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Recently in Salon Technology

The real Y2K crash
Why did stocks that skyrocketed on the promise of "silver bullet" millennium bug solutions fall back to earth?
By Mark Gimein
[12/21/99]

Technology: View from the top
Hold the phone
Robert Tercek and PacketVideo think media convergence is headed for your cell phone.
By John Geirland
[12/20/99]

Something for nothing?
On freebie sites you can't always get what you want, but if you try real hard you just might get something free.
By Lydia Lee
[12/17/99]

Books
Legends in their own minds
Two new books try to lionize warrior-entrepreneurs battling in Microsoft's shadow, but leave us wondering where high tech's heroes are.
By Thomas Scoville
[12/16/99]

Microsoft, Mahir and money, money, money
A software superpower is declared a monopoly, free software rakes in billions and money makes the world go round: The year in tech.
By Janelle Brown, Mark Gimein, Andrew Leonard and Kaitlin Quistgaard
[12/15/99]

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I can see what you're doing. You're looking at all that porn. You'd better stop and pay attention to me. This is for real.

Incredulous in hindsight, I still thought the box would merely disappear. The words weren't specific enough for me to suspect that this was a live dialogue. Besides, the sites I'd been visiting weren't the stereotypical XXX sites. I wasn't some sleazy porn freak, I thought, trying to distinguish my academic viewing of nude feminists from someone else's masturbatory naked-lady viewing. As my defense was taking shape in my mind, this guy really got my attention by typing my Microsoft Network password into that scary little box.

I have the power, booboo69, and I will erase your hard drive if you don't stop looking at this smut. I can destroy all the data on your computer. Do you think you're smarter than me??!

He demonstrated to me what he was capable of unleashing by turning the image on my monitor upside-down and sending over a sound file with his voice on it -- complete with Australian accent. My very own deus ex machina. I never saw anything transferred to my computer, but suddenly it was speaking to me.

"Well, g'day. I'm your friendly hacker and I live in Australia. Doesn't it frighten the shit out of you that I can get into your computer and send you a sound wave like this? But don't worry, I won't do anything wrong. But you'd better be a good boy or a good girl and not look at any dirty pictures because if you do I'll know what you're doing and I can see it too. I'll catch up with you again. Have a nice day. Bye."

Fantastic, I thought. What were the odds that I'd attract a hacker on a morality kick? I frantically typed into the chat box, trying to explain the nature of my research to him, but he didn't care. Besides, like most anyone online, I've checked out a few QuickHitOfSex.com sites -- and he could tell. I told him I was scared and asked him to go away. He said he had "copied files from my hard drive," although he didn't say which ones, and he told me he could see exactly what I was typing. By that point I was sweating buckets and shaking like a leaf -- and it wasn't the lingering flu or the wine. I was downright petrified.

I panicked and yanked out my cable modem connection. My mind was racing as I paced my apartment. How much had he seen? Did I care whether he read my graduate essays, especially the one about the psychology of hacking? Had I visited any sites that might come back to haunt me? What about my e-mail ... I was using Telnet to connect to a remote university server -- could he impersonate me and send messages to my friends and family? Could he find out where I live? And my brother also used that computer -- was his privacy in jeopardy too? Did using a cable modem make me more of a sitting duck?

Through discussions with some Net-savvy friends, I soon learned about hacking tools for "script kiddies," such as the Cult of the Dead Cow's Back Orifice 2000, which allows a hacker to take control of machines that run Windows -- executing applications, reading and transferring files, even restarting or locking up a computer. It gives its user more control of a remote Windows machine than the person at the keyboard has. I also discovered that Trojan horses are nasty beasts -- malicious, security-breaking programs disguised as something benign like a screensaver or a game. They run in the background so you don't know they're there -- until some hacker exploits them to take control of your computer.

I also became aware of the apparent fact that I make a more appetizing meal for hackers since I have a solely Windows environment. As the Back Orifice 2000 site puts it: "Being vulnerable to Trojan horse programs is an inherent flaw in the Windows architecture (by no means unique to it, of course), that software can be executed on a system without any form of user intervention, approval, or feedback. The features of Windows that keep the user from being overwhelmed with information regarding the workings of their computer, are the same features that allow Back Orifice 2000 to keep itself hidden from view."

Next page | I found the Trojan horse -- now what?