UNDERGROUND

'Hello, I'm Gene and I'm mean!'

Alone in their separate homes on different corners of the globe, the four hackers chuckled to themselves.

'Hello, and is this the man called Patrick?' Pad jumped in.

'Well, Mr Spafford, it seems you're a right fucking idiot for not patching your FTP!' Gandalf proclaimed.

'Not to mention the CHFN bug – saved by a Sequent! Or you'd be very fucking embarrassed,' Phoenix added.

Phoenix was laughing too, but he was a little nervous about Pad's warning and he turned the conversation back to a serious note.

'So, Pad, what else did Shatter tell you?' Phoenix asked anxiously.

'Not much. Except that some of the security investigations might be partly because of UCB.'

UCB was the University of California at Berkeley. Phoenix had been visiting machines at both Berkeley and LLNL so much recently that the admins seemed to have not only noticed him, but they had pinpointed his handle. One day he had telnetted into dewey.soe.berkeley.edu – the Dewey machine as it was known – and had been startled to find the following message of the day staring him in the face:

Phoenix,

Get out of Dewey NOW!

Also, do not use any of the 'soe' machines.

Thank you,

Daniel Berger

Phoenix did a double take when he saw this public warning. Having been in and out of the system so many times, he just zoomed past the words on the login screen. Then, in a delayed reaction, he realised the login message was addressed to him.

Ignoring the warning, he proceeded to get root on the Berkeley machine and look through Berger's files. Then he sat back, thinking about the best way to deal with the problem.