They fished around inside SPAN until they surfaced with
a copy of the Father Christmas worm. And, after finally successfully
hacking Russell Brand's machine at LLNL, they deftly lifted a complete
copy of the WANK worm. In Brand's machine, they also found a
description of how someone had broken into SPAN looking for the WANK
worm code, but hadn't found it. `That was me breaking into SPAN to
look around,' Gandalf laughed, relaying the tale to Pad.
Despite their growing library of worm code, Pad had no intention of
writing any such worm. They simply wanted the code to study what
penetration methods the worms had used and perhaps to learn something
new. The British hackers prided themselves on never having done
anything destructive to systems they hacked. In places where they knew
their activities had been discovered--such as at the Universities of
Bath, Edinburgh, Oxford and Strathclyde--they wrote notes to the
admins signed 8lgm. It wasn't only an ego thing--it was also a way of
telling the admins that they weren't going to do anything nasty to the
system.
At one university, the admins thought 8lgm was some kind
of weird variation on a Belgian word and that the hackers who visited
their systems night after night were from Belgium.
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