A hacker with access could insert his
own backdoor--a hidden security flaw--before the company sent out
software to its customers.
With a good technical understanding of how NorTel's equipment worked,
combined with a backdoor installed in every piece of software shipped
with a particular product, you could have control over every new
NorTel DMS telephone switch installed from Boston to Bahrain. What
power! Mendax thought, what if you you could turn off 10000 phones in
Rio de Janeiro, or give 5000 New Yorkers free calls one afternoon, or
listen into private telephone conversations in Brisbane. The
telecommunications world would be your oyster.
Like their predecessors, the three IS hackers had started out in the
Melbourne BBS scene. Mendax met Trax on Electric Dreams in about 1988,
and Prime Suspect on Megaworks, where he used the handle Control
Reset, not long after that. When he set up his own BBS at his home in
Tecoma, a hilly suburb so far out of Melbourne that it was practically
in forest, he invited both hackers to visit `A Cute Paranoia' whenever
they could get through on the single phone line.
Visiting on Mendax's BBS suited both hackers, for it was more private
than other BBSes.
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