UNDERGROUND
outfit like The Realm?' Still, it must have hurt. Hackers in the period 1988–90 depended on each other for information. They honed their skills in a community which shared intelligence and they grew to rely on the pool of information.
Months later, Force grudgingly allowed Electron to rejoin The Realm, but the relationship remained testy. When Electron finally logged in again, he found a file in the BBS entitled ‘Scanner stolen from the Electron’. Force had found a copy of Electron's VMS scanner on an overseas computer while Electron was in exile and had felt no qualms about pinching it for The Realm.
Except that it wasn’t a scanner. It was a VMS Trojan. And there was a big difference. It didn’t scan for the addresses of computers on a network. It snagged passwords when people connected from their VMS computers to another machine over an X.25 network. Powerspike cracked up laughing when Electron told him. ‘Well,’ he told Powerspike, ‘Mr Bigshot Force might know something about Prime computers, but he doesn’t know a hell of a lot about VMS.’
Despite Electron’s general fall from grace, Phoenix talked to the outcast because they shared the obsession. Electron was on a steep learning curve and, like Phoenix, he was moving fast – much faster than any of the other Melbourne hackers.
When Phoenix admitted talking to Electron regularly, Force tried to pull him away, but without luck. Some of the disapproval was born of Force’s paternalistic attitude toward the Australian hacking scene. He considered himself to be a sort of godfather in the hacking community. But Force was also increasingly concerned at Phoenix’s ever more flagrant taunting of computer security bigwigs and system admins. In one incident, Phoenix knew a couple of system admins and security people were waiting on a system to trap him by tracing his network connections. He responded by sneaking into the computer unnoticed and quietly logging off each admin. Force laughed about it at the time, but privately the story made him more than a little nervous.