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BREAKING AND ENTERING

sent him a message, demanding that he call the operations department. 'Alan Dolby doesn't make calls,' he messaged back.

Glasgow was where Dolby had first been rumbled, three months previously, when a file he had created as a back door had been discovered. It was Glasgow that had alerted the rest of system operators on the JANET network that there was a hacker about. So there may have been an element of revenge when, one night, the Glasgow system manager, Dr Roger MacKenzie, tried to access the mainframe from his home PC and found he had been 'locked out' - barred from his own computer. It was later discovered that the Mad Hacker had captured sysman status that night and instructed the mainframe to kick out MacKenzie.

At QMC an increasingly irritated Bob Jones was watching as intrusion after intrusion was recorded in the computer journal. At first these were just messages left for the sysman, schoolboyish nonsense like 'Will ET please phone home' and 'Will Norman Bates please report to the shower room'. But then things became more serious: the Mad Hacker instructed the QMC computer to generate copies of reports from its memory, stopping it from processing necessary work. His intrusions on more than one occasion caused the computer to crash. To Bob, the Mad Hacker was 'vindictive and malicious'.

Once, the Mad Hacker left a message asking: 'Why don't you lock me out?' It was obvious to Bob his intruder wanted to play. He ignored the messages.

But the monitoring was slowly getting results. When the Mad Hacker was spotted making an unusual daytime appearance, Bob rang the twenty-four-hour number - which rang and rang and rang. In frustration he gave the receiver to someone else to hold while he called a contact at British Telecom direct.

'There's no one answering my emergency call,' he shouted.
'Well, yes,' the Telecom man said patiently. 'The service doesn't start until 5 p.m.'

As they spoke, word came through that the hacker had left the system. Bob, still steaming, explained the precise meaning of 'twenty-four-hour service'.

The monitoring was stepped up. In early July the engineers at the

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