As the IS hackers reached a level of sophistication beyond anything
The Realm had achieved, they realised that progress carried
considerable risk and began to withdraw completely from the broader
Australian hacking community. Soon they had drawn a tight circle
around themselves. They talked only to each other.
Watching the Realm hackers go down hadn't deterred the next generation
of hackers. It had only driven them further underground.
In the spring of 1991, Prime Suspect and Mendax began a race to get
root on the US Department of Defense's Network Information Center
(NIC) computer--potentially the most important computer on the
Internet.
As both hackers chatted amiably on-line one night, on a Melbourne
University computer, Prime Suspect worked quietly in another screen to
penetrate ns.nic.ddn.mil, a US Department of Defense system closely
linked to NIC. He believed the sister system and NIC might `trust'
each other--a trust he could exploit to get into NIC. And NIC did
everything.
NIC assigned domain names--the `.com' or `.net' at the end of an email
address--for the entire Internet. NIC also controlled the US
military's own internal defence data network, known as MILNET.
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