How a hack on Prince Philip's Prestel account led to UK computer law This week marks the 30th anniversary of arrests in the infamous Prestel hack case. It led to arrests, breached the Royal Family's security and helped give birth to the UK's first computer crime law. What began as a hack against the Prestel Viewdata system – which opened up access to Prince Philip's mailbox – later led to the …
"exasperated attempts to shock BT into action after BT showed no interest in bolstering the security of its system"
30 years later and BT have the same attitude with their Home Hub:
"BT has investigated similar issues and concluded that there is no fault with the way BT’s Consumer Home Hubs operate to allow VoIP calls over the internet."
Ho hum...
Meanwhile, upstairs at Buck House...
Liz - Honestly Philip, how could you have said such a thing? One just didn't know where to look one was that embarrassed!
Philip - I'm sorry honeybuns, but the message said it was from our Royal PR advisor, and it most definitely said "Ask an ethnic minority nurse whether many of her relatives from nig-nog land are working for the NHS..."
"It is a precedent in English criminal law that new laws will not be considered unless existing law is shown to be inadequate,"
Oh yes? Could someone explain that to the current crop of ministers (Con, Lab and Lib) who seem to write new laws in response to every headline in the Daily Fail, regardless of whether there are already perfectly effective laws on the Statute Book (just ones which the Peelers can't be arsed to enforce.)
you can blame the mass increase in the use of PCSOs for that...
Real Policemen are thin on the ground... and the new laws are being written as ticketable offences that PCSOs can issues tickets for without having to go to the trouble of amassing evidence and taking it to court... they just write up the ticket and it's up to the recipient to have to go to the trouble of taking time off work and turning up in court to challenge it or just accepting it and paying the 'tax'...
Dangerous driving is difficult to take through court and get a guilty verdict on, but a fixed penalty ticket for using a mobile phone is easy... it's binary, either you had the phone in your hand or you didn't... before hand they had to go to the trouble of having to prove that your phone use was actually dangerous.
And hence this new and dangerous wheeze of adding hundreds of pounds in "costs" should you dare to try and disagree with the officer and have your day in court.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-32078676
Pay the £60, or go to court and pay "from £150" in extra costs when found guilty.
Grayling really is a c*nt.
Nice link - seeing the MicroGnome, and info about Micronet 800 brought it all back to me: I had over time, 2 Prestel accounts, and loved chatting to TA's (Travel Agents) about various trips abroad that they had had, mainly as freebies from the holiday firms for the holidays that they sold.
And as Bulletin Board Systems sprung up, I was always looking for "Prestel-type" BBS's where I could use the Spectrum 48k + VTX5000 modem on 1200/75 7-E-1.
After that, I upgraded to a PC and got a modem that supported 2400 half or full duplex, 8-N-1 and found some software, such as ProComm to view many new BBS's. There was even some shareware software (the names escapes me right now) that allowed access to Prestel-type BBS's...as most software was stuff that was available in USA and was made available to UK users - does anyone remember the Night Owl series of CDROM's, full of shareware software?
Ah, such happy memories....so thanks for the link :)
The suspects in this case should never have been charged, as they weren't engaged in any criminal activity - as soon as they discovered there actually was a problem, they ceased from their unauthorized access, and notified the authorities.
This explains the case of the programmer prosecuted for double-checking whether the charitable site he donated to was legitimate that I read about in the Register some years back.
Having broad and severe laws against computer misuse is entirely reasonable. Enforcing them without a shred of common sense and discretion, however, is not.
In the early sets the user credentials were stored on a PROM inside the modem. This was done to prevent fraud and the use of non-licensed modems.
As soon as the modem would detect a carrier, it would send its login credentials...
However that modem could not detect rings. After all it was just meant to do outgoing calls. So what some people did was to get a modem for the answering side, call a BTX terminal at a trade show and wait till someone wants to dial into BTX. It'll then pick up the line, try to dial (which will be ignored), get your carrier, and send you its credentials.
The original description of the system that I read used a telephone dial to interact with the system rather than a touch-tone keypad.
Reading this article suggests that these two were unintentional collateral damage from the push to sell off BT -- BT had to be seen to be unresponsive, outdated and incapable of investing in the future in order to devalue it in the public's mind and so help make the case for privatization. (The fact that a private BT is just the same old / same old but private is irrelevant -- the sale's been made, the asset's gone, just another piece of the family silver that wasn't needed any more.)
"The original description of the system that I read used a telephone dial to interact with the system rather than a touch-tone keypad."
That's not possible. The breaks in the line that resulted would cause a modem to drop carrier. There would also be no facility for the * or # keys and there's no facility in a telephone exchange for those loop interruptions at the local exchange to be translated to something meaningful at the distant end - just noisy clicks over the carrier that serve no purpose. Loop disconnect signalling ceases to be useful once the distant line is answered.
Prestel didn't use MF4 signalling either - it wasn't possible to drive it from a phone. The MF4 signalling is inband and would have obscured the data carrier, causing a disconnect.
The Hacker's Handbook was one of my most prized possessions as a spotty teenager. Reading the text now (http://www.textfiles.com/etext/MODERN/hhbk), I have to smile at gems like this:
"Hacking is an activity like few others: it is semi-legal, seldom encouraged, and in its full extent so vast that no individual or group, short of an organisation like GCHQ or NSA, could hope to grasp a fraction of the possibilities."
They sure got that right...
The Hacker's Handbook is still a must-read for anyone today who really wants to understand computer security - admittedly, many of the technologies within are outdated, but when you consider this was 30+ years ago, taken in that historical context and thinking it through to present day you can easily see how Hacking* is here to stay, and hackers* are getting more and proficient at it.
*I suppose changing the terms "hackers" and "hacking" from their previous meanings (relating to modification or creation of "Heath-Robinson" electronic circuits typically) to encompass the term "computer hackers" (as they used to be known) is one of the first examples of "virtualisation"..
RIP Steve Gold. silentmodems.com.
To follow up on a couple of comments; prestel used V23 modems - it was originally designed to be used from a modified *television*, not a telephone. (It made sense in the 70s - most people had a TV, but they were still a bit too expensive to have a second..) Only later did they relent and allow Set Top Boxes/dedicated terminals/computer access!
Prestel sets had the same feature as BTX - you could set the customer ID in memory, and it would be sent out when an ENQ code was received. Whatever system it was connected to... Many viewdata-format BBS owners found prestel IDs in their logs ...
The Prince Philip prestel account was, I am told, set up for a demonstration and never actually used thereafter... I was promised screen grab from the "hack", but sadly never got them.. The System Manager ID used was, I understand 2222222222. If you consider that the public demo account was 4444444444 and Micronet's demo account 8888888888 ... It's a wonder they didn't get dropped in it beforehand.
Telecom Gold was a separate text-based service that offered messaging with other national services around the word and was thus great for business communications. There was a gateway from Prestel quite late on, but it was cumbersome.
And thanks for the links to viewdata.org.uk - that's my site :) I really must so some updates...
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