The system manager, or "sysman," is the person in control of a computer installation. Like the manager of a large building who has keys to all the offices and knows the combinations to all of the secure areas, he has the keys- -IDs and passwords--to all areas of his system: he controls and changes on-line data, updates indexes, assigns mailboxes, and oversees security. With his system-manager status, Triludan the Warrior had become king of Prestel. He could do anything: he could run up bills for any of the 50,000 subscribers, tamper with information, delete files, and read anything in the mailboxes.
When Triludan told the rest of the group at the meeting that he had captured sysman status on Prestel, they were amazed. In 1984 British hacking was still in its infancy; though American techniques were slowly spreading across the ocean, English hackers, unlike their American counterparts, had never managed to pull off any of the spectacular stunts that attracted press and publicity. Their access to Prestel seemed like the ideal opportunity to put British hacking on the map. They discussed plans and schemes: they knew well that with sysman status they could easily cripple the system. But none of them was malicious. Pranks were harder to pull, and they seemed more fun.
Accordingly they broke into the mailbox of His Royal Highness, Prince Philip, and were rewarded by seeing the message GOOD EVENING. HRH DUKE OF EDINBURGH come up on the computer screen. They left a message for the real sysman, in his mailbox, saying, I DO SO ENJOY PUZZLES AND GAMES. TA. TA. PIP! PIP! HRH ROYAL HACKER. Then they modified the foreign-exchange page on Prestel, provided by the Financial Times, so that for a few hours on the second of November the pound-to-dollar exchange rate was a glorious fifty dollars to the pound.
Triludan himself capped all the tricks: when subscribers dial into Prestel, they immediately see page one, which indexes all other services. Only the system manager can alter or update listings on this page, but Triludan, exploiting his sysman status, made a modest change and altered the word Index to read Idnex. Though it was perfectly harmless, the change was enough to signal to Prestel that its security had been breached. The other pranks had been worrisome, but altering the first page was tantamount to telling Prestel that its entire system was insecure. The company reacted quickly. It notified all its customers to change their passwords immediately, and then altered the sysman codes, thus stopping Triludan and his friends from tampering with the system again.
Six months later Triludan was arrested. Though he had lost sysman status, he had continued hacking the system, using other four-digit combinations. He even continued to leave messages for the system manager, just to prove that he could still gain access, and his games had badly embarrassed Prestel and its owner, British Telecom. The revelation that hackers had penetrated the Prestel system and broken into Prince Philip's mailbox had proved irresistible to the British press, which had cheerfully hyped the story into page-one news. The royal connection ensured that the item got international coverage, most of it implying that hackers had breached royal security systems and read Prince Philip's private and confidential electronic mail.
To catch their hacker, Prestel put monitors on the incoming lines. These filtered all calls to the system, looking for unusual activity such as users trying different passwords or repeatedly failing to key in correct IDs. After watching the lines for a month, the authorities were convinced that they had two intruders, not one. The first was calling from London; the second appeared to be dialing in from Sheffield. British Telecom traced the two callers and put supplementary monitors on their home lines.
Despite the fact that the company had evidence from the messages to the system manager that Triludan was still breaking into the system, they needed hard evidence, so they continued monitoring the lines in London and Sheffield, carefully noting the times the two callers dialed into Prestel. Finally they decided to mount simultaneous raids.
On April 10, 1985, a posse of three British Telecom investigators and four policemen raided the north London address. Just after ten P.M. the police knocked on the door, which was opened by a young man who was six feet four inches tall with thick black hair. His name was Robert Schifreen, and yes, he was Triludan the Warrior--as well as Hex and Hexmaniac, two other hacker aliases that had appeared on Prestel. He was arrested and his equipment confiscated. The police were civil and polite, and they allowed the suspect to bring his bottle of antihistamine tablets with him. Its brand name was Triludan.
