The Corner Pub

else at OTC, he was their technical equal and, in a world where technical prowess was the currency, Rosenberg was a wealthy young man.

He wanted to catch the hackers, but he didn’t want to see them go to prison. They were an annoyance, and he just wanted them out of his system. Any line trace, however, had to go through Telecom, which was at that time a separate body from OTC. Telecom, Rosenberg was told, was difficult about these things because of strict privacy laws. So, for the most part, he was left to deal with the hackers on his own. Rosenberg could not secure his system completely since OTC didn’t dictate passwords to their customers. Their customers were usually more concerned about employees being able to remember passwords easily than worrying about warding off wily hackers. The result: the passwords on a number of Minerva accounts were easy pickings.

The hackers and OTC waged a war from 1988 to 1990, and it was fought in many ways.

Sometimes an OTC operator would break into a hacker’s on-line session demanding to know who was really using the account. Sometimes the operators sent insulting messages to the hackers – and the hackers gave it right back to them. They broke into the hacker’s session with ‘Oh, you idiots are at it again’. The operators couldn’t keep the hackers out, but they had other ways of getting even.

Electron, a Melbourne hacker and rising star in the Australian underground, had been logging into a system in Germany via OTC’s X.25 link. Using a VMS machine, a sort of sister system to Minerva, he had been playing a game called Empire on the Altos system, a popular hang-out for hackers. It was his first attempt at Empire, a complex war game of strategy which attracted players from around the world. They each had less than one hour per day to conquer regions while keeping production units at a strategic level. The Melbourne hacker had spent weeks building his position. He was in second place.