Read Fatal System Error Online
Authors: Joseph Menn
Tags: #Business & Economics, #General, #Computers, #Security, #Viruses & Malware, #Online Safety & Privacy, #Law, #Computer & Internet, #Social Science, #Criminology
Fatal System Error (3 page)
Two days later, Dayton took Barrett and Rachelle on a bus journey into the rain forest, followed by a boat trip down a river, and finally a long ride on horseback. Then they took breathtaking runs down a zip-line through the rain forest canopy. That night Mickey took everyone out to a steak dinner served with an Opus One caber-net sauvignon blend. Barrett grew so sick with food poisoning he had to leave halfway through.
In the following days, Barrett grew more at ease in the clubby atmosphere that reigned among the elite in the BetCRIS building. All the insiders had nicknames. Mickey called Brian “Fruity.” He inducted Barrett as “Smart Kid,” and Barrett joined the other men swapping stories in Mickey’s modest office overseeing the betting floor. Mickey was hardworking and gruff with less-favored underlings, and he and the others were especially dismissive of the Costa Ricans they depended on for cheap labor. Yet Mickey also came across as a self-deprecating and sincere family man. He had the minivan to prove it, even if it was chauffeured.
Around Rachelle, Brian was on good behavior. But it seemed a real effort for him to avoid foul language and sexist remarks, and Rachelle saw through it immediately. She thought he was a sleazebag, and she didn’t get a good feeling from Mickey either. She hadn’t known what to expect, but in retrospect it made sense to her that people who did what these men did for a living, where they did it, would have some rough edges. Rachelle was glad these people would stay in Barrett’s world—she was just there on vacation. Barrett and Rachelle spent New Year’s Eve at Mickey’s house behind a locked automatic gate. It wasn’t extravagant on the inside, and Mickey’s three kids seemed to have the run of the place. Outside, the adults shot off the commercial-grade fireworks they had picked up in town and toasted the entry of 2004.
While he was enjoying himself, Barrett was also contemplating a big move, one that would push him further into the arms of Mickey and his cohorts. Barrett wanted to start his own company, and he needed some financial backers. Mickey appreciated what Barrett could do, had experience running his own business, and obviously had cash to spare. Maybe he and his circle weren’t Boy Scouts, but they had no problem taking risks.
BARRETT HAD ALREADY COME PRETTY FAR, especially for a kid with a profound learning disability. As a child in the Sierra foothill towns of Rocklin and Auburn, California, Barrett had been bright, inquisitive, and happy, often leading other children in games and playing the peacemaker. But during first grade, he struggled with spelling and wouldn’t learn to read. The next year, school officials gave him a battery of tests and informed his parents that there was nothing wrong with him—he just didn’t want to learn. At the school’s urging, Barrett’s father, Bruce, a naturally intense lawyer, kept his son up late night after night, forcing him to study. Barrett tried so hard that he finally told his mother that he thought it would be a relief to die. With that, Barrett’s mother, Pat, brought him to the home of a new psychologist for another round of tests. This specialist rendered a different verdict: clear intelligence shackled by dyslexia. Without intervention, she said, Barrett would never graduate high school. “His mind is a Ferrari engine without a transmission,” the psychologist explained. Barrett’s parents found a school an hour away in Sacramento run by an expert who had developed dyslexia tests for the state of California. They enrolled him for third grade. The school staff found that Barrett had been coping with vision problems so intense that when reading, he saw three lines of identical text. He had been gamely trying to follow the clearest one. Barrett also had great difficulty turning letters into sounds. The staff designed a curriculum just for him and taught Barrett such tricks as putting his finger on the printed page at periods and using it to trace the shape of commas. Imagining a cable running through his head helped with the triple vision. Barrett later found the same techniques gave him the power to visualize in three dimensions things that remained hopelessly abstract to most people, such as what was happening inside computers. Barrett’s younger brother Andy, who suffered from attention deficit disorder, tagged along to the new school as well. Barrett still didn’t like the work much, but at last he could function.
After the family moved to Auburn, Barrett returned to a conventional school for sixth grade. Bullies picked on him, and it was tricky taking a mix of advanced classes and special-education sessions. When his father upgraded his law office’s computers and brought the deposed IBM machine home, though, spell-check and a world of other possibilities came with it. Barrett read a manual about the Internet, took more encouragement from a seventh-grade computer teacher, and soon became so obsessed that he fought with his parents when they set any time for him to turn off the computer and get to bed. His parents would insist that the machine be shut down when they went to sleep. But if they woke up later, the computer was back on. Fuming, Bruce Lyon went outdoors one night and shut off the fuse sending electricity to Barrett’s part of the house. When he rose in the morning, he saw that his son had snaked extension cords together to reach a working outlet.
Even before the Netscape browser made cruising the Web easy for PC owners, Barrett wanted more than his own machine could give him. He and close friend Peter Avalos set up a server running the free operating system Linux that they could tap into from anywhere. It hosted Web pages and Internet Relay Chat. It stored files and 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.
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 parties. Barrett found that being in college was much more interesting than being in class. He drank his share of beer and failed every class but history. After a year, he got his wish to work. Barrett started at a local Internet service provider, then joined a friend at a small security firm, Network Presence. The company specialized in keeping corporate customers safe from hackers.
Barrett often got to work on the “outside team,” authorized sight unseen by a customer to test its defenses by trying to break in. He soon showed an unusual flair for thinking like the enemy. A big assignment was to crack into one of the country’s largest insurance companies, one that prided itself on security. Barrett set up shop in a hotel room filled with whiteboards a block from the company’s headquarters. After running some probes to map what the company’s network looked like, Barrett wrote a fake two-paragraph letter from the company to Qwest, persuading the Internet service provider to turn over control of one of the target firm’s blocks of Internet addresses. Once inside the company’s trusted electronic space, Barrett sent what appeared to be internal emails inviting a dozen key technical employees to sign in to a new internal portal. As they logged in, Barrett captured their user names and passwords before connecting the employees to the old company portal. Those credentials gave Barrett access to the entire network, right down to the desktop of the chief executive.
But Barrett wasn’t through. The company was an early adopter of RFID (radio-frequency identification) badges for employees. The badges included photos and coded authentication that the staff swiped through automated card readers at office entrances. Barrett bought an RFID reader and went to a TGI Friday’s favored as an after-work hangout, where he surreptitiously swiped employees’ badges. Then he bought blank RFID cards, used a picture of himself, and made his own corporate ID. After Barrett’s full report to the customer, one of the target company’s senior technology executives was so impressed that he visited Barrett at his parents’ house, just to see what environment could have produced him.
After maturing on the job, Barrett decided to give college another chance. He enrolled at Cal State Sacramento, put his computers away in a closet, and eliminated the beer issue by signing up for crew, which started practice each weekday at 5:30 A.M. Barrett signed up for a general introduction to philosophy, intending to fulfill a distribution requirement. Even though the course forced him to concentrate on written words, Barrett loved working through the ideas.
Barrett developed a special fondness for the philosophy of ethics and often tried to translate the arguments into the world of computers. In one paper, Barrett used Kant’s categorical imperatives—known in rough translation as “do unto others as you would have them do unto you”—to make the case that denial-of-service attacks couldn’t be justified, no matter how offensive the targeted content. In his spare time, Barrett worked on photography, a hobby that turned into a post as photo editor at the college paper, where he made assignments and gave grades to students taking a photojournalism class. Rachelle Sterling was a few years younger than Barrett when she showed up at the newspaper office and introduced herself. He suggested she stop by his condo to pick up a camera, and they started dating almost immediately.
Barrett moved on from rowing to cycling, but those endeavors ended when an eighteen-year-old girl ran a stop sign and hit Barrett on his bike, smashing his leg. While laid up, he returned to computers. It was around then that he was chatting with friends about someone else’s attempt to map the paths data take on the Internet. Barrett said that the map was nice to look at but that it took too long to generate and was excessively mysterious about how it worked. Barrett declared that he could map the Internet just as well in a single day by building on the route-tracing programs that were a standard tool in the security industry. A friend bet Barrett $50 that he couldn’t do it. So while his leg healed, Barrett set out to win the bet, to establish a means for tracking the growth of the Internet, and to make a pretty picture.
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