Part 96 (1/2)
Scott no longer had any trouble accepting that ”So the securi- ty guy's job,” one short balding ed American hacker said, ”is to keep us out I'm a cracker” What's that? ”The cracker is kind of like a safecracker, or lock picker It's et into the cole when he found out that this slight man's handle was appropriately Waldo
Waldo went on to explain that he was a henpecked CPA who needed a hobby that would bore his wife to tears So he locked hiot hooked on coh other co Honeymooner reruns while his wife kvetched After a while, he said he discovered that he had a talent for cracking through the front doors of computers On the professional hacker circuit that made Waldo a valuable commodity
The way it works, he explained, was that he would trade access codes for outlines of the contents of the computers If he wanted to look further, hesystem on the contents of thousands of co part of his life ”Theup client's credit cards
But me,” he added proudly, ”I've been in and out of the IRS computers more times than Debbie did it in Dallas”
”The IRS computers? You've been in there?”
”Where else does a CPA go, but to the scene of the criaot into the IRS backplane, which connects the various IRS districts together, the things I found scared me No one is in control over there No one They abuse taxpayers, basically honest taxpayers who are genuinely in trouble and need soovern end of a vicious attack by a low level govern property The IRS is iht of Tyrone and his constitu- tional ravings the other night
”The IRS's enores it Auditors are on a quota basis, and if they don't recover their allotted aoodbye” The innocent looking Waldo, too, had found a cause, a raison d'
tre, for hacking away at government computers
”You know that for a fact?” Asked Scott This alone was athe Constitution stood for Waldo nodded and claimed to have seen the internal policy e? Essentially, said Waldo, no one It was anarchy
”They have the worst security of any agency that should by all rights have the best It's a crihts and our privacy have shriveled to nothing” Waldo, the s the system from within From within he could battle the computers that had become the system
”Have you ever, shall I say, fixed files in the IRS computers?”
”Many ti screwed, sometimes I am asked to help It's all part of the job,” he said of his beloved avocation
”How many systems have you cracked?” Asked Scott, visibly im- pressed
”I am,” Waldo said modestly, ”the best I have cracked 1187 systeoal for a while, then 1099, but it's kind of open ended now”
”That's almost one a day?”
”You could look at it like that, but sootta reoes into this You just don't decide one day to crack a system You have to plan it”
”So how do you do it?”
”OK, it's really pretty simple D'you speak software?”
”Listen, you make it real simple, and I won't interrupt OK?”
”Interrupt Hah! That's a good one Here, let me show you on the computer,” Waldo said as he leaned over to peck at the keyboard
”The first step to getting into computers is to find where they are located, electronically speaking, OK?” Scott agreed that you needed the address of the bank before you could rob it
”So e do is search for coe autodialer Here, look here,” Waldo said pointing at the computer screen ”We select the area code here, let's say 203, that's Connecticut Then we pick the prefix, the first three nue So let's choose 968,”
he entered the numbers carefully ”That's Stamford By the way, I wrote this software myself” Waldo spoke of his software as a proud father would of his first born son Scott patted hi him to continue
”So we ask the computer to call every number in the 203-968 area sequentially When the number is answered, my computer records whether a voice, a live person answered, or a computer answered or if it was a faxwas so systes and we have a complete list of every computer in that area,” Waldo concluded
”That's 10,000 phone calls,” Scott realized ”It must cost a fortune and take forever?”
”Nah, not a diram less than a second to record the response and we're off to the next call It's all free, courtesy of TPC,” Waldo bragged