The Blue Nowhere

on a quest without his magic wands and book of spells and potions; computer wizards have to do the same.
    One of the first skills hackers learn is the art of hiding software. Since you have to assume that an enemy hacker, if not the police or FBI, will at some point seize or destroy your machine, you never leave the only copy of your tools on your hard drive and backup disks in your home.
    You hide them in a distant computer, one that has no link to you.
    Most hackers store their stash in university computers because their security is notoriously lacking. But Gillette had spent years working on his software tools, writing code from scratch in many cases, as well as modifying existing programs to suit his needs. It’d be a tragedy for him to lose all that work—and pure hell for many of the world’s computer users since Gillette’s programs would help even a mediocre hacker crack into nearly any corporate or government site.
    So he cached his tools in a slightly more secure location than the data-processing department of Dartmouth or the University of Tulsa. With a glance behind him now to make sure that no one was “shoulder surfing”—standing behind him and reading the screen—he typed a command and linked the CCU’s computer with another one several states away. After a moment these words scrolled onto the screen:
    Welcome to the United States Air Force Los Alamos Nuclear Weapons Research Facility
    #Username?
    In response to this request he typed Jarmstrong. Gillette’s father’s name was John Armstrong Gillette. It was generally a bad idea for a hacker to pick a screen name or username that had any connectionwith his real life but he’d allowed himself this one concession to his human side.
    The computer then asked:
    #Password?
    He typed 4%xTtfllk5$$60%4Q, which was, unlike the username, pure, stone-cold hacker. This series of characters had been excruciating to memorize (part of his mental daily calisthenics in prison was recalling two dozen passwords as long as this one) but it would be impossible for someone to guess and, because it was seventeen characters long, would take a supercomputer weeks to crack. An IBM-clone personal computer would have to work continuously for hundreds of years before it spit out a password this complicated.
    The cursor blinked for a moment then the screen shifted and he read:
    Welcome, Capt. J. Armstrong
    In three minutes he’d downloaded a number of files from the fictional Captain Armstrong’s account. His weaponry included the famous SATAN program (the Security Administer Tool for Analyzing Networks, used by both sysadmins and hackers to check the “hackability” of computer networks), several breaking and entering programs that would let him grab root access on various types of machines and networks, a custom-made Web browser and newsreader, a cloaking program to hide his presence while he was in someone else’s computer and which would delete traces of his activities when he logged off, sniffer programs that would “sniff out”—find—usernames, passwords and other helpful information on the Net or in someone’s computer, a communications program to send that data back to him, encryption programs and lists of hacker Web sites and anonymizer sites (commercial services that would in effect launder e-mails and messages so that the recipient couldn’t trace Gillette).
    The last of the tools he downloaded was a program he’d hacked together a few years ago, HyperTrace, which could track down other users on the Net.
    With these tools downloaded onto a high-capacity disk Gillette logged out of the Los Alamos site. He paused for a moment, flexed his fingers and then sat forward. Pounding on the keys with the subtlety of a sumo wrestler once more, Gillette entered the Net. He began in the multiuser domains because of the killer’s apparent motivation—playing a Real World version of the infamous Access game. No one Gillette queried on the subject, however, had played Access or knew anyone who had—or so they claimed. Still, Gillette came away with a few leads.
    From the MUDs he moved to the World Wide Web, which everyone talks about but few could define. The WWW is simply an international network of computers, accessed through special computer protocols that let users see graphics and hear sounds and leap through a Web site, and to other sites, by simply clicking on certain places on their screen—hyperlinks. Prior to the Web most of the information on the