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CounterPunch
January
4, 2003
Les Miserable
and the Hackers from Hell
Cyber Momma and the Outlaw Cowboys
by ADAM ENGEL
I had a confirmed reader, once. Hate mailer, of
course. Left a message something like, "We know who you
are and sooner or later, we'll get you good." Unfortunately
he left a phony email address--typical hate-mailer-so I couldn't
answer back. So I had my hacker friend, Ryan, brilliant lad,
trace the malicious missive from server to server to server all
around the world and back again until he landed in the corporate
cubicle of one Lester Miserable, my arch nemesis from our days
as rival op-ed hacks on the high school paper.
Back in the day, Les had written an in
depth analysis of the high school football team, his thesis being
"WE ARE NUMBER ONE." I merely pointed out that neither
Les nor I were on the Football team, so we could not possibly
be number one. Les Miserable's been my bete noir ever since.
Ah well, least he still reads my stuff.
Ryan left a nice little note on the servers
of Les's employer, in the mailboxes of IT (it never occurred
to me until this writing that that acronym for "Information
Technology" is an actual word with meaning: It.); on the
company memo list, etc. Simple message: "You've been hacked.
Sorry, but if anyone's to blame it's Lester Miserable. What's
he doing surfing the Web on valuable company time?"
After spooking ol' Les, Ryan and I went
out for drinks--on me, of course--and talked about the old days
when we were gallant digital warriors for a computer security
company, Cyber Momma. Actually, I was just a mediocre Systems
and Network Administrator. Ryan was the warrior cyber cowboy
hacker from hell. Seriously smart dude with serious hacker connections.
Real underground anarchist stuff. Kids really, creating mayhem
on the circuit with the goal, stated and unstated, of pursuing
knowledge, and liberating information (I assume there's still
a difference) from THE MAN.
Ryan was a clean-cut kid from Texas who
left Texas because he hated being a clean-cut kid from Texas.
Went to an "Eastern University Establishment" on full
scholarship to study genetics and molecular biology and what
not. Cyber Momma picked him up and settled his ass in NYC before
the ink was dry on his diploma.
"How'd you go from molecular biology
to computers?" I once asked him.
"Molecular biology is computing,"
he said and grinned wickedly.
He told me about nano-technology, molecular
computing, protein-based software, and other Frankenstein games
he and his co-geeks had played at college.
"There's more computing power in
a glass of water than in all the processors that exist in the
world today," he said and grinned wickedly. "It just
has to be tapped. Just has to be tapped."
"Gives new meaning to the word 'tap-water,'"
I said, a bit spooked.
"Yes. Tap water. Tap. Water. Tap
the water," he said and grinned wickedly.
Note: when Ryan grinned wickedly, it
didn't mean that he was "up to no good," not always,
at any rate. He was just one of those guys who went around grinning
wickedly. Affectation? Nervous tick? Whatever. It worked. Especially
on a slightly pudgy, very white, neatly dressed young Texan with
a shaved head. Note again: Ryan wasn't a "skinhead,"
he was a hacker prankster, prone to coffee, cigarettes (Nicorette
gum around the machines, which were "allergic to smoke,"
he'd said) malt liquor, Tex-Mex food and--I know this sounds
silly and anachronistic--fun.
Then again, fun for Ryan and his network
of hackers--that quaint, archaic term for people now referred
to as "Cyber Terrorists" in the official documentation;
please remember, this was 1997, and "WTC" connoted
huge downtown buildings that would stand forever--was getting
into places they did not belong. Such people begin with the question,
"Why don't we belong there?" move on to "How do
we get in?" and conclude with a paper, posted on various
websites and news groups, "How You Too Can Get In."
Problem is, hackers often ended up working
as consultants for the very corporations that would do anything
in their considerable power to forbid their entry--unless they
were on the payroll. No, it wasn't a matter of "Hackers
have to eat too you know." If it was money they wanted,
they could have gotten it with ease--and many did--from YOUR
bank account, or mine, or just plucked the random percentage-pennies
that drop like so much loose change in cyberspace from multi-million
dollar digital transactions. A little here, a little there; these
things add up.
No, the hackers were in it for the games
and the toys. A company like Cyber Momma had lots of high-tech
toys, and even better, lots of enemies whose systems begged for
"illegal" entry. That was the raison d'etre of security
companies like Cyber Momma. Help client companies hide behind
Cyber Momma-controlled firewalls while they in turn attack their
rivals, who probably had hired Cyber Momma's competition to protect
them.
The Invasion
of Canada
One of the ways Cyber Momma sold their
product was to scare the living shit out of potential clients
by proving to them that their defense was garbage and their "Firewall"
was actually just smoke and mirrors. Often the potential client
would be challenged to defend itself and a Cyber Momma hackers
like Ryan would burst into their digitally walled city like Virtual
Vikings gone berserker on espresso. The biggest such client,
as I recall, was Bell Canada--or whatever corporation it was
that wired America's Great Northern Lawn (sorry, Canada, I calls
'em as I seez 'em; no offense, eh?).
Cyber Momma's CEO boasted to Bell Canada
that "his boy" could crack their defenses and post
a message inside the deepest, most secure regions of the Bell
Canada Kingdom within 24 hours. This already gave Bell Canada
a huge advantage: they know they were going to be attacked, by
a specific source, and this heads-up allowed them to "man
their stations" in preparation. Of course they agreed.
So one July morning in 1997, armed with
a low-end Sun machine running Solaris and Free BSD versions of
Unix; a not very powerful Sun server; his trusty, beat-up, taped-together,
old Linux laptop (like most of his friends, Ryan harnessed the
power of the big toys to a simple, low-end Linux box); all the
coffee and Cola he could drink, and a full box of nicotine-spiked
gum, Ryan began his quest.
He didn't have much to go on but Bell
Canada's public info and IP numbers etc. But that was enough
to get him to the moat. Once he crossed the moat, be picked away
at the draw-bridge. Once inside, he snuck past the guards, and
so on. It wasn't easy--took a lot of numbers crunching, code-cracking,
decrypting; a process which would have taken a lot less time
had he been using one of Cyber Momma's more powerful machines;
but that wasn't part of the deal. Our CEO wanted it raw, real
outlaw hacker stuff. Around the twenty-first or twenty-second
hour, he got in, did his thing and left. All on digital moccasin
feet. The guards hadn't a clue. He left a message on POP server
linked to the machine of Bell Canada's Honcho with the words,
"You've been hacked, courtesy Cyber Momma. Have a nice day."
The Honcho logged on at the prescribed time, read his email,
gasped in shock, probably, and Cyber Momma won the contract.
"You know, once I was in there,
behind their firewall, I could have shut down Canada. I mean,
I got into the real shit, the control mapping, the whole bag.
I was just passing it on my way to that suit's POP server, and
even stopping to check that out was wasting valuable time, but,
like, you know, if I weren't...I mean...they're fucking lucky
I'm one of the 'good guys.' You know what I mean," said
Ryan and grinned wickedly and this time I think the grin was
meant to convey something very, very important.
Something Wicked
This Grin Comes
I know what you're thinking: "So
what? Some <dot.com> era corporate hack(er) stopped short
of shorting out Canada five years ago. Big Deal."
Well, it could have been a very big deal
indeed. I suppose Ryan stopped due to a "crisis of conscience"--after
all, you blow out the communications system, innocent people
will suffer, not just Bell Canada's Board Members and Major Shareholders.
He could have been thinking of potential consequences. On the
other hand, this game was really being played by Cyber Momma
and Bell Canada. Ryan was merely a master player pinch hitting
for his boss. He could have claimed he'd made a mistake--though
I assume someone like him would rather do jail time than admit
to some phony mistake concocted by corporate lawyers--or fallen
back on the age-old, "I only followed orders," routine.
Maybe what really freaked out Ryan was not a crisis of conscience,
but rather, a crisis of consciousness. The rush of power must
have been tremendous. Here was this twenty-two-year old pawn
in an elaborate corporate chess game who, instead of heading
for the "rival king," could have made a (heh, heh)
LEFT turn straight off the board and shut out the lights.
Marx and Frankenstein
Get Wired
I read a book recommended to me by my
friend, Paul. "Cyber Marx," by Nick Dyer-WitheFord.
(I see this coming, Les Miserable, so
I'll pre-empt it: No, I'm not a "Marxist" or any other
kind of "ist." Too conservative for me, all that pre-planned
"scientific" revolution stuff. I want action. I want
chaos. I wanna play ball. Why, if I could get into a time machine
right now I'd go straight to that old British Museum, grab Karl
by his wooly beard, drag him outside, where its cold and dense
with soot and smoke and somber prols, put a rock in his pudgy
hand, and say, "Fuck the dialectic and yer little dog, too.
It's time to Rock n' Roll, Karl, so cast this first stone through
that dainty fucking library window! And I don't have time for
the goddamn state to wither away either; you better hurl that
sucker NOW!" There. Happy, Les? Thou USA PATRIOT/TIPS hate-mailer
cubicle-jockey snitch!).
Interesting reading, that "Cyber
Marx." Seems old Karl said some things about technology
and the nightmares that would ensue as technology became more
and more monopolized by THE MAN (Stalinist, Maoist, Fascist,
NixonReaganClintonBushist--same thing; THE MAN'S The MAN; always
was and always will be hiding behind that same thin curtain we
pay no attention to at our peril).
Now, one doesn't have to have had his
head buried in the New York Times or mind benumbed by CNN for
the past 20 years to know that WE THE PEOPLE have been fucked
royally by Capitalism's absolute control over control (high tech
means of production, surveillance, warfare, general mayhem, not
to mention that little hole in the ozone). WTC. World Bank. Transnational
Corporate Globalization. Whatever. What is that figure put out
by Kevin Phillips (a Republican, yet!), among others? One percent
of the world's population owns 80 percent of the "wealth"--however
one measures wealth--while more than half the planet starves?
And most of that "wealth" is used to spy on people,
blow them up and despoil the air, water and general environment
(good god, they're literally choking us to death!)? What kinda
New World Order is that? Not even a Brave New World Order. Just
plain Blade-Runner-Interzone hell-on-earth type CAUCHEMAR (French
word; look it up; also might wanna research the Kevin Phillips'
figure; I'm just too confused by all these damn numbers adding
to ABSOLUTE ZERO to be a stickler for absolute accuracy; trust
me, we're absolutely in deep shit). Capitalism may have triumphed,
but the other 99 percent of us went down like Mike Tyson against
that big scary guy from England. McWorld has made a big McMess
of OUR planet.
But what a lot of these neo-Marxists
argue, according to the book, is not only that reports of Marx's
death have been greatly exaggerated (by neo-liberal yahoo lackey's
of THE MAN --does the name Francis Fukayama ring a bell? How
about Nicholas Negroponte? Or that ubiquitous goofball, Tom Friedman?),
but that it's not necessarily technology we should be afraid
of, but technology in the WRONG HANDS. Frankenstein wouldn't
have been so screwed if only he'd treated his creature with some
dignity and respect. But now it's too late for that--no, no,
don't apologize, Bill Gates, Al Gore, Paul O'Neil and yer little
dog, Bono, too! The damage is done. The creature is becoming
a MONSTER, contained only by THE MAN's gadgets.
On the other hand, Frankenstein's creature--in
the book, not the movie in which Karloff plays a grunting thug
in a big suit--learns to read and write and speak. If he'd just
laid low until the 1860s--well, no. I don't think Marx could
have saved him, though he certainly would have helped. If he'd
just hung around long enough to figure out how to wrest control
of the gadgets and whirligigs from THE MAN, well, he might have
become a contender. So what if he was ugly? Dick Cheney sure
ain't no prize, and he's made out of lightening-zapped dead tissue
too!
What the writers cited in "Cyber-Marx"
seem to be arguing, from various angles, is that Marx made some
major points, but he wasn't the damn Bible. If fact, that was
the trouble all along, treating Das Kapital like the damn Bible.
Look what happens to folks who treat the Bible like the Bible!
No, what author of "Cyber Marx" seems to be getting
at is that Marx's analysis of Capitalism in general, and Capitalist
controlled technology in particular, is quite relevant to our
current situation. Quite relevant indeed.
Been having fun working more hours for
less money at your meaningless job enriching TechnoCorp Inc.
lately? Or are you one of those who really enriched your corporate
lords by getting downsized? Or did you hit the jackpot and spread
the wealth to numerous conglomerates by getting into serious
debt, or going to prison? Or perhaps all of the above? Well,
you can always help out even more corporations by taking out
huge loans and going back to school. As THE MAN says, the road
to success is through Institutionalized Education (as opposed
to staying home and reading on your own and maybe talking to
friends; but I'm not sure, I think gathering in groups to discuss
ideas might be illegal now; again, who has time to do all this
research?).
Note Bene:
(whatever that means; I know, I know,
I should look it up on Latin Dicionary.com or something; I'll
leave that to you; and while you're at it, why don't you go shopping,
not to support your President--you don't really have one--but
to help the economy, such as it is, and buy "Cyber
Marx.")
While Ryan was hacking systems, I got
shipped off to defend the integrity of the network at one of
world's largest law firms. Major Cyber Momma client. I sat among
the machines in the basement of a tremendous skyscraper on Lexington
Avenue. Manning the Fire Wall to prevent hackers or rival law
firms from accessing "private data." Checking out the
incoming and outgoing messages. Spying on the Lawyers high above,
making sure they weren't surfing the web for illicit purposes.
That is, visiting porno sites.
Turns out these fine, six-figure income
lawyers were indeed scoping out virtual beaver, big time. Males
mostly, which is why The Firm moved to take action. A female
employee complained when she passed the computer of a male colleague
around which several other male colleagues were congregated with
obvious hard-ons stretching the limits of their Barney's slacks.
The Senior Partners smelled sex (in the form of a discrimination
lawsuit).
So, the ingenious CEO of Cyber Momma
sold the not-so-ingenious Senior Partners of The Firm the latest
in snoop scoop software, which it was my duty to install and
demonstrate to a cabal of Senior Partner Poo Pahs.
"Howdy, Partners," I said to
the Firm's Elders.
None were amused. So I proceeded to demonstrate
the inadequacy of censorship, even censorship of the high tech
sort.
"Type in 'Playboy,'" one of
the Elders said, excitedly.
I typed in "<paleyboy.com>"
instead. The gaping vagina that burst onto the screen--one of
the Partners claimed to have seen teeth; I didn't see any--was
so steamy and wet I thought it might melt the monitor.
"But, but...how can this be?"
stammered the Seniorest Partner.
"It's like this," I tried to
explain, slowly, using simple words, just to be sure they understood.
"The manufacturers of this software guarantee that they've
tracked 200,000 porn sites and add patches with up to 20,000
new sites, which we are licensed to download from their site,
each month. Right?"
"Right!" yessed the men who
were not used to getting KNOW! for an answer.
"Well, there's about 20 million
sites on the Web with millions, not thousands, being added each
week by users all over the world. Right?"
"Well, if you say so, you're the
expert."
Actually, I wasn't. I pulled those numbers
outta my head. But they seemed accurate enough.
"Now, considering that porn is the
most lucrative, in fact the only lucrative business on the Web,
what percentage of these already existing sites, not to mention
new sites, are porn sites?"
"Oh. Oh...OH!"
"Precisely."
Then there was Juliette, the Firm's in-house
trouble shooter, a sixty-something-year old grandmother, born
black in Jamaica--and still black when I knew her--who had the
unenviable job of fielding calls from panicked Partners, Paralegals,
Extra-legals Sub-legals, and various other Legals 40 floors above.
"What's that, you say?" Juliette
would ask politely. "You broke the Internet? That could
be a problem. But maybe you didn't break the entire Internet.
Maybe you just crashed you browser. You know, your browser. The
window where the web sites appear. What do you mean, you're not
on the web? Your screen is blank and it won't go on. Hmn. Did
you try plugging in your machine? Right. Now reboot. That means
turn your system on again. Oh, it's working now? That's good.
Oh, no need to thank me, that's what I'm here for."
She'd slam down the phone, mutter, "assholes"
and wait for the next high tech emergency.
One lovely autumn morning as I approached
the Lexington and 53rd to start the day, I saw a COMMOTION. Hundreds
of the firm's employees hanging around outside the building.
"What's going on?" I asked
some guy in a suit.
"Fire downstairs. In IT. The Firm's
afraid it might have lost billions of dollars in data."
"Heavens," I said
I walked a few blocks to Barkley Rex
Cigars, bought a double-corona Dominican, and puffed away in
the smoking room, watching the Asian Economy collapse on CNN.
By the time I got back, the commotion was over and I went down
to the basement to check the damage.
What happened was, some guys were using
a soldering iron on the air-conditioning unit and it set off
the fire alarm. Now, this wasn't just any fire alarm system--after
all, they had to protect billions of dollars worth of data-this
was a Halon alarm system. That means that once the alarm goes
off, they turn on the Halon release doohickey and anyone at IT
has about sixty-seconds to get the hell outta the basement before
the Halon gas is released to suck all the oxygen out of the air
and stop the fire before it laps nary a lick of data. For some
reason, the system didn't work, and no Halon was released. This
reason was obvious: the Halon release mechanism had not been
turned on.
Juliette caught hell for not taking one
for the team and defending the integrity of the Firm's data.
You see, there were about twenty people down there before I arrived,
and Juliette -- no spring chicken, she--was the last one out.
As everybody at IT knows, the last one out must turn on the release
mechanism.
"Are they crazy? Are they insane?"
I can still hear Juliette fuming. "They expect me to turn
that switch and get my ass out of IT in sixty seconds before
the Halon kills me? So they can save the data on their damn machines?
Then what? They'll send my family a condolence card and a basket
of fruit? Bullshit."
I left IT, Cyber Momma, and the whole
game not long after that. There has to be a better use for computers,
networks, data systems, software, and I'm sure we'll find one.
Once we take back every damn one of them from THE MAN.
That's when I began to read about Richard
Stallman, and the GNU/Linux/Free Software movement, and the concept
of Copy Left distribution of data and software. It was pretty
big for a while, and I think it all still exists. It might indeed
be growing a bit too powerful for The MAN not to take notice.
Ever wonder why corporations like IMB and Hewlett-Packard are
starting to brag that their hardware runs Linux, a free, unlicensed
operating system? But don't take my word for it. Look it up.
(by the way, Les Miserable, you DON'T
know who I am; I ditched that guy a million years ago and I ain't
never goin' back; have a nice day!)
Adam Engel
lives and writes in Cyberspace. He can be reached at asengel@attglobal.net
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