The sole drawback from Nick's point of view was that the low-security user-name gave him only restricted access to the computer. The QMC computer had a strict hierarchy of user status, and the environment of low-security users--the areas on the computer they could enter--was severely limited. Most ordinary users had higher status, though their environment was usually restricted by the nature of their tasks. At the apex of the hierarchy, as with Prestel, was the systems manager, who had access to everything. At QMC the sysman is in complete control of the computer, assigning status to other users, overseeing the functioning of the system, and managing the programs and data.
Nick's objective was to capture sysman status. Without it his options were too limited, his environment too restricted. He began searching through the files, using his knowledge of the minutiae of ICL operating systems to find his way through the electronic pathways of the QMC computer. He ran into walls or traps designed to keep him out of restricted areas, but he kept trying.
Nick's hobby, his only one, was collecting unlisted commands for ICL computers.
These are keyboard operations that the company doesn't document, which can be discovered by experimentation. Sometimes these got him around the traps and farther into the system. Slowly he moved through the back alleys of the QMC systems until finally he was able to access the operator libraries, the collection of programs that manage the computer. He knew that the keys to raising his status lay among the programs. He had been hacking for hours by then, but he didn't notice the time or his own tiredness. He played with commands, his little PC sending signals from his bedroom in Enfield through the telephone lines to the mainframe at QMC. He went through the programs sys- tematically, coaxing the ICL, trying to outsmart the security systems that had been put in place precisely to stop someone like him. Eventually the machine yielded. On his first hack Nick had managed to capture system-manager status.
He decided not to play with the QMC computer too much--the capture of sysman status was too valuable to lose by leaving obvious evidence; also, he needed QMC as a jumping-off point for other computers on JANET. He roamed about the QMC computer for a bit, looking at electronic mailboxes and assessing different files. Then he used his sysman status to create four new user-names, OLAD011, OLAD024, OLAD028, and OLAD059, which would allow him continual entry to the QMC machine. He assigned the four user-names to Alan Dolby.
The best part of the JANET network, from Nick's point of view, was that it was a freeway: entry into one point on the system gave a direct route to other points. That meant that he could dial into QMC and then link into other ICLs at other sites. Conveniently, the ever-friendly network listed the sites on the system by computer manufacturer, so he knew just where to go to find more ICLs.
One of Nick's targets was an ICL at Glasgow University in Scotland. Eventually he linked into Glasgow by logging in as a guest user. He used the same technique to break into the ICL at Hull University and others in Nottingham, Belfast, and Bath.
Nick saw hacking as simply a means to play on ICLs. He wasn't interested in stealing information from the network, and in fact, he had no real purpose at all. He was hooked on ICLs and wanted only to be able to work on them, to play around on the operating system, to explore the complexities of the network. He told his parents there wasn't anything illegal in what he was doing, and technically he was correct: at the time there were no laws in the U.K. that specifically addressed hacking, and the Gold-Schifreen case had seemed to make the practice beyond the law.
Once Nick had started hacking the Whiteley family phone bills soared from around $100 a quarter to over $1,600. But Nick always paid his share. He could afford to do so because he had no other social life: no expensive habits, no girlfriends. He went to work came home, and started hacking. He hacked at night because it fit into his schedule, and also because the phone rates were cheaper, there was less line noise, and the target computers would be unmanned.
The trick was, he said later, to stay awake; sometimes he hacked all through the night and then had to go to work the next morning. His "day" could stretch to twenty-eight hours: first eight hours at work, then a night spent hacking, then another eight hours at work trying to stay awake while keeping the printer stuffed with paper and the tape running in the drive. After a marathon stretch like that he would take the next night off and go to bed early.
