UNDERGROUND

Corp in New Jersey. US Naval Undersea Warfare Engineering Station. Siemens-Nixdorf Information Systems in Massachusetts. Securities Industry Automation Corp in New York. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. Bell Communica- tions Research, New Jersey. Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, California.

As the IS hackers reached a level of sophistication beyond anything The Realm had achieved, they realised that progress carried considerable risk and began to withdraw completely from the broader Australian hacking community. Soon they had drawn a tight circle around themselves. They talked only to each other.

Watching the Realm hackers go down hadn't deterred the next generation of hackers. It had only driven them further underground.

In the spring of 1991, Prime Suspect and Mendax began a race to get root on the US Department of Defense's Network Information Center (NIC) computer – potentially the most important computer on the Internet.

As both hackers chatted amiably on-line one night, on a Melbourne University computer, Prime Suspect worked quietly in another screen to penetrate ns.nic.ddn.mil, a US Department of Defense system closely linked to NIC. He believed the sister system and NIC might 'trust' each other – a trust he could exploit to get into NIC. And NIC did everything.

NIC assigned domain names – the '.com' or '.net' at the end of an email address – for the entire Internet. NIC also controlled the US military's own internal defence data network, known as MILNET.

NIC also published the communication protocol standards for all of the Internet. Called RFCs (Request for Comments), these technical specifications allowed one computer on the Internet to talk to another. The Defense Data Network Security Bulletins, the US Department of Defense's equivalent of CERT advisories, came from the NIC machine.

Perhaps most importantly, NIC controlled the reverse