Judgement Day

in the real world, let alone on-line. What others – particularly some American hackers – viewed as prickliness, Pad saw as the perfect sense of humour. To Pad, Gandalf was the best m8 a fellow could ever have.

During the time Pad avoided hacking, Gandalf had befriended another, younger hacker named Wandii, also from the north of England. Wandii never played much of a part in the international computer underground, but he did spend a lot of time hacking European computers. Wandii and Pad got along pleasantly but they were never close. They were acquain- tances, bound by ties to Gandalf in the underground.

By the middle of June 1991, Pad, Gandalf and Wandii were peaking. At least one of them – and often more – had already broken into systems belonging to the European Com- munity in Luxembourg, *The Financial Times* (owners of the FTSE 100 share index), the British Ministry of Defence, the Foreign Office, NASA, the investment bank SG Warburg in London, the American computer database software manu- facturer Oracle, and more machines on the JANET network than they could remember. Pad had also penetrated a classi- fied military network containing a NATO system. They moved through British Telecom’s Packet Switched Stream Network (PSS), which was similar to the Tymnet X.25 network, with absolute ease.²

Gandalf’s motto was, ‘If it moves, hack it’.

On 27 June 1991, Pad was sitting in the front room of his parents’ comfortable home in Greater Manchester watching the last rem- nants of daylight disappear on one of the longest days of the year. He loved summer, loved waking up to streaks of sunlight sneaking through the cracks in his bedroom curtain. He often thought to himself, it doesn’t get much better than this.

Around 11 p.m. he flicked on his modem and his Atari 520 ST computer in the front sitting room. There were two Atari