Approaching Zero - Paul Mungo (books to read to increase intelligence .txt) 📗
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HOUSTON WERE ALSO IN FAKE NAMES WITH FAKE SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBERS; WE EVEN
CHANGED OUR APPEARANCES AND HANDWRITING STYLES AT EACH BANK.
I’M GLAD l’M NOT THE ONE WHO WILL HAVE THE JOB OF TRACKING ME DOWN, OR EVEN
TRYING TO MUSTER UP PROOF OF WHAT HAPPENED. NOW WE WON’T HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT
DISPOSABLE INCOME FOR A WHILE. I CAN FINISH COLLEGE WITHOUT WORKING AND STILL
LIVE IN RELATIVE LUXURY. IT’S KIND OF WEIRD HAVING OVER SIX HUNDRED $100 BILLS
IN THE DRAWER, THOUGH. TOO BAD WE CAN’T EARN ANY INTEREST ON IT!
Needless to say, the anonymous authors of this report have never been traced.
It wasnt until later that anyone in the LoD realized that Black ICF had been
compromised. The board had been regularly monitored by the authorities,
particularly the U.S. Secret Service, as part of a continuing investigation of
the LoD, an investigation that was just about to blow open.
The authorities tended to take reports of hacker exploits seriously. The
various federal agencies, police forces, and prosecutors who had dealt with the
computer underworld knew that computer security had been undermined by hacking.
Everything was at risk: hackers had entered the military computer networks;
they had hacked NASA and the Pentagon; they had compromised credit agencies and
defrauded credit card companies; they had broken into bank systems; and they
had made the telecom system a playground. But it wasn’t just fraud that
concerned the authorities. It was now also apparent that some hackers were
selling their services to the KGB.
Karl Koch was last seen alive on May 23, 1989. That morning he had turned up to
work as usual at the Hannover office of Germany’s ruling Christian Democratic
party. Just before twelve o’clock he drove off alone to deliver a package
across town, but he never arrived. In the late afternoon his employers notified
the police of his disappearance.
Nine days later the police went to a woods on the outskirts of the small
village of Ohof, just outside Hannover, on a routine enquiry. They were
investigating a report of an abandoned car, its roof, hood, and windscreen
thick with dust. In the undergrowth near the car, the police stumbled on a
charred corpse lying next to an empty gasoline can. The vegetation around the
body was scorched and burned. The police noticed that the corpse was barefoot—
but no shoes were found in the car or in the surrounding area.
The investigators were perplexed. There had been no rain for five weeks, and
the undergrowth was as dry as matchwood. But the scorched patch around the body
was contained, as if the fire that consumed the victim had been carefully
controlled.
The body was later identified as that of the twenty-four-yearold Karl Koch. The
police assumed he had committed suicide. But still there were questions:
principally, if Koch had killed himself, how had he been able to control the
fire? Why had it not spread outside the confined perimeter?
Then there were the shoes: Koch had obviously been wearing shoes when he left
his office. If he had taken them off, what had he done with them? It seemed as
if someone had taken them.
But there were no clues to a killer, and the death was deemed to be suicide.
Four years previously Karl Koch had been the first hacker in Germany recruited
by agents working for the KGB. At the time he was living in Hannover, a dropout
from society and school who had recently squandered the small inheritance he
had received following the death of his parents. A small-time drug habit helped
him through his bereavement, and beyond, but his life was going nowhere.
Apart from drugs, Koch’s only interest was hacking. His handle was Hagbard, an
alias taken from the Illuminati trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson.
According to the books, the Illuminati is a secret cult that has been in
existence since the beginning of time and has orchestrated every major crime,
misfortune and calamity. Only one man had ever emerged who could fight the
cult: the hero, Hagbard Celine. Koch was drawn by the conspiracy theories
nurtured in the books; he believed there were parallels in real life.
That year Koch met an older man named Peter Kahl. Kahl was then in his
mid-thirties, a small-time fixer who was looking for a big break. He worked
nights as a croupier in a Hannover casino and during the day was occupied with
putting together his latest scheme.
Kahl’s idea was simple: he planned to recruit a gang of hackers who could break
into West European and American computer systems, particularly those on
military or defense-industry sites. Then he would sell the data and information
they had gathered to the KGB.
Kahl first encountered Koch at a hacker’s meeting in Hannover. The young man
seemed an ideal recruit: malleable, drifting, amoral. Later, when Kahl
explained his scheme to Koch, the
hacker appeared receptive. Two weeks later Koch agreed to become a member of
the Soviet hacker gang.
In 1985 the computer underworld was a growing force in Germany. Hacking had
become prevalent at the beginning of the decade, as low-cost personal computers
became increasingly available. It had grown in popularity with the release of
War Games—the 1983 film in which Matthew Broderick nearly unleashes the next
world war by hacking into NORAD which proved peculiarly influential in Germany.
By the mid-1980s the Germans were second only to the Americans in the number of
hackers and their audacity. The national computer networks had all been
compromised; German hackers would later turn up on systems all over the world.
The growth of the computer underworld was nurtured by sustained media coverage
and the quasi-institutionalization of hacking. Nearly everything in Germany is
organized, even anarchy. So, in a parody of Teutonic orderliness, hackers
assembled into clubs: there was the BHP (the Bayrische Hackerpost) in Munich,
Foebud-Bi in Bielefeld, Suecrates-S in Stuttgart, and HICop-CE (the
Headquarters of the Independent Computer-Freaks) in Celle. Of course the most
famous and best-organized of all was the Chaos Computer Club in Hamburg. Since
its inception in 1981, it had spawned affiliates in other towns and cities,
even a branch in France, and in 1984 hosted the first of its annual conferences, an event that served to keep the Chaos name in the press. In between the
annual congresses, Chaos also held smaller hacker meets at the various computer
conventions held around Germany. Whatever the event, the venue for the hacker
meet was always next to the stand occupied by the Bundespost, the German Post
Office, and the time was always four P.M. on the first Tuesday of the
exhibition.
Chaos was never a huge organization—even now it only has about 150 registered
members—but it is very accomplished at self-promotion and zealous in
disseminating information on hacking. It publishes a bimonthly magazine, Die
Datenschleuder (literally, “the Distribution of Data by Centrifuge”) with
sixteen to twenty pages an issue. It also promotes Die Hackerbibel (“The Hacker
Bible”), a two-part set of reference books detailing hacker techniques.
Chaos first came to the notice of the general public in 1984, Then it hacked
into the German computer information system, ,tx (Bildschirmtext).’ Like all
telephone and data services in Jermany, the system is run by the Bundespost, an
unloved, lureaucratic institution that is obsessive in its attempts to control
all national telecommunications links. The company added to its popularity with
hackers when it began licensing telephone anwering machines and regulating the
use of modems.
At first, Chaos was just another “information provider” on Btx. Subscribers to
the service could dial up and read pages of information supplied by Chaos on
their home computers. Users vere charged at a premium rate for the calls, with
proceeds shared between the Bundespost and Chaos. This seemed a good recipe or
making money—until one of the computer wizards at Chaos discovered that
security on the system was hopelessly weak. He
realized that if a hacker broke into Btx, he could get hold of the Chaos ID and
password (used by the club to access and update the information on its pages),
then dial up other services and ~ddle Chaos with the cost. With a minimum of 10
marks per call, bout $6.80, the amount involved could soon become astronomic.
Chaos’s founder, Wau Holland, and a younger member of the club, Steffen
Wernery, then aged twenty-two, decided to go public with the discovery. The two
contacted Hans Gliss, the managing editor of the computer security journal
Datenschutz-Berater (“Data Security Adviser”). Gliss invited Holland and
Steffen to attend an upcoming conference on data security and present their
information. But at the meeting Bundespost representatives disputed the club’s
claims, unwisely stating that its Btx security was impenetrable. It was the cue
for Chaos to demonstrate otherwise.
The Chaos team hacked into the Btx system and into the account of their local
savings bank, the Hamburger Sparkasse. They then introduced a computer program
they had written, causing the bank to call up the Chaos Btx pages repeatedly
over a ten-hour period. The program was simple: it merely called the Chaos Btx
number, waited for an answer and then hung up. Over and over again. After ten
hours, the bill for the bank came to almost $92,000. But although the bill was
never presented, the ensuing publicity carefully orchestrated by Chaos through
the German press agency—forced the Bundespost to improve its computer
security, and Holland and Steffen became national heroes.
The publicity increased Chaos’s notoriety; its first annual congress was
organized as a result of the coverage engendered by the Btx hack. Chaos became
a byword for high-tech mischief, and its congresses became an important
breeding ground for the German computer underworld. These congresses were
always held during the week after Christmas at the Eidelstedter Burgerhaus on
Hamburg’s Elbgaustrasse. The events lasted for three days, and press and
visitors were welcome, provided they paid the entrance fee.
In 1985 one of the paying visitors was Karl Koch. Steffen remembers seeing him
there and being introduced briefly. He is also certain that they also met on
one other occasion, at a hacker conference at an exhibition in Munich. Koch was
an unmistakable figure: tall, emaciated, and invariably spaced out.
For the next three years their lives would crisscross in a complex dance. If
Koch had seen the pattern, he would have understood. It was the Illuminati,
faceless, unknown, all-powerful, conspiring to take control of Steffen’s life.
Koch’s purpose in visiting the 1985 Chaos congress was to seek out certain
information on computer systems and networks. Despite his years of practice, he
himself was a second-rate hacker. He had come to realize that he was not a born
computer wizard; he needed assistance. He was coming under increasing pressure
from Kahl to find and copy classified material from computers in the West, and
his money was running out just as his dependency on drugs was increasing: from
the relatively harmless hashish favored by many hackers, he had graduated to
LSD and cocaine.
At first the Soviets had seemed incredibly naive: Koch was able to pass Kahl
public-domain software, programs he had simply downloaded for free from
electronic bulletin boards. The KGB had accepted the software, and Koch had
received payment. It seemed very simple, and he assumed he wasn’t doing
anything illegal: after all, public-domain software is freely available to
anyone who wants it.
But then the Soviets became more demanding. The KGB had produced lists of
programs it wanted to obtain and sites it wanted cracked. They also wanted
dial-ups, user IDs, passwords, and instructions on how to gain system-operator
privileges in computer systems. In short, the KGB wanted to
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