Whenever we had discussed hacking back in those days in LA, Joe had always insisted that his workstation was as secure as Fort Knox. I thought, Oh, I’m going to have fun messing with him . Our love of pulling pranks was a common trait that had drawn Lewis and me together ever since our pranks with the drive-up windows at McDonald’s. I called Joe’s home phone number first to make sure he wasn’t there, then dialed the modem line at his house. Once I had logged in using Lewis’s account, it took me only a few minutes to discover that Joe hadn’t kept his security patches up to date. So much for Fort Knox. By exploiting a flaw in a program called "rdist," I popped root on his system. Let the games begin . When I listed the processes he was running, I was surprised to see "crack," the popular program for cracking passwords, written by a guy named Alec Muffett. Why would Joe be running that?