC computer would be much like gaining entry to the Prestel system. To get inside Nick would need both a user-name – a log-in or ID – and a password. The user-name at QMC is an individual seven character ID; the password is a ‘one-way’ encrypted code. (‘One way’ means the code can only be encrypted once and is entirely random; if the user forgets the password, a new one needs to be created.)

That was the theory, anyway. But Nick knew that some software supplied by ICL includes a standard, or default, ‘low-security’ user-

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