Anthrax - The Outsider
his newly created account. It felt good walking in through the front door.
Once inside, Anthrax had a quick look around. The system startled him. There were only three human users. Now that was definitely odd. Most systems had hundreds of users. Even a small system might serve 30 or 40 people, and this was not a small system. He concluded that System X wasn’t just some machine designed to send and receive email. It was opera- tional. It did something.
Anthrax considered how to clean up his footsteps and secure his position. While he was hardly broadcasting his presence, someone might discover his arrival simply by looking at who was logged in on the list of accounts in the password file. He had given his backdoor root account a bland name, but he could reasonably assume that these three users knew their system pretty well. And with only three users, it was probably the kind of system that had lots of babysitting. After all that effort, Anthrax needed a watchful nanny like a hole in the head. He worked at moving into the shadows.
He removed himself from the WTMP and UTMP files, which listed who had been on-line and who was still logged in. Anthrax wasn’t invisible, but an admin would have to look closely at the system’s network connections and list of processes to find him. Next stop: the login program.
Anthrax couldn’t use his newly created front-door account for an extended period - the risk of discovery was too great. If he accessed the computer repeatedly in this manner, a prying admin might eventually find him and delete his account. An extra account on a system with only three users was a dead give-away. And losing access to System X just as things were getting interesting was not on his agenda.
Anthrax leaned back in his chair and stretched his shoulders. His hacking room was an old cloakroom, though it was barely recognisable as such. It looked more like a closet - a very messy closet. The whole room was ankle-deep in scrap papers, most of them with lists of numbers on the back and front. Occasionally,