The Great Rite of Passage from boy to man in the computer underground was Minerva. OTC, Australia's then government-owned Overseas Telecommunications Commission,3 ran Minerva, a system of three Prime mainframes in Sydney. For hackers such as Mendax, breaking into Minerva was the test.
Back in early 1988, Mendax was just beginning to explore the world of hacking. He had managed to break through the barrier from public to private section of PI, but it wasn't enough. To be recognised as up-and-coming talent by the aristocracy of hackers such as The Force and The Wizard, a hacker had to spend time inside the Minerva system. Mendax set to work on breaking into it.
Minerva was special for a number of reasons. Although it was in Sydney, the phone number to its entry computer, called an X.25 pad, was a free call. At the time Mendax lived in Emerald, a country town on the outskirts of Melbourne. A call to most Melbourne numbers incurred a long-distance charge, thus ruling out options such as the Melbourne University dial-out for breaking into international computer systems.
Emerald was hardly Emerald City. For a clever sixteen-year-old boy, the place was dead boring. Mendax lived there with his mother; Emerald was merely a stopping point, one of dozens, as his mother shuttled her child around the continent trying to escape from a psychopathic former de facto. The house was an emergency refuge for families on the run. It was safe and so, for a time, Mendax and his exhausted family stopped to rest before tearing off again in search of a new place to hide.
Sometimes Mendax went to school. Often he didn't. The school system didn't hold much interest for him. It didn't feed his mind the way Minerva would. They Sydney computer system was a far more interesting place to muck around in than the rural high school.
Minerva was a Prime computer, and Primes were in. Force, one of the more respected hackers in 1987-88 in the Australian computer underground, specialised in Primos, the special operating system used on Prime computers. He wrote his own programs—potent hacking tools which provided current usernames and passwords—and made the systems fashionable in the computer underground.
Prime computers were big and expensive and no hacker could afford one, so being able to access the speed and computational grunt of a system like Minerva was valuable for running a hacker's own programs. For example, a network scanner, a program which gathered the addresses of computers on the X.25 network which would be targets for future hacking adventures, ate up computing resources. But a huge machine like Minerva could handle that sort of program with ease. Minerva also allowed users to connect to other computer systems on the X.25 network around the world. Better still, Minerva had a BASIC interpreter on it. This allowed people to write programs in the BASIC programming language—by far the most popular language at the time—and make them run on Minerva. You didn't have to be a Primos fanatic, like Force, to write and execute a program on the OTC computer. Minerva suited Mendax very well.
The OTC system had other benefits. Most major Australian corporations had accounts on the system. Breaking into an account requires a username and password; find the username and you have solved half the equation. Minerva account names were easy picking. Each one was composed of three letters followed by three numbers, a system which could have been difficult to crack except for the choice of those letters and numbers. The first three letters were almost always obvious acronyms for the company. For example, the ANZ Bank had accounts named ANZ001, ANZ002 and ANZ002. The numbers followed the same pattern for most companies. BHP001. CRA001. NAB001. Even OTC007. Anyone with the IQ of a desk lamp could guess at least a few account names on Minerva. Passwords were a bit tougher to come by, but Mendax had some ideas for that. He was going to have a crack at social engineering. Social engineering means smooth-talking someone in a position of power into doing something for you. It always involved a ruse of some sort.
Mendax decided he would social engineer a password out of one of Minerva's users. He had downloaded a partial list of Minerva users another PI hacker had generously posted for those talented enough to make use of it. This list was maybe two years old, and incomplete, but it contained 30-odd pages of Minerva account usernames, company names, addresses, contact names and telephone and fax numbers. Some of them would probably still be valid.
Mendax had a deep voice for his age; it would have been impossible to even contemplate social engineering without it. Cracking adolescent male voices were the kiss of death for would-be social engineers. But even though he had the voice, he didn't have the office or the Sydney phone number if the intended victim wanted a number to call back on. He found a way to solve the Sydney phone number by poking around until he dug up a number with Sydney's 02 area code which was permanently engaged. One down, one to go.