Shebang: How old were you when you started with computers?

Soggie: Twelve or something

[LAUGHTER]

Shebang: And how did you get access to a computer?

Soggie: I bought my own. From my second communion money — it’s a Catholic feast

Shebang: So you got the money from your family and -

Soggie: I bought a computer with it

Shebang: You always wanted one? You wanted one at birth.

Soggie: Starting from the age of ten every morning I whined to my parents, ‘Are we going to buy a computer today?’ And after two years they gave in and I was allowed to buy one, with my money. A computer for myself.

Shebang: I thought you were going to say that every morning you prayed for one.

Soggie: My parents were not divine in any way so there was no necessity to pray.

Shebang: And what was your first taste of the internet.

Soggie: Basically several years ago it was still not possible as an individual to get internet access. And that was the case throughout Europe. Internet access was available only to universities or university students — if they were extremely lucky. Or to corporations, but you needed to pay something like 20,000 Belgian francs a month just to get an extremely slow modem connection. This was clearly not affordable for private individuals and it was meant to be. They weren’t marketing for residential customers. So if you wanted to get onto the internet, certainly in U.S. literature you could find various references to the internet. It’s now almost thirty years old, the internet. And, say ten years ago, it was already a very mature system with its associated legends, and so forth. If people wanted to get onto the internet the only way to do that was to break into a system that was connected. At that time a lot of hackers in Europe were mainly breaking into computers with the reason ‘I want to get onto the internet’. Then what happened typically was that they tried to break into worldwide corporations, many of them U.S.-based with big international networks of their own which at their U.S. branch points connected to the internet at large. At that time it was affordable for companies. Now in the Europe and the U.S. it has become almost free to get an internet connection for residential usage, and all companies are connected so there is no reason any more to break into computers in order to break into computers in order to get to the internet you can do it legally. So there is not incentive any more to break into those systems. The only real reason now to do it is to damage a company or something. O0r just because it might feel nice to be able to break into such systems. But then again people with the ability to do that nowadays are in well-paid jobs. There is a worldwide shortage of IT (information technology) people, so they have no problems finding employment — at least if they are over eighteen years old.

In most cases as with most computer break-ins it was largely due to misconfiguration of a certain system. So the way to get into a computer system was to learn as much as possible about that system. For example, many systems - computer systems or phones switches — when they are shipped they come with a couple of default passwords so that they can start configuring it, The idea is then that once it is installed that you then change those passwords. But on such computers it was typical that they came shipped with eight predefined user IDs and passwords and some of them were at administrative level , so the only thing you had to was to try those passwords and in a lot of cases there were still one or two of those passwords by which we could do anything on the system which were just left open. It was the easiest way.

Shebang: You actually saw the password...?

Soggie: No. But for example the first step is to find the systems, and if your intent was to get on the internet the best thing you could do was to look for free phone numbers 0800 numbers and so forth because a lot of the U.S. corporations in Europe had dialling pools or modem pools available on toll free numbers so their employees could dial in and connect to the corporate network. And so that what you could do is sequentially go after each number and see if there was someone picking up, and if it was a fax or a human or it was connected, there still exist software to do that automatically, just dial 100 consecutive numbers and hang up after three rings or something like that, also after a while phone switches had some control measures in there and they would detect for such attempts if someone was trying sequentially to dial an entire zone. you could equally use such a tool to wake an entire city if you want. Just connect it to a phone switch and dial every one awake at 2 a.m. for example. There are various uses possible.

Shebang: You didn’t use any of those?

Soggie: No No no