That nightmare feeling again

Analyser is 18 years old. He wears faded tee shirts, jeans and Ray-Bans, not thick spectacles. He doesn't look too sharp. In fact, he has a ...

Analyser is 18 years old. He wears faded tee shirts, jeans and Ray-Bans, not thick spectacles. He doesn8217;t look too sharp. In fact, he has a dyslexia problem. He lives in a Tel Aviv suburb, not California. In short, he is anything but the archetypal geek.

Yet, when his activities were discovered two weeks ago, he was immediately declared the smartest entity on the Internet 8212; and the single biggest threat to it. Right now, more than 40 FBI agents are trying to run him to ground.

The young man who calls himself Analyser claims to have broken into more than 400 computers of the US Department of Defence. His teardrop8217; attacks have brought down the computer networks of NASA, the US Navy and the Pentagon, besides a slew of universities including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Cyberspace has again woken up to its worst recurring nightmare: the fact that its universe is always susceptible to attack. And the attack could come from anywhere in the world.

Analyser claimed responsibility for theattacks after the arrest of a Californian hacker who calls himself Makaveli. His interrogation revealed that he was a mere pupil for the greatest hackmeister of all time, who lived in a country where, quot;If they know about him, they8217;d just shoot him in the head.quot; Israel is not really that repressive but nevertheless, the security agencies there would like to get their hands on Analyser at least as much as the FBI. For it appears that one of his targets was the Knesset, the highest legislature. Analyser says that his attacks were a wakeup call to the lazy administrators of the biggest systems in the world, to urge them to quot;make things rightquot;. What he did was token damage, to start people speculating about the kind of damage he could do in the middle of an international business deal or an alpha strike. He could, in fact, start Armageddon with a keystroke, just like in the movies.

But in an interview with the Internet security group AntiOnline his underground hackers8217; group, the Enforcers, stressed the pointthat it was better him hacking the US Navy as an educative exercise than quot;a paid government official of a third world countryquot; doing it to compromise US military security. Analyser himself told AntiOnline that he would never be a hired gun. He was a principled man who actually secured the servers he invaded against other hackers before he sent out his wakeup call.Interestingly, the wakeup call is probably the commonest rationale used by hackers. In 1995, a Silicon Graphics programmer called Dan Farmer released the Satan program on the Internet to alert his colleagues to the need for security. Satan was a standalone drone, designed to identify Internet nodes, hack its own way in and replicate. It caused much alarm and consternation and despite his good intentions, Farmer was fired.

Analyser8217;s wake-up call has brought forth sobering statistics. The Computer Security Institute has revealed that unauthorised access to information causes companies losses of 50 million every year. Financial fraud accounts for11 million and outright theft of information 33 million. These are obviously lower than the real figures. Companies hesitate to reveal how much they get hurt by Net vandalism for fear of losing customer and investor confidence.

The good news is that Analyser intends to retire. He8217;s been hacking for two years and with nothing left to conquer, he8217;s bored. The bad news is that there are about a dozen hackers waiting to inherit his mantle and carry on his good work. The Enforcers are a weird, faceless online community. They are distributed all over the globe. No one member knows what another looks like. They are not even sure of each other8217;s gender. Their individual anonymity makes the group difficult to tackle. And they have been well-tutored by Analyser.