Using Sycophant, they essentially forced a cluster of Unix machines in a computer network to attack the entire Internet en masse.
And that was just the start of what they were into. They had been in so many sites they often couldn't remember if they had actually hacked a particular computer. The places they could recall read like a Who's Who of the American military-industrial complex. The US Airforce 7th Command Group Headquarters in the Pentagon. Stanford Research Institute in California. Naval Surface Warfare Center in Virginia. Lockheed Martin's Tactical Aircraft Systems Air Force Plant in Texas. Unisys Corporation in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania. Goddard Space Flight Center, NASA. Motorola Inc. in Illinois. TRW Inc. in Redondo Beach, California. Alcoa in Pittsburgh. Panasonic Corp in New Jersey. US Naval Undersea Warfare Engineering Station. Siemens-Nixdorf Information Systems in Massachusetts. Securities Industry Automation Corp in New York. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. Bell Communications Research, New Jersey. Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, California.
As the IS hackers reached a level of sophistication beyond anything The Realm had achieved, they realised that progress carried considerable risk and began to withdraw completely from the broader Australian hacking community. Soon they had drawn a tight circle around themselves. They talked only to each other.
Watching the Realm hackers go down hadn't deterred the next generation of hackers. It had only driven them further underground.
In the spring of 1991, Prime Suspect and Mendax began a race to get
root on the US Department of Defense's Network Information Center
(NIC) computer—potentially the most important computer on the
Internet.
As both hackers chatted amiably on-line one night, on a Melbourne University computer, Prime Suspect worked quietly in another screen to penetrate ns.nic.ddn.mil, a US Department of Defense system closely linked to NIC. He believed the sister system and NIC might `trust' each other—a trust he could exploit to get into NIC. And NIC did everything.
NIC assigned domain names—the `.com' or `.net' at the end of an email address—for the entire Internet. NIC also controlled the US military's own internal defence data network, known as MILNET.
NIC also published the communication protocol standards for all of the Internet. Called RFCs (Request for Comments), these technical specifications allowed one computer on the Internet to talk to another. The Defense Data Network Security Bulletins, the US Department of Defense's equivalent of CERT advisories, came from the NIC machine.
Perhaps most importantly, NIC controlled the reverse look-up service on the Internet. Whenever someone connects to another site across the Internet, he or she typically types in the site name—say, ariel.unimelb.edu.au at the University of Melbourne. The computer then translates the alphabetical name into a numerical address—the IP address—in this case 128.250.20.3. All the computers on the Internet need this IP address to relay the packets of data onto the final destination computer. NIC decided how Internet computers would translate the alphabetical name into an IP address, and vice versa.
If you controlled NIC, you had phenomenal power on the Internet. You could, for example, simply make Australia disappear. Or you could turn it into Brazil. By pointing all Internet addresses ending in `.au'—the designation for sites in Australia—to Brazil, you could cut Australia's part of the Internet off from the rest of the world and send all Australian Internet traffic to Brazil. In fact, by changing the delegation of all the domain names, you could virtually stop the flow of information between all the countries on the Internet.