DarkMarket_ Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You - Misha Glenny [37]
Then there were other servers whose passwords could be easily guessed, such as those that retained the default password from the manufacturer, usually something like ‘admin’ or – the most crushingly stupid password of all – ‘password’.
With other computers, he found a vulnerability in their security system (perhaps a little-used ‘port’ or point of entry that failed to ask for a password), which he could exploit to gain access to the inner workings of the server. It might have looked like rocket science to most computer users, but to Matrix it was like pushing at an open door and he could teach anyone how to do it in half an hour.
The first task Matrix had to undertake, once he had taken control of the server, was to fix the vulnerability that he himself had exploited to gain entry: he had to ensure that nobody else could attack it as he had done.
Having entered a server, he was then in a position to control it. If he wished, he could watch all the email and Internet traffic going in and out. But he didn’t wish: all he wanted to do was use these servers to receive, store and distribute games using fXp technology.
Matrix was just fifteen years old, but he could at will come and go in huge parts of the Internet that most adults did not even appreciate existed. His parents had no idea of the secret world he was exploring from his bedroom. Nor were they likely to find out – downloading games and software was patently illegal and an infringement of copyright laws, but the practice was at this time restricted to a very small number of users. It was regarded by manufacturers as an irritation, but not a terminal problem. The overwhelming majority of games were bought perfectly legally in stores or from sites like Amazon.
Matrix did not conceal his activity from his parents out of concern that he might be infringing intellectual property laws. No – the most wonderful thing about the Internet for teenagers, he realised, was that your parents would never (and in most cases can never) have the slightest notion of what you are doing. It was tough enough for parents to keep track of which DVDs were entering or leaving a house. But at least DVDs were physical objects that a mother or father could confiscate, should they find their thirteen-year-old watching an X-rated movie (always at the risk, of course, of provoking a tedious temper tantrum).
The Internet was changing all that. Children were growing up in a cyber environment which to them was self-explanatory and normal, but which parents found increasingly mystifying and treacherous to navigate. Teenagers were perfectly aware that their parents were at cybersea in this same environment. This in turn started to reinforce a sense that the Web was an area of their young lives from which parents could legitimately be banned. How many mothers and fathers have walked into a room and observed their teens minimising their Internet browser as their cheeks flush briefly? And if parents so much as glance at a Facebook page, even when the kids are accessing it in a public room, the child is transformed into a human-rights activist, accusing the beleaguered carer of acting like a Gestapo officer.
What many children and teenagers were less aware of was how, while they were able to pull the wool over their parents’ eyes, there were all sorts of people less easily fooled – and whose numbers were growing. These might include stalkers, advertisers, bullies, groomers, police, teachers and criminals. Only the most sophisticated users are able to cover up what they are actually doing on the Web.
In contrast to long-suffering parents, these other interested parties with a modicum of computer literacy were starting to track digital footprints that children and teenagers were beginning to leave over many years. Such records habitually included admissions of drug-taking and alcoholic binges, the insulting of teachers, the bullying of classmates and, increasingly,