Guilty of Hacking

In 1991, I was a college student who was brought in front of a disciplinary committee, found guilty of hacking, and banned from all computer access for the rest of my student life. The offense? Hacking into NASA.

A similar situation occurred during high school when I was summoned to the back room of the computer science lab to face a panel of teachers. The question was simple: “How did you do it?”. The offense: I had cracked the usernames and passwords for the entire school and sold them to a rich kid for a pack of floppy disks, who then ratted me out.

Looking back, I must give credit to my high school teachers for recognizing that what I did was bad but also extremely cool. However, the college experience was unfair because although what happened was fantastic in the sense of being remote from reality, it wasn't entirely me doing the hacking. Well, not all of it.

Let's talk about the penalty first. Back then, being banned from all computers was severe because no one had home computers, and there was no general internet access in the UK - there was no dial-up to anything but a BBS. Being banned from computers meant there was nothing else to do except read textbooks and study electronics, which was my degree of study. Thankfully, I had already completed my programming project, but it still hurt.

You're probably wondering about NASA. Yes, I did not actually hack into NASA. Someone else tried, and I got caught up in it all.

Out of the six countries I've had the privilege of living in, one of them is Australia. While there, I worked at a research lab in Melbourne. I was one of only two C++ programmers and worked on developing an Extended Generalized Kalman Filter to model steel rolling, something that the parent company did a lot of. I was also introduced to something new called "the Internet." It was pre-web, so nothing fancy, but it did have FTP, TELNET, and USENET. The latter was extremely useful for asking programming questions, like an early Stack Exchange. FTP was excellent for downloading tools, including GCC and other code. And TELNET was what we used to log into the DEC workstation from the VT100 and VT220 terminals we had in the office. Indeed, anyone on the Internet could TELNET into our workstations. Firewalls only started to be used in the '90s, so at that time, almost everything was connected directly. Raw. If you had the IP address, and a username and password, you could log in.

Going back to high school, in the early '80s, a new type of game was created, a multiplayer text-based adventure game called MUD, which stood for Multi-User Dungeon. It ran on a computer in Essex University in the nighttime hours, and I used my 300-baud modem to connect and play it. It blew my mind and convinced me that multiplayer games would be the future of gaming.?

My high school had a nascent local-area network that stretched around the campus, and I discovered ways for the attached BBC Computers to communicate to each other through it. This led me to write a version of MUD for my school, which was a massive hit. However, after I graduated, there was no way to take it with me because there was no internet. That was until I went to Australia.

After working on the Kalman filter, I spent my spare time developing a Multi-User Dungeon (MUD) on a DEC Unix workstation in the lab. I took inspiration from Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, a spoof fantasy world. It took a few weeks to create, but when it went live, it became an instant hit. I called it Discworld II and the first was in the books. This was before the widespread availability of home computers and the internet, so players from universities and colleges around the world connected to the game using TELNET to defeat monsters, chat, and fight each other. There were no instant messaging, web, or social media at the time, so the social aspect was a big draw.

When I returned to the UK, the game was still running, and I thought there was no way to connect to it from England. One day, I overheard two students in the VLSI design lab in Manchester talking about a puzzle that sounded familiar. They were playing my game, which was 10,538 miles away. After inquiring about how they managed to play it, they revealed that it was possible to connect to my DEC workstation through several hops, including the university's X25 PAD and the Joint Academic Network (JANET). I did so, and as "god," I smote their characters to demonstrate my power, revived them, and gave them some goodies as a bonus. I wanted to ensure they knew who was in charge, and that the Boss had returned!

Discworld II in Manchester was like a turbo crack cocaine wildfire on steroids. Computer science and electronic majors were playing it, as were students in all the computer labs and libraries. I was kept very busy running the game, and I began to think about turning it into a business and convincing my sponsoring employer to invest in multiplayer gaming. The previous year, I ran a student bar and believed that selling beer was the best way to make money, but this game was far more popular. In fact, I overheard students complaining about their addiction, unable to take a break even for the bathroom. It was incredible! Unfortunately, the success was short-lived and came crashing down in a matter of days.

The first indication of trouble was that I couldn't log in. This happened occasionally due to the unreliable network, but it was frustrating. Next, a computer science tutor confronted me about using the computer lab without authorization. He had set all login credentials for his classes to be the same, and these were freely shared. I explained that I was trying to troubleshoot a broken link, but he accused me of playing a game called "Discworld," which he claimed was shut down due to hacking. He said that he had complained to the postmaster of the domain, who had identified a certain Ben Gibbs at our university as the culprit.

I was confused by the hacking claim, as I had permission to use the lab for that software. Nevertheless, I admitted to being who he was looking for. The tutor was ecstatic, as the Computer Misuse Act had just been passed the previous year. I was brought before a panel of teachers to explain my actions, but evidence from Australia later surfaced that exonerated me.?

The IP address of the machine running the game had become famous, and hackers had targeted it, exploiting its weak passwords and lack of a firewall. The true hacker had then used that machine to launch attacks on NASA computers. The Australian police had visited our lab on a request by the FBI, requesting logs from the workstation, and the staff decided to end their foray into online gaming.

I lost all computer privileges and received a stern warning. I returned to building PCBs, but hundreds of students were left without their online gaming. Who knows, perhaps some of them went on to start their own online gaming companies!

Since writing this article, I found a Wikipedia article about the Discworld MUD that is apparently still going strong!