They were an annoyance, and he just wanted them out of his
system. Any line trace, however, had to go through Telecom, which was
at that time a separate body from OTC. Telecom, Rosenberg was told,
was difficult about these things because of strict privacy laws. So,
for the most part, he was left to deal with the hackers on his own.
Rosenberg could not secure his system completely since OTC didn't
dictate passwords to their customers. Their customers were usually
more concerned about employees being able to remember passwords easily
than worrying about warding off wily hackers. The result: the
passwords on a number of Minerva accounts were easy pickings.
The hackers and OTC waged a war from 1988 to 1990, and it was fought
in many ways.
Sometimes an OTC operator would break into a hacker's on-line session
demanding to know who was really using the account. Sometimes the
operators sent insulting messages to the hackers--and the hackers gave
it right back to them. They broke into the hacker's session with `Oh,
you idiots are at it again'. The operators couldn't keep the hackers
out, but they had other ways of getting even.
Electron, a Melbourne hacker and rising star in the Australian
underground, had been logging into a system in Germany via OTC's X.
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