For the Inner Circle, cracking software is a challenge. For
the wannabe underground, collecting it is an obsession. For the software
industry, it's a billion-dollar nightmare.
By David McCandless
Sunday morning, 7 a.m., somewhere in US Eastern Standard
Time: Mad Hatter gets up, has a glass of Seagram's Ginger Ale and a cigarette,
and checks his machine, which has been running automated scripts all night. He
looks for errors and then reads his e mail. He has 30 messages from all over
the world: some fan mail, a couple of flames, a few snippets of interesting
information, three or four requests - some clear, some PGP-encoded. After a
quick espresso and another cigarette, he surveys the contents of a few private
FTP sites, filters through a bunch of new files, and then reroutes the good
stuff to his newsreader. After breakfast with the family, another wave of
automated scripts kicks in. The ISDN connection hums to life. A steady stream
of bytes departs his machine 128 Kbps and vanishes into the ether. By the end
of the day Mad Hatter, a ringleader of the software piracy group called the
Inner Circle, will have poured 300 Mbytes of illegal "warez" onto the
Internet.
Monday morning, 9 a.m., Greenwich Mean Time: Phil arrives
for work in Bracknell, England, in a suit and tie, just back from a few days
in Switzerland. Inside Novell UK's glossy five-story headquarters, he lets
himself into his office. It looks like a mad, bad bedroom - shiny desktops and
derelict ones, disemboweled minitowers and battered servers, every last
expansion slot distended with DAT machines, CD-ROM burners, extra hard drives.
A metal shelf unit contains a rack of monitors, some video equipment, spare
keyboards. Everything is wired insanely to a single ISDN line. After a coffee,
Phil boots up and skims his email. Twenty minutes later he has ceased to be
Phil. For the next week, he will pretend to be a trader, a courier, a cracker,
a newbie, a lamer, a lurker, a leecher. He is an undercover Internet
detective, a "technical investigator." He spends his days roving the Net,
finding people like Mad Hatter - and busting them.
This is a story about a universe with two parallel,
overlapping worlds. One is the familiar, dull world of the software industry,
with its development costs, marketing teams, profit, and loss. Phil's world,
at least part of the day.
And then there is warez world, the Mad Hatter's world, a
strange place of IRC channels and Usenet groups, of thrills, prestige, and
fear. A world of expert crackers who strip the protection from expensive new
software and upload copies onto the Net within days of its release. A world of
wannabes and collectors, whose hard drives are stuffed like stamp albums, with
programs they'll never use. And a world of profit pirates, who do exactly what
the software makers say: rip off other people's stuff and sell i t for their
own benefit.
In Phil's world, software is a valuable tool that commands
high prices - programs like QuarkXPress, Windows NT, and AutoCAD, costing
thousands of dollars a shot. But in Mad Hatter's world, those sticker prices
means nothing - except inasmuch as more expensive programs are harder to
crack, and that makes them the most desirable, spectacular trophies of all.
In Phil's world, warez are a menace. In warez world, Phil
is.
Filthy lucre
Phil's world is full of nasty numbers. Antipiracy organizations like the
Software Publishers Association and Business Software Alliance estimate that
more than US$5 million worth of software is cracked and uploaded daily to the
Net, where anyone can download it free of charge. A running scoreboard on the
BSA Web site charts the industry's losses to piracy: $482 a second, $28,900 a
minute, $1.7 million an hour, $41.6 million a day, $291.5 million a week. A
lot of that is garden-variety unlicensed copying and Far East-style
counterfeiting. But an estimated one-third leaks out through warez world,
which can be anywhere there's a computer, a phone, and a modem.
This is bad news for the business. Think of the lost
revenue! The lost customers! "It's a frightening scenario out there," says
Martin Smith, Novell's product-licensing manager for Europe, the Middle East,
and Africa. "We are seeing a very, very rapid development of crime on the
Internet."
He's not being paranoid: look at the thousands of messages
that pour through alt.binaries.warez.ibm-pc and the other Usenet sites that
are the warez world's pulsing heart. In a typical week, you'll see Microsoft
Office Pro and Visual C++, Autodesk 3D Stud io MAX, SoftImage 3D, SoundForge,
Cakewalk Pro Audio, WordPerfect, Adobe Photoshop 4.0 - virtually every
high-end package in existence. All this plus impossibly early betas and
alphas. Add a smattering of mundane Web tools, Net apps, registered shareware,
games, and utilities, and you have everything for the forward-looking computer
user.
Warez world's volumes are impressive, too - a good 65 Mbytes
a day of freshly cracked, quality new releases, chopped into disk-sized
portions (to make it from one hop to the next without clogging the servers),
compressed, and uploaded. Postings can vary from a few bytes (for a crack) to
hundreds of megabytes. The nine main warez sites alone account for 30 to 40
percent of the traffic on Usenet, an average of more than 500 Mbytes in
downloads every 24 hours, according to OpNet.
Bad news indeed for Phil and his friends, gazing at those
endless dollar signs. But warez world's leading citizens say that filthy lucre
is beside the point - at least for them and the hungry collectors they supply.
"No money ever exchanges hands in our forum," says
California Red, one of a half dozen of the Mad Hatter's Inner Circle
colleagues gathered for an IRC chat.
"We're on the nonprofit side of the warez feeding chain,"
insists another, TAG (The Analog Guy).
"It's a trade. You give what you have, get something you
need. No money needed," adds Clickety.
"We're not in it for the money. I would never sell something
I got from warez," California Red reiterates.
"Never made a dime," says Mad Hatter.
Even Phil admits these are not the people responsible - not
directly, anyhow - for the 500-Mbyte, $50 bundled software CD-ROMs from Asia
that are the industry's most prominent nightmare. Warez crackers, traders, and
collectors don't pirate software to make a living: they pirate software
because they can. The more the manufacturers harden a product, with tricky
serial numbers and anticopy systems, the more fun it becomes to break. Theft?
No: it's a game, a pissing contest; a bunch of dicks and a ruler. It' s a
hobby, an act of bloodless terrorism. It's "Fuck you, Microsoft." It's about
having something the other guy doesn't. It's about telling him that you have
something he doesn't and forcing him to trade something he has for something
you don't.
In other words, it's an addiction. Listen to a typical
dialog on an IRC warez trading channel:
"What you got?"
"Cubase three."
"What's that?"
"A music program."
"I got it. What else?"
"No, but it's Cubase three-oh-three - the latest bugfix."
"Shit. Gimme."
"It's not a patch. It's another seven meg download."
"Don't care. I want it."
Warez traders scour the newsgroups every night, planting
requests, downloading file parts they don't need. Warezheads feel unfulfilled
unless they've swelled their coffers by at least one application a day. They
don't need this Java Development Kit tool, or that Photoshop plug-in - the
thrill is in creating the new subdirectory and placing the tightly packed and
zipped file cleanly, reverently, into the collection. They may even install
it. Then toy absentmindedly with its toolbars and palettes before tucking it
away and never running it again.
Look at Michael, an 18-year-old warez junkie who's also into
weight lifting. In the evenings, while his friends pursue women, he's either
at the gym or home at his machine, combing the planet for the latest dot
releases of 3D Studio MAX. "I bought a Zip d rive so I could store it all. The
SoftImage rip is 20 disks. It took me three months to get the entire set." A
directory called WAREZ on his D:/ drive has $50,000 worth of cracked software,
more than any one person could ever use, ludicrous amounts of applications.
The more high-end and toolbar-tastic the app, the better. Without technical
support or manuals, he hasn't a clue how to use most of it. But it's there and
will stay there. "Warez give you a weird kind of feeling," he says. "You end
up collecting programs you don't need and never use. Just so you can say,
'I've got this or I've got that.' Or 'My version of Photoshop is higher than
yours.'"
Mad Hatter knows the feeling. "It's an obsessive game. We
see it every day - people begging for something to 'finish their collection.'"
He's not much better himself. "When I was out of work on disability, I was
totally motivated by the thrill of massive uploads, uploading at least 40
Mbytes a day for four months straight." Fellow Inner Circle member Clickety
used to spend 12 hours a day online until college got "awful heavy." Another,
Abraxas, spends 6 to 10 hours online on weekdays, 12 to 16 on weekends . But
Mad Hatter - who runs the semi-tongue-in-cheek, semi-poker-faced discussion
group alt.support.warez.recovery - is making progress: he's down to 30 Mbytes
a day. "My computer is online 24 hours a day," he says. "A warez pirate is
always online."
As gods
For Joe Warez Addict at the end of the cracked software food chain, membership
in a group like the Inner Circle is the ultimate collectible. A way to
legitimize their addiction, work for the common good, and, of course, get a
nice fresh supply of warez. T he drug addict becomes dealer. A sizable chunk
of Mad Hatter's daily mail is begging letters.
"I hope that if I ask this question, you will not be offended in any way. But
can I join the Inner Circle? I mean, I respect the Inner Circle ... but never
got a chance to join it. I was just wondering, can I? Please mail me back
ASAP."
Needless to say, this lone obsessive didn't get his chance.
Joining the Inner Circle is nigh on impossible. Reaching its members, though,
is easy enough. They keep a high profile, both in posting files on Usenet and
flaming lamers. When I first tried to contact them I thought that they
weren't so good at answering email, but it turned out their provider had just
been taken offline for illegal spamming. They relocated en masse, and my mail
had been lost in transit. So I posted a message to one of their newsgroups,
made sure it was correctly labeled, politely worded, and not crossposted (a
cardinal sin anywhere on Usenet). A reply arrived within eight hours. Mad
Hatter was more than happy to talk, but not on the phone, not in person, and
not on conventional IRC. "It has a bit of a habit of advertising my IP
address," he said. He and six other Inner Circle members set up their own IRC
server, configured a secret channel, and arranged a mutually convenient time
for a live interview. We met and talked for nine hours, in the bizarre
overlapping conversational style of IRC. They were frank and open, friendly
and articulate - and, like any new start-up, flattered by the attention.
A 17-strong force, the Inner Circle has its own iconography
and its own ideals. Its members are warez gods. They preach, police, advise,
flame. Their commandments? Good manners, good use of bandwidth, and good warez.
Give unto others as you would have the m give unto you. When the Inner Circle
is not sourcing warez from secret sites, its members are hunting and gathering
from more conventional sources. Clickety borrows fresh stuff from his clients.
A few have attended Microsoft Solution seminars. "Some of us are actual beta
testers, too," says Mad Hatter. "That's got to be scary for the developers."
One way or another, they help maintain the steady flow of warez onto Usenet.
From there, various wannabes, lamers, and aspirants copy their work to
countless BBSes, FTP sites, and Web pages.
These are not pimply teenagers devoid of social life and
graces, little ferrets who talk in bIFF text and make napalm out of soap and
lightbulbs; they're not downloading porn or being careful not to wake their
parents or spelling "cool" as "kewl." According to the interviews I
conducted, not one member is younger than 20; Clickety-Clack is the youngest
at 23. Most are 30-plus. Champion uploader Digital has been happily married
for 22 of his 46 years. Most are well-adjusted white males with day jobs and
thoroughly nuclear families. Founding member Abraxas has four kids, two over
18. Mad Hatter runs a small business from home. Technical guru TAG is a
computer animator. Irrelevant maintains commercial real estate. They're spread
all over the United States. A few are concentrated around Orlando, Florida.
Two or three others are California-based. For obvious reasons, that's as
precise as they like to get.
The Inner Circle was born of a sense of outrage that their
beloved pirate-wares newsgroups were going to pot. Warez had been around for
more than a decade, but the growth of the Internet was bringing clueless
newbies onto the boards. Warez needed a code o f ethics and a group of leaders
to set some examples. The leaders would be the best crackers - some of whom
became the Inner Circle.
"We took over alt.binaries.pictures.leek in early '96,"
explains Abraxas, "and then leaked the first Nashville [Windows 97] beta. The
groups were being overrun by clueless people. They needed help. They were
wasting Internet resources. Perhaps if we could encourage responsible use of
the available bandwidth, the whole Usenet warez 'scene' might last a while
longer. Warez was around before we were, and will be after, but we wanted to
help people and preserve resources using common sense."
As enforcers of the warez code, the Inner Circle can be
swift and sure. In April 1996, a pirate gang called Nomad, convinced that
posts to warez groups were being suppressed, decided to get themselves some
unsupervised elbow room. They selected an antiwork newsgroup -
alt.binaries.slack, relatively empty and off the beaten track - where software
could be slipped past news providers who had firewalled the usual warez
forums. Within 24 hours, the forum was flooded with the latest releases. The
slackers best irred themselves from their apathy and fought back, posting
files that told the pirates politely to push off. The warez kept coming. Then
the Inner Circle waded in on the slackers' side and castigated the invaders
for their poor manners. The pirates left meekly - though as a parting gift,
one of them posted Microsoft NT, Beta 3, all 48 Mbytes of it, in 5,734 parts.
The slackers' newsfeed was clogged for days.
A slightly disturbing revelation came out of the slacker
invasion. "After the first attempted takeover, we discovered just how scary
search engines like Deja News and AltaVista were," explains TAG. "You could
dig up real email addresses pretty easy on about 75 percent of people posting
warez." A worried TAG hacked into the code of Forte Agent, an industry
standard newsreader already cracked to bypass the shareware cripples, and
stripped away the X-newsreader header, giving posters far greater anonymity. A
s a side effect, the patch also reduced email spams by two-thirds. "The hack
went over so well with even nonwarez people that Forte eventually incorporated
it into Agent as a feature," TAG says proudly, "although I don't think they'll
be giving us credit. "
By mid-'96, Mad Hatter decided that police work was getting
to be too much of a chore. The newsfeed was being clogged by lamers,
requesters, and partials posters with "room-temperature IQs." Those genuinely
into warez were seeing less and less complete software uploaded; in its place
were hundreds of stray disks and clammy begging posts. In a rare fit of pique,
Mad Hatter took his revenge.
"If I continue to see the 'here's what I have' threads," he
wrote, "I will stop uploading here. I will not help and will laugh my ass off
that everyone is suffering. If for some reason you doubt that I make a
difference, it's your loss, as I personally have uploaded 85 percent of all
the shit that's getting posted now when it was zero day or still fresh. Keep
fighting over stale shit - I like to watch; keep posting partials, and I'll
stop upping my 100 to 300 Mbytes a week. In fact, I think I'll stop now. "
And stop the Inner Circle did. "We became burnt out on
educating the masses," Mad Hatter says. Instead, a range of guaranteed
lamer-free encrypted newsgroups was created for posting PGP-encoded warez, for
Inner Circle-approved members only. Those on the s elect interested-parties
list are given the codes to unlock the software, and anyone can apply to join.
Requirement: a reasonable knowledge of PGP. "Hopefully this is a sign you
won't be totally incompetent if you choose to post," says TAG. At the last count, the IPL had 500 subscribers, happily trading warez under the protection
of the latest in antilamer technology.
New economy
Warez on Usenet are basically gifts - testimony to the power and stature of
the giver. Files are posted for all to download, free. Just fire up your
newsreader, point it at an appropriate forum, and a list like a home-shopping
catalog of the latest software spills down your screen. There is no pressure,
but if you download and you like the vibe, you are expected to join the
community and contribute uploads whenever possible.
On the freewheeling IRC chat forums, warez are no longer
gifts - they're trade goods. The rewards are greater, but you've got to work
for them. The IRC channels are 24-hour stock exchanges cum street markets:
FreeWarez, Warez96, Warez4Free, WarezSitez, WarezAppz, and WarezGamez. There
are private channels, hidden areas, and invite-only piracy parties. And there
are no free lunches - every piece of software has to be paid for, in software.
The more recent the application, the higher its value. The ultimate bartering
tools are zero-day warez - software released by a commercial house in the last
24 hours, cracked if necessary and uploaded. The prizes for good zero-day
warez vary; you may get instant download status on a particular server, logins
and password s for exclusive FTP sites, or admission to the ranks of a
powerful cartel like the Inner Circle.
"Zero-day sites are very élite stuff," explains paid-up
élitist TAG. "People can get access only if they can move a few hundred Mbytes
a day. Most are invite only. The average IRC warez trader doesn't get that
kind of access unless he puts a lot of effort into it." Zero-day warez trading
is a fraught business; competition between groups often leads to malpractice.
"You get a lot of first releases with bad cracks," says TAG, "just so someone
can say they released first. Then two days later, you get a working crack. We
get most of our freshest stuff from private FTP and courier drop sites."
If your software collection is more mundane, you can trade
one piece directly for another. But with so many unpoliced egos in one place,
this can be risky. People will often welsh on deals, allowing you to pass them
a file and then disappearing into the ether. Cunning traders will barter with
"trojans" - zipped-up files of gunk, realistic enough to carry out half the
transaction. In extreme cases, someone may feed you a virus.
A step down from zero-day warez are drop sites, where fresh
cracks can be found for the cost of a download. Some drop sites run on the
trader's own machine; others piggyback on government or corporate mainframes,
shareware mirrors, and university networks . Often they're only in existence
for 24 hours, or on weekends when the sysops are at home.
Wherever you end up, you'll be struck by the extreme
politesse and measured courtesy, united by a common language. "Greets m8. Have
appz, gamez and crackz on 129.102.1.3. Looking for Pshop 4.0 beta. L8ter."
"Have 1.5 gigs of warez on anonymous T1. Upload for leech access. /msg me for
more info. No lamers."
Real money
Back in Phil's world, they can't quite cope with the idea of this ferocious
brag-driven barter economy cloaked in courtesy. The SPA and the BSA just don't
believe it. "Considering the amount of time they dedicate, they must be making
a return to justify i t," says Phil.
Casual observers of the BSA's Web site may well be convinced, if only because
they're stunned by the money that's involved - or seems to be. Fifteen point
five billion dollars a year! But those figures are based on the assumption
that if piracy were stopped, someone would be willing to pay for every
pirated copy in circulation.
"Billions of dollars?" scoffs East London BBS operator Time
Bandit. "I know guys who have thousands and thousands of pounds worth of
software, but the values are meaningless. Win95 may cost, like, £75 in the
shops, but in warez, it's worthless. It's just another file that you might
swap for another program, which might cost four grand. How much it costs in
real money is meaningless."
How do you ram home sales figures and quarterly losses to a
bunch of teenagers who see warez trading as their passport to acceptance on
the scurrilous side of a brave new world? How do you convince middle-aged men
who see incandescently expensive software as monopoly money in a vast, global
boardgame that what they're doing is "harmful"? In the software industry's
latest campaign, you scare them - or try. The BSA's mandate used to be "not to
capture pirates, but to eradicate piracy." Now exemplary punishment is the
big thing.
To do that, the BSA and the SPA are willing to push the law
to its limits. Prosecuting clear offenders - warez-vending BBS operators and
FTP-site pirates, for instance - is one thing; suing ISPs for carrying Web
pages containing pirate links and cracks is another. A typical case was
against C2Net, a Buffalo, New York-based ISP that the SPA sued for doing just
that. In what smacked of a token prosecution - or, in the words of C2Net's
president, Sameer Parekh, "legal terrorism" - the action by Adobe, Claris ,
and Traveling Software, under the aegis of the SPA, held the provider
responsible as "publishers" for the contents of its server, and for the
activities of individual account holders. The SPA eventually backed off but
threatens to revive the suit if C2N et and other ISPs don't agree to monitor
their users for copyright infringement. C2Net says it will not give in to
litigious "bullying."
And then there are straightforward busts. On January 12,
1996, Microsoft and Novell jointly announced a settlement with Scott W.
Morris, who was "doing business as the Assassin's Guild BBS ... billed ... as
the worldwide headquarters for two large pirate groups, Pirates With Attitude
(PWA) and Razor 1911." According to the statement, "marshals seized 13
computers, 11 modems, a satellite dish, 9 gigabytes of online data, and over
40 gigabytes of offline data storage dating back to 1992.... Mr. Morris agree
s to assist Microsoft and Novell in their continuing BBS investigations."
Phil, our undercover Internet detective, wasn't responsible
for that particular drama, but he's been integral to others. His latest
victory was in Zürich - "a landmark case against individuals and organizations
distributing unlicensed software on the Internet," he calls it. A 27-year-old
computer technician who helpfully called himself "The Pirate" was running an
FTP site filled to the brim with warez, including US$60,000 worth of
unlicensed Novell software. Phil, impersonating a trader, infiltrated the site
(admittedly no great feat), collected evidence, then handed it over to the
Swiss police. He accompanied them on the raid to ensure no evidence was
damaged. "He was one of a new breed who advertise on the Internet," says Phil.
"He made his files available via email requests and telnet." Swiss police
also raided the home of a BBS called M-E-M-O, run by "The Shadow," a friend of
The Pirate. Unfortunately, The Shadow was on holiday with his parents. The
family returned two weeks later to find their front door broken down; the son
was arrested. If convicted, the young pirates face up to three years in jail
and possible $80,000 fines.
The Pirate's mistake - aside from his suicidal choice of
nickname - was to plant himself geographically. Phil, a former corporate
network manager, was able to trace him through his FTP site's IP address. Phil
knows his networks; this makes him the perfect undercover agent - and one of
Novell UK's most envied employees. "I play on the Net all day," he says, "and
get paid for it."
There's a bit more to it than that. Phil and his
counterparts in Asia and the US are deployed to infiltrate pirate groups; to
study IRC; to get under the skin of the lamers, the dabblers, and the
professionals; to chat, seduce, charm, and interact with the denizens of this
bizarre over-underworld. Phil talks to traders in their own language,
understands the tricks and traps. After busting The Pirate, he says, "we were
talking and he was moaning about the sluggishness of his network. I pointed
out that, as ide from using LANtastic, he was using a 75-ohm terminator on the
back of his file server, slowing the whole thing down."
Now that he's back from Zürich, Phil will be getting some
new toys: the spoils of war. In many jurisdictions, any hardware deemed to be
part of an illegal setup can be taken by investigators and - if part of a
civil prosecution - can be worked in as part of the settlement. Once sucked
dry of evidence and incriminating data, the cannibalized machines are moved to
Bracknell and hooked up to the network.
But despite the resources at his disposal and his status as
a network ninja, Phil doesn't always get his man. "If there's a person out
there who has a decent level of technological awareness of the ways he can be
located, it's quite true to say he could successfully hide himself, or use a
system where it would be impossible to track him. It's technically possible
for them to bounce their messages all around the world and have us running
around like blue-arsed flies." It's a reluctant admission, but then Phil is
one person pitted against thousands.
Successful prosecutions aren't always that easy either. Take
David LaMacchia, an MIT engineering student who turned two of the school's
servers into drop sites and downloaded an estimated $1 million worth of
pirated software. LaMacchia was arrested in 199 5, only to have the case
thrown out by a judge who ruled that no "commercial motive" was involved.
Prosecutors tried charging him with wire fraud, but this was ruled an
unacceptable stretching of the law. LaMacchia walked free. "Bringing Internet
cases through the judicial system is a nightmare," says Novell's Martin
Smith. "Try talking to a judge about 'dynamically allocated IP addresses.' We
don't have a chance."
Tell that to the former warez traders of America Online,
which had a meteoric history as a pirate mecca. For years, instructions on how
to crack AOL's security and obtain free accounts were a Usenet staple. Online,
"freewarez" chat rooms were packed with traders, 24 hours a day. Megabytes of
warez were kept in permanent circulation.
Then came the crackdown of 1996, a dark period in warez
history. Goaded by software-industry watchdogs, AOL introduced countermeasures
to disinfect its system; alt.binaries.warez was removed from the Internet
newsfeed. CATwatch automated sentinels were pl aced on AOL's warez chat
channels, logging off anyone who entered. "Free" accounts were traced and
nuked. Michael, the weight-lifting trader and also an AOL veteran, says
everyone thought that "the FBI had infiltrated the warez groups, and we were
all going to get busted." On the cusp of the big time - a top pirate outfit
named Hybrid had a position open - Michael had been hoping to prove himself by
doing a CD rip of the soccer game Euro 96. "I was halfway through
removing the FMV and CD audio. I reckon I could've got it down from 58 disks
to 9. But then everything went haywire."
Profit-driven crackers are actually the easiest to catch:
they have links to the real world, starting with the money trail from credit
cards. And the easiest prey of all are BBSes, with their telltale telephone
connections. In January, FBI agents led by t he bureau's San Francisco-based
International Computer Crime Squad raided homes and businesses in California
and half a dozen other states. They seized computers, hard drives, and modems,
though no arrests were made. Along with Adobe, Autodesk, and other BSA
stalwarts, the list of software companies involved included Sega and Sony - a
hint that the targets included gold-disk dupers who counterfeit mass-market
videogames.
Mad Hatter was not impressed. "Wow, I'm in hiding," he
cracked the day after the raids. But "Cyber Strike" was, as BSA vice president
Bob Kruger said later in a statement, "the most ambitious law enforcement
action to date against Internet piracy" - specifically, the first US case in
which the FBI, rather than local police, took the lead. And that can't help
but augment the BSA's number-one antipiracy tactic for 1997: creating the
"perception of threat." And even warez gods don't necessarily want the FBI on
their case.
But bluster aside, people like Mad Hatter are
intrinsically - and deliberately - much harder to catch. The most prestigious
pirate groups - Razor 1911, DOD, Pirates With Attitude, the Inner Circle - are
tightly knit clubs whose members have known e ach other for years and call
each other "good friends" - though they rarely, if ever, meet. Joining is no
easy task. Positions become vacant only when members quit or are busted, or a
vote is taken to expand operations. Kudos and reputation are everything .
Unofficial homepages can be found here and there, constructed by acolytes who
celebrate the groups' best releases and victories. These are often padded out
with cryptic biographies and obituaries for those busted by the cops ("We feel
for ya!"). Despite the boasting, and the draping of their releases with
corporate motifs - logos, front ends, graphics, even signature tunes and Java
applets - crackers' true identities typically remain secret, even to one
another.
The anonymity, however, works both ways. Cloaked in his own
secret identity, Phil says he has managed to get deep within several major
groups in the past 18 months and is skimming the surface of several others. He
can convincingly portray himself as a caring, sharing warez god. "You make
some good friends," he says with a smile. And, it seems, you can end up pretty
impressed. "Some of these people are incredibly talented. The logic and
programming behind their setups are just amazing." Or maybe he's just
bluffing?
Warez and whyfores
In Phil's world, warez dealers are thieves. In warez world, the software
companies are the criminals.
"Most products you buy from a store can be returned if you
are unsatisfied," reads the beautifully crafted Warez FAQ, on the Inner
Circle's Web site. "Software cannot." The Inner Circle thus can claim to have
a practical motivation - providing "a place to find something you might want
to evaluate before purchasing." All right. "I personally have bought progs
that I demo'd first from warez," declares Clickety. "I have more warez than I
could ever hope to install on my poor drives. Tested a lot of crap also that I
was glad I didn't pay for - deleted it right off the bat. I have recommended
software to clients based upon using a pirate version at home."
"Software developers have families, and should be able to
support them," reads the Warez FAQ. "We do advocate buying your own software
if you really like it and use it heavily," adds Mad Hatter.
As Phil and his friends are well aware, the line between
piracy and ownership is very blurred. For example, it's commonplace for 3-D
animators and modelers to use pirated, cracked, or at least unlicensed copies
of their office software at home, for overtime or experimentation. In some
minds, it's even a "necessary evil," a slightly arcane marketing strategy, a
rather reckless approach to branding - look at Netscape. Indeed, many software
executives privately acknowledge that piracy - especially the attention it
brings to new releases - can be a valuable way to develop markets.
Novell's Martin Smith might disagree. He spends "99.9
percent" of his time fighting piracy, and he worries that the next generation
of browsers will seamlessly marry the Web with Usenet. "The newsgroups will be
a lot more accessible," he says, with something close to resignation, "which
is going to make the whole thing a lot more widespread and give these guys a
much bigger market. There's not much we can do, other than encourage ISPs not
to take them."
The difficulty is that, once it's up, a Usenet post can
generally be canceled only by the author or a sysop from the post's point of
origin, "server zero." Even if a cancel is issued, it takes time to ripple
across the network. A warez regular would be able to grab the file before it
was vaped. Some servers refuse on principle to honor cancels. "Even the most
diehard warez hater in news.admin.hierarchy would defend your right to be safe
from cancels," claims TAG. Many commercial ISPs have taken the industry's
encouragement and dropped the warez groups, but lots of free servers are
carrying on. And things aren't helped by the lack of a clear legal framework.
Imagine the scenario: a program that belongs to a US company is uploaded via a
router in Canada to a server in South Africa, where it is downloaded by a
Norwegian operating out of Germany using a US-based anonymous remailer, then
burnt onto a CD in the UK and sold in Bulgaria. "How would you prosecute that
mess?" asks Smith. "It's a jurisdictional nightmare."
And the profit pirates are getting more creative. Smith
cites the Web page of one warez guru, offering a premium-line phone number:
for $3 a minute, you can listen to details about the best warez FTP sites,
their addresses, and their login passwords. "Updated every three days for
your convenience," it declares. It also makes provisions for those dialing
from outside the US. The selling of information that leads to illegal use of
information - a difficult case to prosecute.
"Our strategy is to bring a critical mass of prosecutions,"
says Smith. "We'll take out some people who're downloading this material - the
gnats - and then we'll take out some of the larger, more organized guys. The
people who are packaging it up and zipping it onto CD-ROMs." Which might work
in a world where software was always bought on CD-ROM. But in pushing ever
deeper into electronic commerce, where more and more real commercial software
(browsers, little applets) is being given out for free, where t he Internet is
the ultimate distribution network, this looks a little ropey. Friction-free
markets and friction-free piracy run in tandem. The Inner Circle already has
its PGP-encoded giveaway mall in place.
Smith knows all this. There's just not much he can do about
it. "All it needs is one server in one country where there are no laws to
counter copyright theft, and there are plenty who will - the likes of Libya,
Bulgaria, and Iran. One country with a decent enough telephone infrastructure
is enough to undo a hundred busts in the West." Even if laws are
constitutional or enforced, larger biases come into play. "Try asking a Saudi
policeman to arrest a Saudi software pirate on behalf of an American company.
Forget it."
Dingle my dongle
The alternative to policing is burglar-proofing: making things harder to
crack. In principle, you might think that the gazillion-dollar software
industry would be able to produce uncrackable software. In practice, it can't,
although it certainly keeps trying.
Take the dongle, for example. It is the summit of copy
protection, an explicit melding of software and hardware. Without the right
hardware key - the dongle - plugged into the machine's parallel port, the
software won't run. And without the right software , the dongle is a mindless
doorstop. Calls to the dongle are woven into the code at the lowest level.
"The program may call the dongle every 150 mouseclicks, or every time you
print, or every time you select flesh tones as your desktop color scheme,"
says one dongle expert. If the response to the call is false or not
forthcoming, the program shuts down. All communications between the two are
encrypted by uncrackable algorithms. Internal security fuses ensure that any
attempt to hack the dongle mechanicall y will cause it to self-destruct.
"Nothing short of an electron microscope," says the expert, "could extract the
algorithm from that mess."
The biggest player in the dongle market is Rainbow
Technologies, whose Sentinel hardware keys are used by 55 percent of all
protected software. There are 8 million Sentinel keys attached to 8 million
printer ports the world over. The company calls it "the world's most effective
way to stop piracy" - a clarion call to crackers if ever there was.
The logical approach to cracking a hardware key is to create
a "pseudodongle" - a chunk of code that sits in memory, giving the correct
answers to any query. To do this, a cracker would have to monitor and trap
traffic to-ing and fro-ing across the parallel port, then use this
information to build an infallible query/response table. Unfortunately, if the
query is, say, six characters long, it can have more than 280 trillion
responses (281,474,976,710,700 to be exact). With the speed of modern
machines, this would take approximately 44,627 years to collate. With the
SentinelSuperPro dongle ("the most secure and flexible protection available")
the query length can be 56 characters - requiring a mere 10 125
years (in theory) for a complete table. However, the dongle in
SentinelSuperPro for Autodesk 3D Studio MAX was cracked in just under seven
days of its retail release - substantially less than the 44 millennia
emblazoned on the sales brochures. Other expensive high-end applications that
use Sentinel - including NewTek's LightWave 5 and Microsoft's SoftImage - have
ended up the same way: cracked, repackaged, and redistributed to every corner
of the Internet within weeks of their release. How? Instead of at tempting to
simulate the dongle, expert crackers simply remove its tendrils from the
program code, unraveling the relationship skein by skein, function by
function, call by call, until the application ceases to need the dongle to
function. Then it's ready for anyone and everyone to use - or, more likely,
gawk at.
Nobody says this is easy. There may be only three or four
crackers in the world who could manage such an opus. But with the Internet to
transmit the result, only one needs to succeed.
With the latest wave of dongles, warez world looked to
Russia to get the job done - and a shadowy group called DOD "won" the
contract. The self-styled "Warez Bearz of Russia and Beyond," DOD appears to
have arms throughout Europe, Asia, and the US. It undid Microsoft SoftImage's
dongle protection in two weeks, which wasn't easy. The crew riotously
celebrated in their "NFO" file: "Totally awesome work of glorious DOD cracker
- Replicator after five other crackers gave up! We decided not a do a crack
patch 'coz it will take too much time to code it ... you ask why? 'Coz there
are only 72 (!!!) EXEs patched. All options now work 100%!"
NFO files do more than brag or supply installation
instructions; they testify that the ware is a bona fide release, guaranteed to
work. And this is more than just posturing; a group's reputation is paramount.
Each release is painstakingly beta-tested. These are their products now,
their labors of love. Nobody wants to find a "bad crack" in his hands after a
seven-hour download. Nobody wants to be accused of being "unprofessional."
Nobody wants the ignominy of anything like the bad crack for Autodesk's 3D
Studio that made the rounds in 1992. For all intents and purposes it ran
correctly, all features seemed 100 percent functional. Except that the
dedongled program slowly and subtly corrupted any 3-D model built with it.
After a few hours of use, a mesh would become a crumpled mass of broken
triangles, irrevocably damaged. Cleverly, Autodesk had used the dongle to
create a dynamic vector table within the program. Without the table, the
program struggled to create mathematically accurate geometry - and event usually
failed. Many a dodgy CAD house saw its cost-cutting measures end in ruin.
Autodesk support forums and newsgroups were flooded with strangely
unregistered users moaning about the "bug in their version of 3D Studio." A
rectified "100 percent cracked" version appeared soon after, but the damage
was done. The Myth of the Bad Crack was born, and the pirate groups'
reputations tarnished.
But the pirates bounced back. They always do. And there's no
reason to think that there's any way to stop them. Software security people
are at an intrinsic disadvantage. Compare their job to that of securing
something in the real world that's valuable an d under threat - a bank, say.
Typically, only one set of armed robbers will hold up a bank at a time, and
they'll get only one crack at it. Imagine an army of robbers, all in different
parts of the world, all attacking the same bank at the same time. And in the
comfort of their own homes. Not just once, but over and over again. Imagine
that each set of robbers is competing against every other, racing to be first
in. Imagine, too, that some of the robbers are so technically adept that they
could have built the alarms, the safe, and even the jewels themselves. And
that they have cracked more than 30 banks with the same protection system. And
that they're learning from all their failures, because they're never caught.
No security could realistically resist such an onslaught. It may be that the
only way to avoid having your software cracked is to put no protection
whatsoever on it. No challenge, no crack.
Popularity only feeds the frenzy. Doom is a good
example. In 1993, id Software distributed the original shareware version of
its nasty-guns-in-nasty-dungeons masterpiece on bulletin boards, CompuServe,
and a then-little-known system called the Internet. Downloaded by more than 6
million people worldwide, Doom was a trailblazer in the world of modem
marketing. The shareware gave you a third of the game: if you liked it, you
had to buy the rest on disks. Millions did.
Doom and its makers became a
dream target. Weeks before Doom II's release, the sequel was available
on the Internet - not as shareware, but warez. And not just as a teaser, but
the whole damn thing. "Yeah, that was leaked," says Mike Wilson, id's
then-vice president of marketing, now CEO at Ion Storm. "Can't tell you how
much that hurt." The leaked copy was rapidly traced - rumors abounded that the
version was a review copy fingerprinted to a British PC games magazine - but
too late. It was already on Usenet, doing the rounds on IRC, filling up FTP
sites. The pirates were in ecstasy and id was left with recoding the final
retail release, to ensure future patches and upgrades would not work on the
pirated version. Then they shut the stable do or. No more external beta
testing; no more prelaunch reviews. "We assured ourselves it would never
happen again," says Wilson. "No copy of our games would leave the building."
Nice try. Quake, Doom's much-anticipated
follow-up, turned up on an FTP server in Finland three days before the
shareware come-on was due to be released. The pirate version was a final beta
of the full game - complete with eerily empty unfinished levels and bare,
unartworked walls. Within hours, it had been funneled to sites all over the
globe. IRC was swamped with traders and couriers desperate to download.
"Somebody actually broke into our then poorly secured
network and started to download it right before our eyes," Wilson recalls. "We
managed to stop the transfer before he got all of it. We traced the call, got
his name and address. He was pretty scared, but, of course, it was some kid.
We didn't pursue that one. It hurt, but not enough to put some little kid in
jail."
When the legitimate Quake hit the stores last year,
it was initially in the form of an encrypted CD, which let you play a
shareware version for free but would only unlock the rest on receipt of a
password, available for purchase by phone. The encryption scheme, an industry
standard called TestDrive, was eventually cracked by a lone European pirate
called Agony. And id's crown jewel was now available, courtesy a 29K program.
"In order to unlock the full version, you are supposed to call 1-800-IDGAME
S," Agony gloated in a posting. "Hahahahahah."
"We knew it was going to be hacked," says Wilson. "We of all
people knew. But we thought it was safe enough, certainly safer than Doom
II." And, truth to tell, it didn't matter too much. The gap between the
game's release and the warez version becoming widespread was enough for id to
sell the copies they expected. "Copy-protection schemes are just speed bumps,"
laments Wilson.
Nobody really knows how much actual damage cracking does to
the software companies. But as the industry rolls apprehensively toward the
uncertain future of an ever-more frictionless electronic marketplace, almost
everyone thinks piracy will increase. "The level of activity out there is
overwhelming. We know that we have to take action to take control of it. We
will continue to bring a critical mass of prosecutions," says Novell UK's
Smith. He doesn't sound all that convinced.
Somewhere back on the US East Coast, Mad Hatter has a final
swig of ginger ale and settles down to bed with his wife, White Rabbit. She
thinks his obsession is a wasted resource, but didn't complain when he
installed the latest version of Quicken on he r computer - a cracked
copy, of course. "We are all family men, married with children, day jobs,
dedicated accounts, and multiple phone lines," Mad Hatter says. "Our kids have
been looking over our shoulders for years. They will be the next couriers, the
next warez gods."
Is Your Child a Hacker?
| Warez Wars
| Razor 1911
| Scene History
| History of AOL
