Still, the system is dirt-cheap. If knowledgeable, you could probably replicate it for less than $500 for the printer and modem. And you could send to it with just a $400 lap-sized portable.
Beyond that, the Enquirer’s arrangement may be safer than leaving an unprotected computer on the phone to collect unencrypted files.
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Then there’s the Dalton school case in New York City in which the four culprits, age thirteen, violated silicon sanctity hundreds of miles away. The feds caught up with them before they could steal Pepsi Cola, by coaxing an order out of a warehouse. But another computer didn’t fare so well. The thirteen-year-olds destroyed more than one-fifth of the 50 million bits in the machine’s memory, inspiring a magazine writer to call them “electronic Huns.”
More recently, the 414 Gang out of Milwaukee—named after their telephone area code—broke into computers across the country. These half-dozen or so high school students, tapping on home micros, broke into more than sixty computers and among other things they:
▪ Hooked up with a VAX 11/780 at Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. Eighty hospitals across the U.S. were using the computer to help treat hundreds of radiotherapy patients.[[55]]
▪ Broke into an unclassified computer at the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory.
▪ Penetrated a Security Pacific Bank computer in Los Angeles. That may not have been so much a challenge. The account name and password both were “SYSTEM”—a word that many computer manufacturers routinely put in new machines and that their customers often forget to take out. “TEST,” “DEMO,” and “MAINTENANCE” are other old standbys.
If teenagers can wreak Attilan havoc and snoop on a bank computer, then think of adults.
So use passwords and codes, knowing their vulnerabilities. Try, anyway, to give computer crackers a good challenge by avoiding use of obvious passwords like street names or those of wives or children. Consider a two-level password; also, maybe one with two words of pure gibberish; that’s what CompuServe does. And, obviously, purge the computer of standard passwords in the “SYSTEM” vein.