Starting a Hacker Scene
by Derneval
It all started in October 1994. There was a hacker and virus writer congress in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and it was the first meeting of its kind in South America. My experience in the Internet and my thirst for virus knowledge drove me there. I had about eight years of computer handling and very little knowledge of the things happening in other places. What a big surprise to find a quite organized hacker scene there.
In Brazil, of which I wrote about in a previous article, the groups that did it never made their knowledge public. The Argentine hackers have their own magazine Virus Report and about four or five e-zines, all of them dealing with virus writing and a few other subjects. And they also had 2600 meetings.
When I got back to São Paulo, Brazil, still amazed by the congress, I told my friends at work about it and a few of them, quite important people, thought that setting up a hacker congress here would be a good thing, if one could make it a positive meeting. My gang was no longer around. The place where we used to gather, the computer lab at the Politechnick School, was now brand new, but the old fellas had found themselves good jobs and got replaced by new guys, none of whom knew me. I tried to make contact with them and found out that, yes, they had a sort of organization of their own, yes, they had internet access, no, they did not have the time nor the will to explore everything on the Internet. The virus specialist I talked with did know lots of tricks, but had no knowledge of the situation outside, nor the files about the Bulgarian factory or AIDS/GRIDS virus. Nothing. Practical experience they had quite a lot of. Everybody had something they chose to work with, but not too much. Very few people in my country can read enough English to read all the e-zines like Phrack.
The worst thing is that I did my approach out of the blue, without too much to show, not asking for any knowledge. A year and a half surfing on the Internet was very bad to me from the social point of view. The guys only sort of trusted me. Nothing more than that. They would not copy the disks I had prepared with info, nor would they share with me their knowledge - only a few bits. Once they had a talker, the first one in Brazil, that would have been a window for making more contact, but I decided on another approach. I thought it was necessary to "educate" the newcomers, so they'd share some of the hacker ethics and mentality. Many people don't realize the need to draw a line between right and wrong. The press would not print articles portraying my views on hacking, because very few people knew about that. And the preparations for a congress of such people would demand a lot of press coverage.
I started by doing a hand-mail server. People would send me a letter asking to be part of my list. I'd put them under an "alias" and send one or two files every day. Nothing about breaking in. Only tips about where to find stuff like this and one file or another about hacking exploits. I even started to put an ad on the soc.culture.brazil newsgroup about that. Later on, I found out about a server that, with ease, could be used as a list server. Then I built the "hackers" list. More or less at the same time, I invited the "rat-gang" and a few other guys to start a meeting.
I also planned a little zine in order to pass the tips, so I would not have to repeat things like: "Why I Am Doing That," "What is Hacking," etc. The name was important. The only one that stuck was Barata Eletrica (Electric Cockroach). My boss, of all persons, understood it. Later on, he asked me, "Why not something above ground?" I asked for help, but nobody had the time. I did it 100 percent on my own. The first issue was about a few things that should be common knowledge like the definition of hacking, how and why I was starting it, what was my goal, etc. A Phrack fan would not read it, for sure. It was probably also the first e-zine in Portuguese to be published on the Internet.
In those days, the newspapers would talk about the Internet, but it was not available outside some universities. One had to be involved with a research project to get the access or accept a commercial e-mail access via UUCP. CompuServe was almost unheard of (thank God, it still is). People had to send me mail in order to get the zine. The first one was completed because of the "would-be" first meeting, to which very, very few people came. That made me feel a little disappointed. But the worst was about to come a few days later.
Nobody from the Administration had bothered about my list, neither the other "hackers" list nor even the zine itself. Then I gave the tip about the zine to a newspaper. The number of people I sent files reached 80. But that same week, there was a break-in to a computer at the University of São Paulo. People heard about my list one day after that. Fate or not fate, I was wearing a 2600 t-shirt both days - the day the tip about the zine was published and later, when people from the administration called me to ask about my list. They knew me already. I was one of the guys with the highest number of hours using the Internet from the University of São Paulo. It was a good thing that they could not charge me for trying to guess the root password.
People there were paranoid. But even though I was wearing a 2600 t-shirt with a Blue Box stamped on it, they only asked me not to use the University computers to distribute it anymore. That was tough. But later, that turned out to be the best thing they could have asked me to do. It forced me to look for an FTP site. Of all places, I tried to ask the Electronic Frontier Foundation. That was the very site where I had spent many hours downloading things. To my surprise, they accepted. It saved me a lot of hours, sending it by mail to 80 people, from another Internet freenet account outside Brazil. There were always new people hearing about my zine. For a time, this distribution method worked. I even designed a program that would do it automatically. But it still took about four or five hours of work to send a new issue of my e-zine to everybody who asked for it.
Later on, the University of Santa Catarina agreed to put it at their URL. Pity it was not in HTML style. And another University put it at their FTP site. The "hackers" outside my University grew to about 200 people and most importantly, a guy asked me to help do an article about hackers for a paper magazine called Superinteressante (Superinteresting). There was a picture and the URL of my zine. The good thing was that the reporter understood my point of view and the article didn't portray hackers as some sort of public enemy.
The press, most of the time, didn't worry about learning a subject. They built on what somebody else wrote about it earlier. One good thing about my e-zine was that it contained data that helped some of them write about it. When a guy was caught playing with root privileges at the University of Pernambuco, the Veja magazine did not called him a hacker, but a computer pirate. In two other break-ins, the same thing happened. The guys even put a difference between a "hacker" and a "dark-side-hacker" or "cracker," the same difference stressed in my e-zine.
People informed me that because of my e-zine, I would always be banned from getting superuser access legally, even at the site of my job. The guys at the administration were paranoid about me. It did not matter if the superuser from a computer crashed by someone liked my zine. It did not matter if my zine was imitated by others from other Universities, some even asking me help.
Today, there is another guy also doing a hacker zine, much more aggressive than mine. The "hackers" list has got about 600 people in it. People are only beginning to learn about it. Almost every week, someone asks me to teach them how to use SATAN or some other cracking software. Others ask for something more complicated, like for me to be their teacher and guru. Most of them are between 14- and 19-years-old. Because of my articles crying about how hard it is to do it alone, people offer help, and the zine is being uploaded everywhere. Even the BBS at my job asked me for permission to put it there. This success is something I do not quite understand.
In order to write the articles, I had to almost quit hacking, both for lack of time and safety. The articles, by the way, were always very tame, in order to avoid any kind of legal problems. I made the mistake of using my own name, instead of using a nickname and tried another time to join some hackers together in a pub. I agreed to inform them of the place and time by computer. The administration of my computer "froze" my account just a few days before the meeting. It wrecked the thing. I could not send people the details. The last thing that happened was the translation of the book Hacker Crackdown by Bruce Sterling. I was gathering people, by e-mail, to translate piecemeal the book. Everybody would translate five or ten pages to Portuguese. But one day, my account was cracked and I complained about that to the guys at the administration. For me, that was the job of someone with superuser power.
They decided to check the files in my account. My name was already blacklisted, needless to say. When the guy that checked found a file named crack.gz, he didn't bother to see what was inside. Instead, the account was blocked. And later, a woman came to warn me that the only way to get my account back was to open, among witnesses, that particular file. And they told me to write down on paper "la raison 'etre" ("the reason for being") of the file. Signed. Some top guy in the administration would check it and let me have my account back. One of these days, perhaps in a month. I think they're delaying the process.
I gained a whole gang of Brazilian hacker admirers (and perhaps a few true experts) and lost my account. At least that's something to talk about.
A word to the wise: If you're thinking about setting up a hacker scene in your country, try not do this alone. Get informed about legislation. It always helps. Get any lists available and make it work for you. Draw a line of action. It's a process that can't be hurried. Store the e-mail you receive, but encrypt it. Use paper press, when available. Try to make friends among the news people. Use talkers, IRC, and even phone calls to make contacts. I only used mail and the hacker zine. It's not enough. If you have problems, spread the word about them. It can't make them any worse. Try to write really good articles. If you use foreign sources, make sure you understand what you read. Don't think you can make money out of it just because you get famous. Try to keep your job, your graduation, and your friends. You'll need them sometime in the future.
If your account gets "frozen," don't cry. Have another one ready. And above all, don't lose hope. The thing is to spread the seed. The rest is a matter of time.