It was a VMS Trojan. And there was a
big difference. It didn't scan for the addresses of computers on a
network. It snagged passwords when people connected from their VMS
computers to another machine over an X.25 network. Powerspike cracked
up laughing when Electron told him. `Well,' he told Powerspike, `Mr
Bigshot Force might know something about Prime computers, but he
doesn't know a hell of a lot about VMS.'
Despite Electron's general fall from grace, Phoenix talked to the
outcast because they shared the obsession. Electron was on a steep
learning curve and, like Phoenix, he was moving fast--much faster than
any of the other Melbourne hackers.
When Phoenix admitted talking to Electron regularly, Force tried to
pull him away, but without luck. Some of the disapproval was born of
Force's paternalistic attitude toward the Australian hacking scene. He
considered himself to be a sort of godfather in the hacking community.
But Force was also increasingly concerned at Phoenix's ever more
flagrant taunting of computer security bigwigs and system admins. In
one incident, Phoenix knew a couple of system admins and security
people were waiting on a system to trap him by tracing his network
connections.
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