Science Vs - The Wank Worm: How NASA Got Hacked

Episode Date: December 6, 2018

Before WikiLeaks, there was the Wank Worm. In this week’s episode, we tell you the story of how Australian hackers infiltrated NASA, just months after the country was hooked up to the internet in 1989. Joel Werner, host of Sum of All Parts, helps us tell this story, along with cybersecurity researcher Dr. Suelette Dreyfus. Check out the transcript here: http://bit.ly/35EkMw5 UPDATE 12/07/18: An earlier version of this episode stated that Galileo's engines ran on nuclear power. We've removed this line, as it was Galileo's electrical systems, not the propulsion system, which ran on nuclear power. Selected references: The original Sum of All Parts episode about Phoenix and Electron Suelette’s book, written with the help of Julian Assange, about the early Australian hacking movement, UndergroundAn in-depth reference on Hacktivism Thanks to our sponsor, Cole Haan. You can hear more of Wendy and other Gimlet hosts in conversation at ExtraordinariesOnTheMic.com, produced in partnership with Cole Haan. Credits: Original story produced by Joel Werner, for Sum of All Parts, from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Science Vs is Wendy Zukerman, Rose Rimler, Meryl Horn and Odelia Rubin. Our senior producer is Kaitlyn Sawrey. We’re edited by Blythe Terrell. Mixed and sound designed by Emma Munger. Music written by Emma Munger and Bobby Lord. Our fact checker is Michelle Harris. A huge thanks to Alex Goldman, Jason Scott, Chris Avram, Professor Graham Farr, Barbara Ainsworth, the Zukerman Family and Joseph Lavelle Wilson. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What does the AI revolution mean for jobs, for getting things done? Who are the people creating this technology and what do they think? I'm Rana El-Khelyoubi, an AI scientist, entrepreneur, investor, and now host of the new podcast, Pioneers of AI. Think of it as your guide for all things AI, with the most human issues at the center. Join me every Wednesday for Pioneers of AI. And don't forget to subscribe wherever you tune in. It's season three of The Joy of Why, and I still have a lot of questions.

Like, what is this thing we call time? Why does altruism exist? And where is Jan 11? I'm here, astrophysicist and co-host, ready for anything. That's right, I'm bringing inuckerman, and you're listening to Science Versus from Gimlet Media. This is the show that pits facts against floppy disks. Against federal crimes. Against computer fraud.

Stop, these are terrible. What about files? Like computer files? What about the FBI? Files versus files? Really? Please stop. Just stop now. All right. Do you want to introduce yourself? Okay. Okay. Hi, my name's Joel Werner and I make a podcast called Some of All Parts. Joel is a science journalist from Australia. He's also a great friend of mine. And the reason that Joel is here today is because he's been working on this crazy story about the earliest days of hacking. And by the way, our story has a few naughty words.

This is a story that's sort of from the dark ages of the internet. And the tale we're going to tell you is about an underground group of nerds who cobbled together their computers from, like, bits of gear they found in the trash. And yet, they became some of the most infamous hackers of their day, creating one of the world's first international hacking scandals. But our story? It starts with a different set of nerds. Nerds that had a ton of fancy high-tech equipment, the best in the world. NASA. To set it up a bit, this is October 1989 and NASA's getting ready to launch Galileo, which is the first spacecraft to ever orbit Jupiter. We have a go for auto sequence start. Atlantis has four redundant computers.

It was this huge project, but it had also gotten to be really controversial. Good afternoon. At Cape Canaveral, they are go for launch of the space shuttle Atlantis. The launch of the Galileo space probe wasn't supposed to be controversial. The shuttle and its five astronauts

will deploy Galileo, an unmanned space vehicle that will fly to Jupiter. But the controversy surrounding the launch was all because Galileo was a nuclear-powered spacecraft. Wait a sec, so why was that controversial? Well, people were worried that if the spacecraft exploded, then it would spew out radioactive fallout. Really? Yeah, yeah. You've got to remember that this is 1989, right?

This is the last days of the Cold War. So people are freaking out about nuclear anything. And it's only a few years after the Challenger disasters. So NASA doesn't exactly have a perfect record here. In the lead up to launch, there were protesters camped outside the Kennedy Space Centre. People started getting really fired up. But then something happened that made NASA really nervous. The scientists would come in in the morning and put down their cup of coffee and sit down and try and log in.

Dr Sulet Dreyfus is a cybersecurity researcher at the University of Melbourne, and she sets the scene. And they would find that instead of all their scientific data or their normal work, there was a screen that would appear that said, your system has been wanked. What? Your system has been wanked? Oh, I know. It's amazing, right? And so wank's an acronym. It's like worms against nuclear killers. Wank. Oh, I know. It's amazing, right? And so WANK's an acronym. It's like Worms Against Nuclear Killers. WANK. Worms Against Nuclear Killers. That's the lamest acronym I've ever heard. They clearly

just wanted to say the word WANK. But this is actually part of the Galileo protest, right? So you have the physical protesters outside the Kennedy Space Center and inside, online, in the NASA system is this Wank worm. And it kind of freaks NASA out for good reason, right? So the thing about computer worms is that they're kind of like computer viruses, except they spread on their own. So they have the potential to cause a lot of damage. Here's Sulet. So this worm was, you know, a self-propelling bit of software that would infect and hop from machine to machine, network to network, and would get out and basically spread by itself.

So this was very alarming, and it started affecting first dozens and then hundreds and then thousands of machines. And so the worm was spreading, wriggling beyond NASA. You see, the NASA network is connected to the US Department of Energy, CERN in Switzerland and the RIKEN accelerator facility in Japan. The wank worm had gone international. And this worm wasn't just telling people that their computer had been wank worm had gone international. And this worm wasn't just telling people

that their computer had been wanked, it was telling them that their files were getting deleted. There's a doco about this called In the Realm of the Hackers, where they interview a NASA guy who was there at the time, and this is how he describes it. What happened initially was that there were a lot of phone calls going back and forth and a lot of confusion. There were different things you would see depending on what the worm

was trying to do to your machine. It would say, hi, I'm deleting all your files and start listing your files and saying delete, delete, delete, delete. In the end, NASA realised that the wank worm wasn't actually deleting files. It was just telling people that it was. The Galileo launch went off without a hitch, but even so, this whole thing was hardly benign. The worm took weeks to get under control. It's estimated that it cost NASA a half million dollars

in wasted time and resources, and all for what seemed to be an anti-nuclear protest. But still, in a weird way, this was groundbreaking. The NASA network was invaded by one of the first worms, computer worms in the world, and in fact, the first worm that had a political message. Yeah, get that right. This is the world's first hack with a political message. Yeah, get that right. This is the world's first hack with a political message. That is crazy. Like when you think about people hacking for political purposes these days, it just feels like it's everywhere. I mean, these groups can get into basically anything they want.

They allegedly breached government websites, major financial services, entertainment conglomerates, and law enforcement networks. People are saying Russian hackers influenced the U.S. elections. 12 Russian intelligence agents hacked multiple Democratic Party targets in 2016. The Russians hacked the computers of the Democratic Party organizations. And yet, one of the earliest hacks like this, basically ground zero for hacktivism, was this dinky little... ..wankworm? Hey, you know, every journey starts with a solid wankworm, right?

But you've got to remember, like, back in the 80s, computer worms were really new, so not that many people would have seen anything like this before. Now, once NASA figured out how to stop the worm wanking, so to speak, they wanted to know where the hell it had come from. The FBI is called in, and soon they find out that the worm first came from outside the US, from a foreign computer. Initially, computer logs pointed to France,

and so the French took a closer look. The French Secret Service had investigated where some of these connections were coming from because I think they were worried that the American investigators were going to pin this on them because some of the connections had gone through France. But they were able to trace connections back to Australia. Australia?

But why would any Australian care what NASA was doing? But there was something else that tied this to Australia. Hidden in plain sight on that screen that said your system has been officially wanked was also a cheeky reference to something very Australian. Also in the wank room was a banner that had appeared in Infected Machines. And there was a quote at the bottom that said, you talk of times of peace for all and then prepare for war.

And no one knew where this was from. You know, they thought, oh, some sanctimonious worm writer who's hacked this and sent it out there. You talk of times of peace for all and then prepare for war. The FBI had no idea where this came from. But then a computer expert in Australia figured it out. In fact, it was Dr. Surlette Dreyfus flipping through her record collection who put two and two together. So it was from a Midnight Oil song from a fairly obscure album called Species Deceases. But of course, that was the political message.

And that is, in a sense, what made this worm so special and unique was not just that it could jump from network to network. It was that it contained a message, an idea it was trying to spread. Oh, man. It's from a Midnight Oil song that is so Aussie. Mate. Mate. Okay, okay. So for the uninitiated, Midnight Oil is a huge Aussie band,

particularly in the 1980s. Americans might know them for that song, Beds Are Burning. You know, do it with me, Joel. How do you sleep when the beds are burning? But seriously, though, I can't believe this was hackers in Australia in 1989. I mean, did Australia even have the internet back then? Like, just barely. Australia's internet was switched on four months before the NASA hack in June of 1989.

That's amazing. Four months. We had the internet for four months and then hackers got into NASA. I mean, this really goes to show that we can't have nice things to play with. Yeah, totally. So that's all it took. Four months of being connected to the internet and Australian hackers were breaking into NASA.

After the break, who did this? And will they get caught? At that point, whoever was responsible had emerged in a kind of hazy silhouette from the forest, but not clear enough to make out who it was, and then they slipped back among the gum trees. Welcome back. We just heard the story of how in the 1980s, hackers infected NASA with a worm that became known as the wank worm.

An electronic trail of clues and a very cheeky midnight oil reference suggested Australians were behind it. And this was in the really early days of the Aussie internet. Reporter Joel Werner is telling us the story from here. Right, so it turns out that it only took a few months for a bunch of newbie hackers to start causing some serious shit to go down. And if you're looking for hackers in Australia in 1989, Melbourne was a great place to start. The city was a bit of a tech hub and alongside it, this fringy punk tech community was starting to

take shape. This is Dr. Sulet Dreyfus again, and she wrote a book about these hackers. This early underground scene was comprised of a real mix of people. At heart, there were people who were explorers, explorers on the frontier of technology, explorers on using computer networks to talk and communicate with people in other countries to learn information. A lot of them turned to semi-legal activities of breaking into university systems, telecom systems, not so much because they were criminals, but because they couldn't otherwise get access to this incredible technology that they knew existed.

They'd do whatever they had to to get their hands on the latest technology. There was a real sense of DIY in this scene. So they would go dumpster diving on the weekend. They would go to both private companies and telecom, and they would go to the garbage dumps out the back, and they would open them up and crawl inside and trawl around in the trash in order to find the manuals or bits of hardware that might have been discarded. These were absolute treasures. They were like gold. A vibrant tech counterculture was fast evolving online

and its members would interact via these primitive text-only chat rooms called BBSs or bulletin board systems. Now, these BBSs became really important. It's where hackers would meet to talk strategy. For the hackers, this was their war room. One of the key things here is that no one was using the real name. You know, people were using handles, and that was a relatively new thing. They would run this literally out of their bedrooms.

Like, at the end of their bed would be a table with this computer and a set of modems hooked up, and then you would basically log on to leave messages for people with similar interests. And that was extraordinary. People didn't have that before. But like all cliques, these bulletin boards had fringes and they had an inner sanctum. But then there were the back rooms, the back rooms, you know, the gambling rooms, the smoking rooms. And in these rooms, selected groups of people would trade in the currency of this new community, and that was information. And at the back of the back of the most exclusive rooms was a hacker collective known as The Realm. The Realm traded information between the hackers who were in it,

but the hackers who were in it also traded and shared information with overseas hackers. Julian Assange is the most high-profile former member of The Realm, but at the time, its best and brightest were two teenage boys with the handles Phoenix and Electron. So Phoenix is arrogant and clearly intelligent, but a braggart, pretty extroverted. He is very kind of cocky and sure, but also pushy in a way that advances their explorations. Electron is very wry, quietly spoken, holds things close to his chest,

but very technically adept, very willing to tap, tap, tap until you actually get through to the other side. Already stars of the local hacking scene, Phoenix and Electron began working around the clock, trading information and techniques with the elite hackers of Europe and the US. There was definitely an attitude with the top hackers in other countries that the Australians were really serious players. If you said you were an Australian hacker, you got a bit of respect.

And it was in part because of these guys. Which takes us back... We have ignition and liftoff. ...to NASA and the Galileo spacecraft. The Galileo spacecraft bound for Jupiter. So was it Phoenix and Electron who infected NASA with the wank worm? Well, look, we know it was Australians who did it. And these two were amongst the sharpest hackers going around.

In Sulit's book, which, by the way, she worked on with Julian Assange and they interviewed a bunch of the hackers from this time, including Phoenix and Electron. And in the book, she describes a scene where Electron's dancing around the dining room table, chanting, I got into NASA, I got into NASA. Oh man. I know, right? It would seem to suggest maybe that he was behind it, but, yeah, like, no-one was actually ever arrested or charged over the wankworm hack specifically. Right, OK.

But they are looking very, very suspicious. Yeah, we don't know for sure it was them, although we can heavily suspect, right? Right. And from here, the plot thickens even more because Phoenix and Electron are about to really up their game. And that happens when they get their hands on Zardos. So Zardos was an online newsletter

that described all kinds of cybersecurity vulnerabilities. Zardos was a kind of a holy grail for the hackers. Zardos was where they would share security holes that they found for networks, for systems. And this gives you access not just to one system, but to all the systems running that technology. It is a master key. And it was actually the name was taken from a science fiction cult film which had starred Sean Connery. Zardos! Zardos! It is the only path and passage into the vortex. Zardos!

With Zardos, not only can you get into a network, you can essentially take control of the network. That kind of power is immense and giddying. It was absolutely giddying to these, you know, late teens, early 20s, boys often, many of whom had never left Australia, had never owned a passport. To have that kind of access is incredible. And, of course, being bored teenagers trapped in the suburbs,

egging each other on, they start to use their newfound power. They go on a rampage, breaking into high-profile network after high-profile network and showing no sign of slowing down. They've been penetrating systems at Los Alamos National Labs, Harvard University, Digital Equipment Corporation, Bell Systems, University of Texas. You know, it's a long list of prestigious institutions. And they're not going for the small Fred's Backyard pool digging service.

They want to go for the big guys. So now that they've got Zardos and access to all the vulnerabilities, Phoenix and Electron start hacking into heaps of computers and really quickly, back to back, hack after hack, so much so that people assume there must have been another worm on the loose, automatically spreading from computer to computer. That's how the New York Times reported it in March 1990.

Phoenix read their report and loved that his work was getting written up in the Times, but he was also kind of pissed that his hard work hacking into places was being attributed to some worm. And this, this moment right now is the beginning of the end for Phoenix and Electron. Phoenix calls up the reporter of the New York Times, and brags to him. Brags to him about the fact that, no, it's not a worm breaking into these machines. It's actually people. It's not a rogue program. It's people.

John Markoff at the New York Times wrote an article based on his conversation with Phoenix and it made the front page. And Phoenix was super excited by this. Phoenix is at this stage saying to Electron, well, do you think we can make the cover of Time or Newsweek? And Electron's kind of head-slapping, going, really? What is this guy on about? And so that's where, in a sense, it starts to go particularly pear-shaped, because Electron is horrified to know that Phoenix has done this. He's a low-key kind of a guy.

He wants to stay a low-key kind of guy. And he wants to stay out of prison. So he actually packs up his modem at that stage and gives it to his father and says, hide the modem from me so I can't log on. He is successful in finding the modem. It takes him, I think, a couple of days. And there it goes, plugged back into the wall,

and he's off and running again. And while all this is happening, the police are also closing in. That front-page article in The New York Times, well, that got the FBI's attention, and they started hassling the Australian Federal Police, or AFP, to do something about these hackers. The FBI is calling the AFP and saying, do something about these noisy hackers. And that's when it all begins to become unravelled. Initially, at least, it looked like the AFP would have no chance of catching the hackers.

They didn't know much about computers. I mean, they were still using typewriters in the late 80s. And there was also a bit of a cultural disdain for cybercrime from within the police force. One cop at the time said, funnily enough, that cybercrime was considered to be, and I quote, a bit of a wank. It's funny, the irony of this.

Both the AFP and the early hacker community were, in a sense, financially impoverished. They couldn't just go out and buy lots of equipment. They had to completely improvise. I know the AFP had to beg, borrow and steal equipment from financial institutions, from other organizations. Could we borrow this? Can we have your old gear that you're throwing out? I mean, they were all but dumpster diving themselves and pleading, can we just have that for a month?

So they could experiment with it. When the AFP decided to get serious about cyber security, they had to rethink the whole way they gathered evidence. Basically, they had to link what was happening online with the real people that were doing it. And it was all so new that no-one really knew how to do it. So they actually developed this high-speed modem tapping capability, and it was one of the first in a criminal investigation.

Phoenix and Electron never saw it coming. In those final weeks, these hackers of their generation grossly underestimated just how close the police were getting. The AFP had tracked down the Realm hackers, and they were watching and ready to pounce and they needed to wait until they had gathered enough evidence and then get in and get them. And get them they did.

Electron, who's been hacking till late at night, and he gets up to go use the loo, have a wee in the wee hours of the morning. And the lights go out for reasons he couldn't figure out. And then all of a sudden, the police are bursting through his door or his window, coming into his room, you know, throwing him down on the floor. His father was, I think, completely surprised by the raid. I mean, he had some inkling that his son was up to a bit of mischief, but not the kind of mischief that would see

a half a dozen police officers raining down on the house in the middle of the night, not like that. And it's funny because, I mean, some of the hackers thought that they would be mentally prepared and used to joke that they would be mentally prepared for when the cops came, but I think none of them were. On April 2nd, 1990, less than a year after Australia first connected to the internet, Phoenix and Electron were arrested, and they were charged with getting unauthorized access

to computers in the US and Australia. In court, they both pleaded guilty, but kind of remarkably avoided jail time, getting several hundred hours of community service each. While Julian Assange graduated from the realm to create WikiLeaks and, you know, come to dominate the international spotlight for better or for worse, Phoenix and Electron, they both retired from the world of hacking and they've effectively disappeared.

Really? No one knows where they are? I mean, I tried to track them down reporting this story. I talked to a bunch of people who were around at the time, but it was really just a series of dead ends. I think all I could figure was that if people this skilled at computer science want to disappear, then they can kind of just disappear. So then what do you make of this whole story, of this endeavour?

What's the Aesop moral to this fable? Yeah, does it have to have one? Like, I don't know. Like, I understand that what they did and the way that they did it has, you know, ramifications that are still reverberating around us now, like 30 years later. But I also just think this is a story of a couple of bored teenagers in suburban Australia. Like, I was that bored teenager, you know? Like, I grew up in the suburbs in the 80s. There was nothing much to do. So, you just do stupid shit to keep yourself entertained. And, like, my stupid shit was throwing rocks into windows

in abandoned buildings, and their stupid shit was breaking into NASA, you know? Yeah, and, like, now that the internet has evolved to be so much more than it was then, I mean, bored and smart kids can, like, just break so many windows. They can break, like, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows XP. It's stressing me out. How can we dance when our app is turning?

Oh. How do we sleep while our beds are burning? Down, down, down. That's Science Versus. A version of this episode first played on Joel's podcast, Some of All Parts, which is amazing. And you've got to subscribe, Some of All Parts. It's a show produced out of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation

and a new season will be out early next year. My favourite episode, other than this one, is one called The Sound of Seizure. It's episode seven, so you've got to check it out, Some of All Parts. Links will be in our show notes, along with a transcript of this episode, full of citations,

of course. The original story was produced by Joel Werner. Science Versus is me, Wendy Zuckerman, Rose Rimler, Meryl Horne and Odelia Rubin. Our senior producer is Caitlin Sorey. We're edited by Blythe Terrell. Mix and sound design by Emma Munger. Music written by Emma Munger and Bobby Lord. Our fact checker is Michelle Harris. A huge thanks to Alex Goldman, Jason Scott, Chris Avron, Professor Graham Farr, Barbara Ainsworth, the Zuckerman family and Joseph Lavelle Wilson. Next week, we're exploring transgender.

Can science help us understand what makes us the gender that we are? I'm not going to be a mother. I'm not gonna be a mother. I'm gonna be a father. He was like, you know what? Okay. If you work hard, you can be anything you want to be. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. Back to you next time.