12.7  THE OTHER SIDE OF THE COIN
 

All is not fun and games on the Net.  Like any community, the Net has its 
share of obnoxious characters who seem to exist only to make your life 
miserable (you've already met some of them in chapter 4).  There are 
people who seem to spend a bit more time on the Net than many would find 
healthy.  It also has its criminals.  Clifford Stoll writes in "The 
Cuckoo's Egg" how he tracked a team of German hackers who were breaking 
into U.S. computers and selling the information they found to the 
Soviets.  Robert Morris, a Cornell University student, was convicted of 
unleashing a "worm" program that effectively disabled several thousand 
computers connected to the Internet.  

Of more immediate concern to the average Net user are crackers who seek 
to find other's passwords to break into Net systems and people who infect 
programs on ftp sites with viruses. 

There is a widely available program known as "Crack" that can decipher 
user passwords composed of words that might be found in a dictionary 
(this is why you shouldn't use such passwords).  Short of that, there are 
the annoying types who take a special thrill in trying to make you 
miserable.  The best advice in dealing with them is to count to 10 and 
then ignore them -- like juveniles everywhere, most of their fun comes in 
seeing how upset you can get. 

Meanwhile, two Cornell University students pleaded guilty in 1992 to 
uploading virus-infected Macintosh programs to ftp sites.  If you plan to 
try out large amounts of software from ftp sites, it might be wise to 
download or buy a good anti-viral program. 

But can law enforcement go too far in seeking out the criminals?  The 
Electronic Frontier Foundation was founded in large part in response to a 
series of government raids against an alleged gang of hackers.  The raids 
resulted in the near bankruptcy of one game company never alleged to have 
had anything to do with the hackers, when the government seized its 
computers and refused to give them back.  The case against another 
alleged participant collapsed in court when his attorney showed the 
"proprietary" and supposedly hacked information he printed in an 
electronic newsletter was actually available via an 800 number for about 
$13 -- from the phone company from which that data was taken.