Fatal System Error Read Online Free Page A

Fatal System Error
Book: Fatal System Error Read Online Free
Author: Joseph Menn
Tags: General, Social Science, Computers, Business & Economics, Law, Criminology, security, Viruses & Malware, Online Safety & Privacy, Computer & Internet
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could crunch through prodigious amounts of data at high speed. Even better, it looked after some three hundred domain names that Barrett registered. If he wanted to send emails from any one of them, now he could. Barrett and Peter called their setup TheShell, and they offered its services free to friends. When the number of users ran into the hundreds and they had to add more equipment, they started charging $5 a month. Pat Lyon’s problem was adjusting to her son’s new friends: people in their twenties whom he had met online and were now inviting him over to take computers apart. Despite her misgivings, the guys all checked out okay. Barrett did get up to mischief, though, as pretty much every teen technology prodigy did. That’s why he would later empathize to a painful extent with the hackers he exposed on the other side of the world.

    Most of Barrett’s misbehavior was harmless. In high school, he and Peter earned credit for managing the school’s computer network. Unsurprisingly, they installed a “sniffer” to monitor whatever traffic they wanted. They let on to a favored history teacher that they knew his password, just to see his reaction. The teacher panicked and had an administrator tell Barrett that he had better plug the “security hole” fast. Barrett counteroffered, suggesting that the administrator stop surfing porn from a classroom computer after hours. That was the end of the conflict. Peter went on to the Naval Academy in Annapolis.

    Only once in his high-school career did Barrett do something seriously bad, in 1995. Network Solutions, the understaffed firm that registered websites for companies, accepted changes submitted via electronic forms, without making so much as a phone call to the listed owners of the sites. To make sure that those forms were coming from legitimate sources, it checked to see if the submissions came from an email server that belonged to the company in question. But Barrett thought it might be possible to “spoof” a return address on an email by bouncing it off the real server. If he crafted the email in just the right way, it might convince Network Solutions that the request was legitimate.

    It would be an enormous security flaw if someone could pretend to be America Online—or the Defense Department—and take control of the relevant websites. The responsible move would have been to warn Network Solutions immediately. But Barrett was curious to see if he was right, and there was a quick way to find out. On “accipurpose,” as he put it later, Barrett tested his theory. He sent trick emails that hypothetically would tell Network Solutions that AOL, Disney, and a few other American mainstays had abandoned their websites.

    The sites went down, displaying blank pages to millions of Web surfers as the victimized companies and Network Solutions scrambled to put things right. Barrett had guessed that it might take a few hours to recover, but it took AOL three full days to get back up. Oops! Barrett thought. The massive shutdown was impossible for the authorities to ignore, and the FBI was soon on the case. Agents found the bogus electronic forms and traced them back to TheShell.com . They looked up the records showing who controlled TheShell and called Barrett’s house, reaching his father. When questioned, Barrett told his dad that it could have been any customer of TheShell who had sent the emails, or even someone just pretending to be a customer. That was technically true, and Barrett, who was still a minor, got away clean. But having the FBI call his house was not a pleasant experience, and Barrett felt badly for the headaches and financial losses he’d caused. From then on, he walked the straight and narrow.

    After graduating from high school in 1996, Barrett didn’t want to go to college. He wanted to do more computer work. But his father insisted, so he enrolled at California State University at Chico, which was close to home, and expected rigor mostly at
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