📸 Photo

KINGPIN

FBI, who still wanted that report. “Where’s the stuff?” Agent Beeson wrote. “Please call.”

There had to be more he could do with the power to crack almost any network he wanted. Max trained his BIND exploit on the servers of Id Software in Mesquite, Texas, a gaming company developing a third installment of the enormously popular first-person shooter Quake. Max loved first-person shooters. He was on the network in a flash, and after some exploring, he emerged with his trophy. He announced to Kimi that he’d just obtained the source code—the virtual blueprints—for Quake III, the most anticipated game of the year.

Kimi was unmoved. “Can you put it back?”

Max soon realized that his attacks were getting some attention. At Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a researcher named Vern Paxson spotted Max’s scanning using a new system he’d developed called BRO, for Big Brother. BRO was an experiment in a relatively new kind of security countermeasure called an intrusion detection system—a cyber burglar alarm with the sole function of sitting quietly on a network and sifting through all the traffic for suspicious activity, alerting administrators when it spots something that doesn’t look right.

Paxson wrote a full report on the attack for CERT. Max intercepted it and was impressed. The researcher had not only detected his attack, he’d compiled a list of servers that Max’s code was attacking through Lawrence Berkeley’s network—Max was using the network as one of his secondary launch points. He sent Paxson an anonymous note from the lab’s root account.

Vern,

I’m sorry to have caused you any inconvenience,
but I single-handed fixed a MAJOR GAPING SECURITY
HOLE in many of your systems. I admit there were
new holes but these were all passworded, and I