Steffen wasn't so lucky. He was held in the police cells for two days, under continuous interrogation. He says he was allowed to sleep for only three to four hours each day. Steffen told them all he knew, including the fact that a full list of computers penetrated by the VAXbusters had been presented to the German authorities and didn't include the two French sites. He also insisted that all Chaos members had stopped hacking.
While Steffen was being interrogated, Gliss told the five hundred delegates at Securicom of his experience and of Steffen's incarceration. He also read Steffen's paper, which had been written to help the French improve their computer security. Later he contacted the German authorities on Steffen's behalf, but they were powerless to intervene: the French were holding Steffen as an "accessory" to the break-ins at Philips-France and SGSThomson.
Three times Steffen was brought before a judge, and each time he was remanded in custody for further questioning. The German foreign office discreetly pressured the French government over the case, until finally Steffen's dossier reached the desk of the French president.
Mitterand presumably had enough problems: he ordered the German hacker's release. On May 20th, at five minutes past midnight, Steffen was driven to the airport and unceremoniously bundled aboard the night plane to Hamburg. He had spent over two months in a French jail.
While Steffen was incarcerated in Paris, the real culprits remained in Germany, safely beyond French jurisdiction.
Despite the French authorities' suspicions about Chaos and the VAXbusters, despite the raids in Hamburg, it was in reality the Soviet hacker gang-- ensconced in Hannover and Berlin--who had penetrated the sites at Philips-France and SGS-Thomson. They were looking for information on megachip research, just as the KGB had requested. Surprisingly, in view of the importance the French authorities attached to the sites, Pengo remembers them as simple systems to get around in once they had been breached.
Koch and Pengo had penetrated the security at Philips-France and SGS-Thomson using the back door and the trap program they had learned about from Weihruch, the Karlsruhe student. It was understandable that the French would blame the VAXbusters: both teams had used the same techniques, having learned them from the same source.
Koch and Pengo had downloaded data from the two French companies, and supposedly passed a computer tape to the KGB in East Berlin. Without revealing exactly what was on the tape, Pengo has suggested that it might have contained details of a design program for advanced microprocessors. But although the hackers were able to pass on the French material to their Soviet paymasters, the KGB was again demanding more. By the end of 1987 they wanted information on Western military computer networks, including the operating specifications of the interconnected machines. It appeared that the KGB wanted to infiltrate the military systems.
However, the pressure was beginning to tell on Pengo and Koch, and the two had other things on their minds. They were frightened by the arrests of the Chaos members in Hamburg; they felt that it wouldn't be long before the police stumbled over their own operation. And they had also heard about Steffen's interrogation in Paris, which meant that the French were also chasing them.
In the summer of 1988 both Pengo and Koch independently approached the authorities, hoping to take advantage of an amnesty provision in German espionage legislation. This provision guaranteed lenient treatment to those who had not previously been under suspicion and now confessed, provided they cooperated fully. The two confessed to espionage, the only offense covered by the amnesty. Paradoxically, confessing to any lesser offense could have resulted in a severer penalty.
Both were interrogated regularly and at length by the authorities. By early 1989 the Germans felt that they had enough evidence to support a case against the other members of the Soviet hacker gang. On March 2nd, eighteen people were interrogated and eight arrested. The latter included Hess, Pengo, and Koch, as well as Dirk Brescinsky and Peter Kahl. The others were local hackers caught up in the wide-ranging investigation. All the hackers were released after a few days; Kahl and Brescinsky were dispatched to a high-security prison in Karlsruhe. Pengo and Koch could expect to escape prosecution due to their earlier confessions under the amnesty.
Just two months after his arrest Karl Koch would be found dead, his burned body Iying in a wood on the outskirts of Hannover.
