UNDERGROUND

'Yeah. You know,' Phoenix changed the subject to his favourite topic, 'what we really need is Deszip. Gotta get that.' Deszip was a computer program which could be used for password cracking.

'And Zardoz. We need Zardoz,' Electron added. Zardoz was a restricted electronic publication detailing computer security holes.

'Yeah. Gotta try to get into Spaf's machine. Spaf'll have it for sure.' Eugene Spafford, Associate Professor of Computer Science at Purdue University in the US, was one of the best known computer security experts on the Internet in 1990.

'Yeah.'

And so began their hunt for the holy grail.

♦

Deszip and Zardoz glittered side by side as the most coveted prizes in the world of the international Unix hacker.

Cracking passwords took time and computer resources. Even a moderately powerful university machine would grunt and groan under the weight of the calculations it was asked to do. But the Deszip program could change that, lifting the load until it was, by comparison, feather-light. It worked at breath- taking speed and a hacker using Deszip could crack encrypted passwords up to 25 times faster.

Zardoz, a worldwide security mailing list, was also precious, but for a different reason. Although the mailing list's formal name was Security Digest, everyone in the underground simply called it Zardoz, after the computer from which the mailouts originated. Zardoz also happened to be the name of a science fiction cult film starring Sean Connery. Run by Neil Gorsuch, the Zardoz mailing list contained articles, or postings, from various members of the computer security industry. The postings discussed newly discovered bugs – problems with a computer system which could be exploited to break into or gain root access on a machine. The beauty