Austen knew that the only way to catch the hacker was to monitor the lines, the same time-consuming process used to track down Triludan the Warrior. That meant involving British Telecom, which needed to assign an engineer to trace calls. And because the Mad Hacker worked at night, that would involve overtime. For the first few days the investigation was bogged down over the overtime question: neither British Telecom nor QMC nor Scotland Yard were willing to pay. Eventually the phone company gave in and set up a twenty-four-hour trace, to be activated whenever the hacker was detected on the QMC system.
As the Mad Hacker gained confidence and experience, his activities took on a new twist. To Bob Jones it seemed malicious, as if the hacker had declared war on the system. One night the Mad Hacker ordered the QMC computer to print, I THINK YOU SHOULD KNOW I AM MAD . . . I AM ALSO DEPRESSED, over and over. To Hull University he sent a message saying, I AM TAKING UP THE CHALLENGE, then loaded a "rabbit" onto the system. A rabbit is a piece of software that orders a computer to perform useless tasks endlessly, multiplying ever more work orders until they finally overwhelm the computer and it can cope with nothing else. The Hull computer was down for ten hours after this particular rabbit began breeding. THAT WILL FILL UP YOUR SODDING SYSTEM, another message said.
He then dropped a rabbit into the Glasgow computer. But this time, it didn't work. As he was on-line, the computer operator discovered him and sent him a message demanding that he call the operations department. ALAN DOLBY DOESN T MAKE CALLS, he wrote back.
Glasgow was where Dolby had first been rumbled, three months previously, when a file he had created as a back door had been discovered. It was Glasgow that had alerted the rest of the system operators on JANET that there was a hacker. So there may have been an element of revenge when, one night, the Glasgow system manager, Dr. Roger MacKenzie, tried to access the mainframe from his home PC and found that he had been "locked out"--barred from his own computer. It was later discovered that the Mad Hacker had captured sysman status that night and instructed the mainframe to kick out MacKenzie.
At QMC an increasingly irritated Bob Jones was watching as intrusion after intrusion was recorded in the computer journal. At first these were just messages left for the sysman, schoolboyish nonsense such as WILL ET PLEASE PHONE HOME and WILL NORMAN BATES PLEASE REPORT TO THE SHOWER ROOM. But then things became more serious: the Mad Hacker instructed the QMC computer to generate copies of reports from its memory, which prevented it from processing necessary work, and on more than one occasion his intrusions caused the computer to crash. It seemed as if the Mad Hacker had become vindictive and malicious.
Once, he left a message asking, WHY DON'T YOU LOCK ME OUT? It was obvious to Jones that his hacker wanted to play, but he ignored the messages.
Monitoring the lines was slowly getting results. When the Mad Hacker was spotted making an unusual daytime appearance, Bob Jones called the twenty-four-hour emergency number at British Telecom--which rang and rang. In frustration he gave the receiver to someone else to hold while he called a contact at British Telecom direct.
"There's no one answering my emergency call," he shouted.
"Well, yes," the Telecom man said patiently. "The service doesn't start until five P.M." As they spoke, an assistant passed him a note saying that the hacker had left the system. Jones, still steaming, explained the precise meaning of "twenty-four-hour service".
The monitoring intensified. In early July the engineers at the telephone office nearest QMC finally traced the hacker back to a telephone in Enfield. Another monitor was placed on the suspect number to record all future activity.
On July 5th Jones came in to work to find that the computer journal recording the Mad Hacker's intrusions had been wiped out. That could only have happened if the hacker had captured sysman status again. He also found this message:
THIS INSTALLATION HAS BEEN HACKED BY ALAN DOLBY.
ALAN DOLBY IS A REGISTERED MEMBER OF HACKING INC. (ICL DIVISION), WHICH IS A SUBSIDIARY OF HACKING INTERNATIONAL.
THIS HACK IS (c) 1988 BY ALAN DOLBY (THE MAD HACKER).
The announcement was followed by a message for Marlyn, a computer operator previously employed by QMC and mistakenly believed by the Mad Hacker to be the sysman:
