Final Victim

PICO

"Yesssssss," he said and pumped a fist.

"What is it?"

"We're in e-mail. PICO is a little text editor, sort of a memo writer or scaled-down word processor used on most UNIX-based systems like Pennet for typing up e-mail messages."

"What now?" Karen said.

"Now that we're in and we know exactly what editor they're using for e-mail, we can use some of its own internal commands to break out and get to the underlying UNIX system prompt where we can talk directly to the computer, using its own language. This is where it gets tricky, but with a little practice and a jacker cracker, sus ordenes magnificos"-he bowed slightly-"I'm gonna make this jukebox do the right thing." And as he spoke, his fingers flew across the keyboard. He typed in:

Ctrl-X

That put him in at the exit options menu of PICO.

send; abort; e)dlt;…

In order to keep PICO running without having the system dump him back to the users' menu, he typed:

Ctrl-Z

They waited until the screen said:

Stopped (signal)

"Win-win! We're out of the shell," he said, grinning. "Compared to the Pentagon, this is like stealing from a cart vendor."

"Are you confessing to hacking into the Pentagon computer?" She smiled.

"Aren't you supposed t'read me my rights before askin' a question like that?" Then he grinned. "Some people get high smoking crack, I get high doing a crack. Right now, this system is good as jacked."

"What's next?" she said, still looking at the screen with amazement.

"We see who else is talking to this thing. First we type in `ps,' which stands for process or program and can show us everything running. We'll give ps three switches: an 'a,' which stands for all people using, `u' for user info, and 'x' so ps will even show us processes which have no controlling terminal." He typed:

ps-aux

And up on screen flashed: