Chapter 11: Net interactive (4 of 4) -- 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 the chapter on
 Usenet customs ).  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, as mentioned above, 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 pled 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.