There are quite a few interesting details from another forum that I haven't seen -
Old 21st Jun 2008, 20:06 - Great story - x2
If he hadn't used his then girlfriend Tamsin's own e-mail address to make the purchase, he might well have been hacking freely to this day.
Tamsin, a librarian, is the other tragic figure in this story. For several years, McKinnon was living with her in a flat in her aunt's house in Hillfield Avenue, Hornsey, North London.
One can only imagine Tamsin's frustration (she has not responded to my requests for an interview) as his hacking obsession took over.
In late 2000, McKinnon even gave up his paid job as a computer administrator to devote himself to cyberspace infiltration. Soon, he stopped washing, became noctural, ate rarely, smoked marijuana and spent all day in a dressing-gown.
Understandably, Tamsin dropped him - although, out of fondness or insanity, she continued to share the flat with him. She really should have got out then, because his night-time activities were now alerting some very serious people.
Between early 2000 and autumn 2001, McKinnon hacked into 97 computer systems, belonging to the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, Department of Defense and NASA.
He could do this because their security was unbelievably lax. 'It was so easy,' he says today. 'I found out that the U.S. military use the Windows computer software system. And having realised this, I assumed it would probably be an easy hack if they hadn't secured it properly.'
McKinnon's cyber crowbar consisted of several readily available programmes 'glued' together by one of his own.
The package searched for 'blank passwords' - computers whose passwords hadn't been changed from their default setting. It was no harder than climbing a neighbour's fence. Online, he could scan '65,000 machines in little more than eight minutes'.
Once he had found a loophole, he was into the host network.
'It wasn't very clever,' he has said. 'There were no lines of defence. And I wasn't alone in doing it. Often, I could see that there were a number of other foreign hackers present at any one time.' So what did he see there?
One example he gives was an account by a 'NASA photographic expert'. They alleged that in 'Building 8' of the Johnson Space Center, images of UFOs were 'regularly airbrushed out' from the high-resolution satellite imaging. McKinnon claims this encouraged him to investigate further. 'I logged on to NASA. They had huge, high-resolution images stored in their picture files. They had filtered and unfiltered, or processed and unprocessed, files.
MORE:
http://www.cyclechat.co.uk/forums/sh...ad.php?t=14409