UNDERGROUND

The Great Rite of Passage from boy to man in the computer underground was Minerva. OTC, Australia's then government- owned Overseas Telecommunications Commission,$^2$ ran Minerva, a system of three Prime mainframes in Sydney. For hackers such as Mendax, breaking into Minerva was the test.

Back in early 1988, Mendax was just beginning to explore the world of hacking. He had managed to break through the barrier from public to private section of PI, but it wasn't enough. To be recognised as up-and-coming talent by the aristocracy of hackers such as The Force and The Wizard, a hacker had to spend time inside the Minerva system. Mendax set to work on breaking into it.

Minerva was special for a number of reasons. Although it was in Sydney, the phone number to its entry computer, called an X.25 pad, was a free call. At the time Mendax lived in Emerald, a country town on the outskirts of Melbourne. A call to most Melbourne numbers incurred a long-distance charge, thus ruling out options such as the Melbourne Uni- versity dial-out for breaking into international computer systems.

Emerald was hardly Emerald City. For a clever sixteen-year- old boy, the place was dead boring. Mendax lived there with his mother; Emerald was merely a stopping point, one of dozens, as his mother shuttled her child around the continent trying to escape from a psychopathic former de facto. The house was an emergency refuge for families on the run. It was safe and so, for a time, Mendax and his exhausted family stopped to rest before tearing off again in search of a new place to hide.

Sometimes Mendax went to school. Often he didn't. The school system didn't hold much interest for him. It didn't feed his mind the way Minerva would. The Sydney computer system was a far more interesting place to muck around in than the rural high school.

Minerva was a Prime computer, and Primes were in. Force, one of the more respected hackers in 1987-88 in the Austra- lian computer underground, specialised in Primos, the special