Once the program was outside the US, it was fair game--there was
nothing US authorities could do about someone in Norway sending Deszip
to a colleague in Australia. But even so, the comp-sec and
cryptography communities outside the US still held programs such as
Deszip very tightly within their own inner sanctums.
All of which meant that Electron and Phoenix would almost certainly
have to target a site in the US. Electron continued to compile a hit
list, based on the Zardoz mailing list, which he gave to Phoenix. The
two hackers then began searching the growing Internet for computers
belonging to the targets.
It was an impressive hit list. Matthew Bishop, author of Deszip.
Russell Brand, of the Lawrence Livermore National Labs, a research
laboratory funded by the US Department of Energy. Dan Farmer, an
author of the computer program COPS, a popular security-testing
program which included a password cracking program. There were others.
And, at the top of the list, Eugene Spafford, or Spaf, as the hackers
called him.
By 1990, the computer underground viewed Spaf not just as security
guru, but also as an anti-hacker zealot. Spaf was based at Purdue
University, a hotbed of computer security experts.
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