Final Victim

USER PID %CPU %MEM… TT STAT START TIME COMMAND

lover 18083 76.9 0.5… r5 R 23:06 0:00 ps-aux rat 18077 7.7 0.3… pf S 23:19 0:00 /usr/ucb/bbs balsa 17024 0.0 0.0… qb IW 00:06 0:00 /usr/ucb/bbs

The list went on for about twenty lines.

"What's all that?" she said.

"That's who's on the remailer computer right now and what they're running. It's very thin because it's past midnight or something in Norway." He pointed to one of the symbols under the COMMAND column. "BBS stands for Bulletin Board System. Okay, since we don't have a password, let's see if we can spoof one of these users into giving us his."

"How we gonna do that?"

"We'll send one of them a message that nobody but him will see. We'll get him to log off and then log back in, but we'll be lurking here. Then we'll snarf his login with my special foo file. Okay, let's finger one of these users."

"I thought a finger was a tracking program."

"Backfinger is a sort of tracking program to see who was fingering you. Finger gets info on a user. Let's pick one of these first three guys, here. You're looking for a sex criminal… How 'bout Mr. Rat? He sounds scummy." Malavida hunkered over the keyboard and typed in "finger-m rat," and in response, the screen printed out:

Login name: ratIn real life: WindMinstrel

Directory: /alumnl3/ratShell: /bin/csh

On since April 14 21:33:09 on ttyr3 from tropic. Seas. ufla. Edu No unread mail

"In real life, Wind Minstrel. What's that?"

"In real life his name is whatever it is, but Mr. Rat doesn't want to tell his or her real-life name. He's using a computer alias… Wind Minstrel. I like it. Very cool." He studied the screen. "Okay, the good news here is this tells us what host computer Wind Minstrel is using. It's a box named 'tropic' at Science and Engineering Administration Services at the University of Florida."

Malavida went into his cracking tool kit, pulled out another disk, and slid it into his PC. He typed "sz," sending the file to his new user's account on Pennet, a file he called "F00." It was a program he had written which would send a phony error message.

"Okay. Now, what I'm trying to do is create a phony system message on Mr. Rat's screen so he will think he has to log in again, and when he does, I'll steal his login and password," Malavida said, grinning. Then he typed:

FOO-ttyr3-root@

"This program's gonna tell Mr. Rat to log in again." On his screen, Malavida showed Karen the message that was being sent to The Rat's computer:

Message from root@ring2Ice. Anon. Pennet. No