UNDERGROUND

Pad thought Wandii's case was on shaky ground. Addiction didn't seem a plausible defence to him, and he noticed Wandii looked very nervous in court just after his plea.

Pad and Gandalf left London after their court appearance, returning to the north to prepare for their sentencing hearings, and to watch the progress of Wandii's case through the eyes of the media.

They weren't disappointed. It was a star-studded show. The media revved itself up for a feeding frenzy and the prosecution team, headed by James Richardson, knew how to feed the pack. He zeroed in on Wandii, telling the court how the schoolboy 'was tapping into offices at the EC in Luxembourg and even the experts were worried. He caused havoc at universities all around the world'.³ To do this, Wandii had used a simple BBC Micro computer, a Christmas present costing £200.

The hacking didn't stop at European Community's computer, Richardson told the eager crowd of journalists. Wandii had hacked Lloyd's, *The Financial Times* and Leeds University. At *The Financial Times* machine, Wandii's adventures had upset the smooth operations of the FTSE 100 share index, known in the City as 'footsie'. The hacker installed a scanning program in the FT's network, resulting in one outgoing call made every second. The upshot of Wandii's intrusion: a £704 bill, the deletion of an important file and a management decision to shut down a key system. With the precision of a banker, FT computer boss Tony Johnson told the court that the whole incident had cost his organisation £24871.

But the FT hack paled next to the prosecution's real trump card: The European Organisation for the Research and Treat- ment of Cancer in Brussels. They had been left with a £10000 phone bill as a result of a scanner Wandii left on its machine,⁴ the court was told. The scanner had left a trail of 50 000 calls, all documented on a 980-page phone bill.

The scanner resulted in the system going down for a day, EORTC information systems project manager Vincent Pied- boeuf, told the jury. He went on to explain that the centre