I went over to the apartment that night to fix things. I've found that hacking into systems is best done during the night, the late night.
I sat down at the computer, and copied the files from the floppy. I connected the computers to the phone lines. I took a final look at the script file, making sure that the files were in the spots that the scripts required.
I loaded up the telnet program, and started the script. I watched it for a while, as the script dialed into the systems, and did the commands. The script files had real quick timeouts, so that if I couldn't access the systems in a reasonable (and quick) amount of time, the script would disconnect and go onto the next system.
The script was working just fine. So I left it alone. It had been a long day, and I nodded off in front of the computer.
I woke up five hours later with a good kink in my neck. The script file was still working, looked like another couple of hours would finish it up. It seemed like it was working just fine. So I let it continue.
I went outside for some fresh air. It was about 4:00 am, a late spring morning. The sun wasn't up yet; there was just the barest hint of the sunrise in the east. The birds were quiet, all you could hear were the crickets chirping.
And I was feeling pretty proud of myself. I had discovered a big problem on the Net, and I was fixing it. And I was pushing the fix right back onto the people who had caused the problem.
You have to remember that the Net had gotten really important to everyone. This started back in 1998-99 and continued into 2001 and later. The Net was used for all communications between everyone and everything. There were private parts of the Net, of course, but everything was interconnected. And even though there were firewalls installed, most could be circumvented. If you subscribed to a security mailing list, it seemed that almost every day you would see a notice about some sort of exploit into a system.
And this one was pretty subtle. And it was everywhere, even in some private parts of the net.
There was an old rule I remember from some detective show I watched on cable TV. If you wanted to find out what was going on, you should "follow the money". And the "delay packet" program was not only watching for email packets, but for money packets: financial transactions from and to the 'target'. The FBI, the originators of the copy packet program that was in many routers on the Net, was looking at email and financial transactions. They were using the Program to "follow the money".
When I backtracked the delay/copy packets (the program does both, so I refer to it both ways) to their sources, I got into some financial systems. Remember that I had installed Herman the bot on all those systems. There were several hundred systems that I got into, and most got my packet bounce-back program installed.
My bounce-back program had a delay in it, so that it wouldn't start the bounce-backs until 35 days later. I figured that most systems' log files would have been recycled by then, so that it would be harder for anyone to track my hack into their systems.
I was able to get into many systems, some of them the basic Net system that you and I use to wander around the Net, and some into some private systems, including financial systems. That was OK, since the infected routers were in those systems too.
But I made a mistake. It was a simple one. I just copied the wrong file.
It's the little things that get you.