UNDERGROUND

tools could destroy an entire batch of widgets – and the multi- million dollar robotics machinery which manufactures them.

But the IS hackers had no intention of committing informa- tion espionage. In fact, despite their poor financial status as students or, in the case of Trax, as a young man starting his career at the bottom of the totem pole, none of them would have sold information they gained from hacking. In their view, such behaviour was dirty and deserving of contempt – it soiled the adventure and was against their ethics. They considered themselves explorers, not paid corporate spies.

Although the NorTel network was firewalled, there was one link to the Internet. The link was through a system called BNRGATE, Bell-Northern Research's gateway to the Internet. Bell-Northern is NorTel's R&D subsidiary. The connection to the outside electronic world was very restricted, but it looked interesting. The only problem was how to get there.

Mendax began hunting around for a doorway. His password cracking program had not turned up anything for this system, but there were other, more subtle ways of getting a password than the brute force of a cracking program.

System administrators sometimes sent passwords through email. Normally this would be a major security risk, but the NorTel system was firewalled from the Internet, so the admins thought they had no real reason to be concerned about hackers. Besides, in such a large corporation spanning several conti- nents, an admin couldn’t always just pop downstairs to give a new company manager his password in person. And an impa- tient manager was unlikely to be willing to wait a week for the new password to arrive courtesy of snail mail.

In the NorTel network, a mail spool, where email was stored, was often shared between as many as twenty computer systems. This structure offered considerable advantages for Mendax. All he needed to do was break into the mail spool and run a keyword search through its contents. Tell the computer to search for word combinations such as 'BNRGATE' and 'password', or to look for the name of the system admin for BNRGATE, and