The Corner Pub

Lurch? Uhuh. An Addams Family fan.

‘Can you make sure everything is working? We don’t want our service interrupted.’ The Perth manager sounded quite anxious.

Mendax tapped away on the keyboard randomly and then paused. ‘Well, it looks like everything is working just fine now,’ he quickly reassured him. Just fine.

‘Oh, that’s a relief!’ the Perth manager exclaimed. ‘Thank you for that. Thank you. I just can’t thank you enough for calling us!’ More gratitude.

Mendax had to extract himself. This was getting embarrassing.

‘Yes, well I’d better go now. More customers to call.’ That should work. The Perth manager wanted a contact telephone number, as expected, if something went wrong – so Mendax gave him the one which was permanently busy.

‘Thank you again for your courteous service!’ Uhuh. Anytime.

Mendax hung up and tried the toll-free Minerva number. The password worked. He couldn’t believe how easy it was to get in.

He had a quick look around, following the pattern of most hackers breaking into a new machine. First thing to do was to check the electronic mail of the ‘borrowed’ account. Email often contains valuable information. One company manager might send another information about other account names, password changes or even phone numbers to modems at the company itself. Then it was off to check the directories avail- able for anyone to read on the main system – another good source of information. Final stop: Minerva’s bulletin board of news. This included postings from the system operators about planned downtime or other service issues. He didn’t stay long. The first visit was usually mostly a bit of reconnais- sance work.

Minerva had many uses. Most important among these was the fact that Minerva gave hackers an entry point into various