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hacker would have no need to resort to trap-door methods of entry to the system, Jones reasoned.

The hacking incidents were reported to the QMC’s head of security, who passed on the information to Scotland Yard’s Computer Crime Unit. Although established in 1971, the CCU had until 1985 consisted of only one officer. Then, as computer crime escalated and the government became concerned about the vulnerability of its own systems, the CCU was formalized. It was enlarged eventually to four officers – still not a big force, given that Scotland Yard can be called in on cases anywhere in the country. The unit is at present headed by John Austen, who was the officer detailed to investigate the Mad Hacker affair.

Austen knew that the only way to catch the hacker was to monitor the lines, the same time-consuming process used to track down Triludan the Warrior. That meant involving British Telecom, which needed to assign an engineer to trace the call. And because the Mad Hacker worked at night, that would involve overtime. For the first few days the investigation was bogged down over the overtime question: neither British Telecom nor QMC nor Scotland Yard was willing to pay. Eventually the phone company gave in and funded a twenty-four-hour trace, to be called when the hacker was detected on the QMC system.

As the Mad Hacker gained confidence and experience, his activities took a new twist. To Bob it looked malicious, as though the hacker had declared war on the system. One night the Mad Hacker ordered the QMC computer to print ‘I think you should know I am mad . . . I am also depressed’, over and over. To Hull University he sent a message saying ‘I am taking up the challenge’, then loaded a ‘rabbit’ on to the system. A rabbit is a piece of software that orders a computer to perform useless tasks endlessly, breeding like its namesake until the work orders finally overwhelm the computer and it can cope with nothing else. The Hull computer was down for ten hours after its particular rabbit began breeding. ‘That will fill up your sodding system,’ the Mad Hacker messaged them.

He also dropped a rabbit into the Glasgow computer. But this time, as he was on-line, the computer operator discovered him and

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