The Fugitive

strangers coming and going. He wondered if the hotel guests waiting in their cars were spying on him, and he soon began jumping at shadows. Perhaps, he thought, the Secret Service had found him after all.

Par thought about how he could investigate the matter in more depth.

One of The Atlanta Three hackers, The Prophet, called Nibbler occasionally to exchange hacking information, par- ticularly security bugs in Unix systems. During one of their talks, Prophet told Par about a new security flaw he’d been experimenting with on a network that belonged to the phone company.

The Atlanta Three, a Georgia-based wing of The Legion of Doom, spent a good deal of time weaving their way through BellSouth, the phone company covering the south-eastern US. They knew about phone switching stations the way Par knew about Tymnet. The Secret Service had raided the hackers in July 1989 but had not arrested them yet, so in September The Prophet continued to maintain an interest in his favourite target.

Par thought the flaw in BellSouth’s network sounded very cool and began playing around in the company’s systems. Dial up the company’s computer network, poke around, look at things. The usual stuff.

It occurred to Par that he could check out the phone com- pany’s records of the motel to see if there was anything unusual going on. He typed in the motel’s main phone number and the system fed back the motel’s address, name and some detailed technical information, such as the exact cable and pair attached to the phone number. Then he looked up the phone line of the computer chalet. Things looked odd on that line.

The line which he and Nibbler used for most of their hacking showed a special status: ‘maintenance unit on line’.

What maintenance unit? Nibbler hadn’t mentioned any problems with any of the motel’s lines, but Par checked with him. No problems with the telephones.