cheap or free. They are also illegal, but it is very rare,
almost unheard of, for a small-scale software pirate to be
prosecuted. Once "cracked" of its copy protection, the
program, being digital data, becomes infinitely
reproducible. Even the instructions to the game, any
manuals that accompany it, can be reproduced as text
files, or photocopied from legitimate sets. Other users on
boards can give many useful hints in game-playing tactics.
And a youngster with an infinite supply of free computer
games can certainly cut quite a swath among his modem-
less friends.
And boards are pseudonymous. No one need know
that you're fourteen years old -- with a little practice at
subterfuge, you can talk to adults about adult things, and
be accepted and taken seriously! You can even pretend to
be a girl, or an old man, or anybody you can imagine. If
you find this kind of deception gratifying, there is ample
opportunity to hone your ability on boards.
But local boards can grow stale. And almost every
board maintains a list of phone-numbers to other boards,
some in distant, tempting, exotic locales. Who knows
what they're up to, in Oregon or Alaska or Florida or
California? It's very easy to find out -- just order the
modem to call through its software -- nothing to this, just
typing on a keyboard, the same thing you would do for
most any computer game. The machine reacts swiftly
and in a few seconds you are talking to a bunch of
interesting people on another seaboard.
And yet the *bills* for this trivial action can be
staggering! Just by going tippety-tap with your fingers,
you
may have saddled your parents with four hundred bucks
in long-distance charges, and gotten chewed out but good.
That hardly seems fair.
How horrifying to have made friends in another state
and to be deprived of their company -- and their software -
- just because telephone companies demand absurd
amounts of money! How painful, to be restricted to
boards in one's own *area code* -- what the heck is an
"area code" anyway, and what makes it so special? A few
grumbles, complaints, and innocent questions of this sort
will often elicit a sympathetic reply from another board
user -- someone with some stolen codes to hand. You
dither a while, knowing this isn't quite right, then you
make up your mind to try them anyhow -- *and they work!*
Suddenly you're doing something even your parents can't
do. Six months ago you were just some kid -- now, you're
the Crimson Flash of Area Code 512! You're bad -- you're
nationwide!
Maybe you'll stop at a few abused codes. Maybe
you'll decide that boards aren't all that interesting after
all,
that it's wrong, not worth the risk -- but maybe you won't.
The next step is to pick up your own repeat-dialling
program -- to learn to generate your own stolen codes.
(This was dead easy five years ago, much harder to get
away with nowadays, but not yet impossible.) And these
dialling programs are not complex or intimidating -- some
are as small as twenty lines of software.
Now, you too can share codes. You can trade codes
to learn other techniques. If you're smart enough to catch
on, and obsessive enough to want to bother, and ruthless
enough to start seriously bending rules, then you'll get
better, fast. You start to develop a rep. You move up to
a
heavier class of board -- a board with a bad attitude, the
kind of board that naive dopes like your classmates and
your former self have never even heard of! You pick up
the jargon of phreaking and hacking from the board. You
read a few of those anarchy philes -- and man, you never
realized you could be a real *outlaw* without ever leaving
your bedroom.
You still play other computer games, but now you
have a new and bigger game. This one will bring you a
different kind of status than destroying even eight zillion
lousy space invaders.
Hacking is perceived by hackers as a "game." This is
not an entirely unreasonable or sociopathic perception.
You can win or lose at hacking, succeed or fail, but it
never
feels "real." It's not simply that imaginative youngsters
sometimes have a hard time telling "make-believe" from
"real life." Cyberspace is *not real!* "Real" things are
physical objects like trees and shoes and cars. Hacking
takes place on a screen. Words aren't physical, numbers
(even telephone numbers and credit card numbers)
aren't physical. Sticks and stones may break my bones,
but data will never hurt me. Computers *simulate* reality,
like computer games that simulate tank battles or
dogfights or spaceships. Simulations are just make-
believe, and the stuff in computers is *not real.*
Consider this: if "hacking" is supposed to be so
serious and real-life and dangerous, then how come
*nine-year-old kids* have computers and modems? You
wouldn't give a nine year old his own car, or his own rifle,
or
his own chainsaw -- those things are "real."
People underground are perfectly aware that the
"game" is frowned upon by the powers that be. Word gets
around about busts in the underground. Publicizing busts
is one of the primary functions of pirate boards, but they
also promulgate an attitude about them, and their own
idiosyncratic ideas of justice. The users of underground
boards won't complain if some guy is busted for crashing
systems, spreading viruses, or stealing money by wire-
fraud. They may shake their heads with a sneaky grin, but
they won't openly defend these practices. But when a kid
is charged with some theoretical amount of theft:
$233,846.14, for instance, because he sneaked into a
computer and copied something, and kept it in his house
on a floppy disk -- this is regarded as a sign of near-
insanity from prosecutors, a sign that they've drastically
mistaken the immaterial game of computing for their real
and boring everyday world of fatcat corporate money.
It's as if big companies and their suck-up lawyers
think that computing belongs to them, and they can retail
it with price stickers, as if it were boxes of laundry soap!
But pricing "information" is like trying to price air or
price
dreams. Well, anybody on a pirate board knows that
computing can be, and ought to be, *free.* Pirate boards
are little independent worlds in cyberspace, and they don't
belong to anybody but the underground. Underground
boards aren't "brought to you by Procter & Gamble."
To log on to an underground board can mean to
experience liberation, to enter a world where, for once,
money isn't everything and adults don't have all the
answers.
Let's sample another vivid hacker manifesto. Here
are some excerpts from "The Conscience of a Hacker," by
"The Mentor," from *Phrack* Volume One, Issue 7, Phile
3.
"I made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait
a second, this is cool. It does what I want it to. If it
makes a
mistake, it's because I screwed it up. Not because it
doesn't like me.(...)
"And then it happened... a door opened to a world...
rushing through the phone line like heroin through an
addict's veins, an electronic pulse is sent out, a refuge
from day-to-day incompetencies is sought... a board is
found. 'This is it... this is where I belong...'
"I know everyone here... even if I've never met them,
never talked to them, may never hear from them again... I
know you all...(...)
"This is our world now.... the world of the electron
and
the switch, the beauty of the baud. We make use of a
service already existing without paying for what could be
dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and
you
call us criminals. We explore... and you call us criminals.
We seek after knowledge... and you call us criminals. We
exist without skin color, without nationality, without
religious bias... and you call us criminals. You build
atomic
bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat and lie to us and
try to make us believe that it's for our own good, yet we're
the criminals.
"Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity.
My crime is that of judging people by what they say and
think, not what they look like. My crime is that of
outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me
for."
#
There have been underground boards almost as long
as there have been boards. One of the first was 8BBS,
which became a stronghold of the West Coast phone-
phreak elite. After going on-line in March 1980, 8BBS
sponsored "Susan Thunder," and "Tuc," and, most
notoriously, "the Condor." "The Condor" bore the singular
distinction of becoming the most vilified American phreak
and hacker ever. Angry underground associates, fed up
with Condor's peevish behavior, turned him in to police,
along with a heaping double-helping of outrageous
hacker legendry. As a result, Condor was kept in solitary
confinement for seven months, for fear that he might start
World War Three by triggering missile silos from the
prison payphone. (Having served his time, Condor is now
walking around loose; WWIII has thus far conspicuously
failed to occur.)
The sysop of 8BBS was an ardent free-speech
enthusiast who simply felt that *any* attempt to restrict
the expression of his users was unconstitutional and
immoral. Swarms of the technically curious entered 8BBS
and emerged as phreaks and hackers, until, in 1982, a
friendly 8BBS alumnus passed the sysop a new modem
which had been purchased by credit-card fraud. Police
took this opportunity to seize the entire board and remove
what they considered an attractive nuisance.
Plovernet was a powerful East Coast pirate board that
operated in both New York and Florida. Owned and
operated by teenage hacker "Quasi Moto," Plovernet
attracted five hundred eager users in 1983. "Emmanuel
Goldstein" was one-time co-sysop of Plovernet, along with
"Lex Luthor," founder of the "Legion of Doom" group.
Plovernet bore the signal honor of being the original
home of the "Legion of Doom," about which the reader will
be hearing a great deal, soon.
"Pirate-80," or "P-80," run by a sysop known as "Scan-
Man," got into the game very early in Charleston, and
continued steadily for years. P-80 flourished so flagrantly
that even its most hardened users became nervous, and
some slanderously speculated that "Scan Man" must have
ties to corporate security, a charge he vigorously denied.
"414 Private" was the home board for the first *group*
to attract conspicuous trouble, the teenage "414 Gang,"
whose intrusions into Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and
Los Alamos military computers were to be a nine-days-
wonder in 1982.
At about this time, the first software piracy boards
began to open up, trading cracked games for the Atari 800
and the Commodore C64. Naturally these boards were
heavily frequented by teenagers. And with the 1983
release of the hacker-thriller movie *War Games,* the
scene exploded. It seemed that every kid in America had
demanded and gotten a modem for Christmas. Most of
these dabbler wannabes put their modems in the attic
after a few weeks, and most of the remainder minded their
P's and Q's and stayed well out of hot water. But some
stubborn and talented diehards had this hacker kid in
*War Games* figured for a happening dude. They simply
could not rest until they had contacted the underground --
or, failing that, created their own.
In the mid-80s, underground boards sprang up like
digital fungi. ShadowSpawn Elite. Sherwood Forest I, II,
and III. Digital Logic Data Service in Florida, sysoped by
no less a man than "Digital Logic" himself; Lex Luthor of
the Legion of Doom was prominent on this board, since it
was in his area code. Lex's own board, "Legion of Doom,"
started in 1984. The Neon Knights ran a network of Apple-
hacker boards: Neon Knights North, South, East and
West. Free World II was run by "Major Havoc." Lunatic
Labs is still in operation as of this writing. Dr. Ripco
in
Chicago, an anything-goes anarchist board with an
extensive and raucous history, was seized by Secret
Service agents in 1990 on Sundevil day, but up again
almost immediately, with new machines and scarcely
diminished vigor.
The St. Louis scene was not to rank with major centers
of American hacking such as New York and L.A. But St.
Louis did rejoice in possession of "Knight Lightning" and
"Taran King," two of the foremost *journalists* native to
the underground. Missouri boards like Metal Shop,
Metal Shop Private, Metal Shop Brewery, may not have
been the heaviest boards around in terms of illicit
expertise. But they became boards where hackers could
exchange social gossip and try to figure out what the heck
was going on nationally -- and internationally. Gossip
from Metal Shop was put into the form of news files, then
assembled into a general electronic publication, *Phrack,*
a portmanteau title coined from "phreak" and "hack." The
*Phrack* editors were as obsessively curious about other
hackers as hackers were about machines.
*Phrack,* being free of charge and lively reading,
began to circulate throughout the underground. As Taran
King and Knight Lightning left high school for college,
*Phrack* began to appear on mainframe machines linked
to BITNET, and, through BITNET to the "Internet," that
loose but extremely potent not-for-profit network where
academic, governmental and corporate machines trade
data through the UNIX TCP/IP protocol. (The "Internet
Worm" of November 2-3,1988, created by Cornell grad
student Robert Morris, was to be the largest and best-
publicized computer-intrusion scandal to date. Morris
claimed that his ingenious "worm" program was meant to
harmlessly explore the Internet, but due to bad
programming, the Worm replicated out of control and
crashed some six thousand Internet computers. Smaller-
scale and less ambitious Internet hacking was a standard
for the underground elite.)
Most any underground board not hopelessly lame
and out-of-it would feature a complete run of *Phrack* --
and, possibly, the lesser-known standards of the
underground: the *Legion of Doom Technical Journal,*
the obscene and raucous *Cult of the Dead Cow* files,
*P/HUN* magazine, *Pirate,* the *Syndicate Reports,*
and perhaps the highly anarcho-political *Activist Times
Incorporated.*
Possession of *Phrack* on one's board was prima
facie evidence of a bad attitude. *Phrack* was seemingly
everywhere, aiding, abetting, and spreading the
underground ethos. And this did not escape the attention
of corporate security or the police.
We now come to the touchy subject of police and
boards. Police, do, in fact, own boards. In 1989, there
were
police-sponsored boards in California, Colorado, Florida,
Georgia, Idaho, Michigan, Missouri, Texas, and Virginia:
boards such as "Crime Bytes," "Crimestoppers," "All
Points" and "Bullet-N-Board." Police officers, as private
computer enthusiasts, ran their own boards in Arizona,
California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Missouri,
Maryland, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee
and Texas. Police boards have often proved helpful in
community relations. Sometimes crimes are reported on
police boards.
Sometimes crimes are *committed* on police
boards. This has sometimes happened by accident, as
naive hackers blunder onto police boards and blithely
begin offering telephone codes. Far more often, however,
it occurs through the now almost-traditional use of "sting
boards." The first police sting-boards were established in
1985: "Underground Tunnel" in Austin, Texas, whose
sysop Sgt. Robert Ansley called himself "Pluto" -- "The
Phone Company" in Phoenix, Arizona, run by Ken
MacLeod of the Maricopa County Sheriff's office -- and
Sgt. Dan Pasquale's board in Fremont, California. Sysops
posed as hackers, and swiftly garnered coteries of ardent
users, who posted codes and loaded pirate software with
abandon, and came to a sticky end.
Sting boards, like other boards, are cheap to operate,
very cheap by the standards of undercover police
operations. Once accepted by the local underground,
sysops will likely be invited into other pirate boards,
where
they can compile more dossiers. And when the sting is
announced and the worst offenders arrested, the publicity
is generally gratifying. The resultant paranoia in the
underground -- perhaps more justly described as a
"deterrence effect" -- tends to quell local lawbreaking for
quite a while.
Obviously police do not have to beat the underbrush
for hackers. On the contrary, they can go trolling for
them.
Those caught can be grilled. Some become useful
informants. They can lead the way to pirate boards all
across the country.
And boards all across the country showed the sticky
fingerprints of *Phrack,* and of that loudest and most
flagrant of all underground groups, the "Legion of Doom."
The term "Legion of Doom" came from comic books.
The Legion of Doom, a conspiracy of costumed super-
villains headed by the chrome-domed criminal ultra-
mastermind Lex Luthor, gave Superman a lot of four-color
graphic trouble for a number of decades. Of course,
Superman, that exemplar of Truth, Justice, and the
American Way, always won in the long run. This didn't
matter to the hacker Doomsters -- "Legion of Doom" was
not some thunderous and evil Satanic reference, it was not
meant to be taken seriously. "Legion of Doom" came
from funny-books and was supposed to be funny.
"Legion of Doom" did have a good mouthfilling ring
to it, though. It sounded really cool. Other groups, such
as
the "Farmers of Doom," closely allied to LoD, recognized
this grandiloquent quality, and made fun of it. There was
even a hacker group called "Justice League of America,"
named after Superman's club of true-blue crimefighting
superheros.
But they didn't last; the Legion did.
The original Legion of Doom, hanging out on Quasi
Moto's Plovernet board, were phone phreaks. They
weren't much into computers. "Lex Luthor" himself (who
was under eighteen when he formed the Legion) was a
COSMOS expert, COSMOS being the "Central System for
Mainframe Operations," a telco internal computer
network. Lex would eventually become quite a dab hand
at breaking into IBM mainframes, but although everyone
liked Lex and admired his attitude, he was not considered
a truly accomplished computer intruder. Nor was he the
"mastermind" of the Legion of Doom -- LoD were never
big on formal leadership. As a regular on Plovernet and
sysop of his "Legion of Doom BBS," Lex was the Legion's
cheerleader and recruiting officer.
Legion of Doom began on the ruins of an earlier
phreak group, The Knights of Shadow. Later, LoD was to
subsume the personnel of the hacker group "Tribunal of
Knowledge." People came and went constantly in LoD;
groups split up or formed offshoots.
Early on, the LoD phreaks befriended a few
computer-intrusion enthusiasts, who became the
associated "Legion of Hackers." Then the two groups
conflated into the "Legion of Doom/Hackers," or LoD/H.
When the original "hacker" wing, Messrs. "Compu-
Phreak" and "Phucked Agent 04," found other matters to
occupy their time, the extra "/H" slowly atrophied out of
the name; but by this time the phreak wing, Messrs. Lex
Luthor, "Blue Archer," "Gary Seven," "Kerrang Khan,"
"Master of Impact," "Silver Spy," "The Marauder," and
"The Videosmith," had picked up a plethora of intrusion
expertise and had become a force to be reckoned with.
LoD members seemed to have an instinctive
understanding that the way to real power in the
underground lay through covert publicity. LoD were
flagrant. Not only was it one of the earliest groups, but
the
members took pains to widely distribute their illicit
knowledge. Some LoD members, like "The Mentor," were
close to evangelical about it. *Legion of Doom Technical
Journal* began to show up on boards throughout the
underground.
*LoD Technical Journal* was named in cruel parody
of the ancient and honored *AT&T Technical Journal.*
The material in these two publications was quite similar --
much of it, adopted from public journals and discussions
in the telco community. And yet, the predatory attitude of
LoD made even its most innocuous data seem deeply
sinister; an outrage; a clear and present danger.
To see why this should be, let's consider the following
(invented) paragraphs, as a kind of thought experiment.
(A) "W. Fred Brown, AT&T Vice President for
Advanced Technical Development, testified May 8 at a
Washington hearing of the National Telecommunications
and Information Administration (NTIA), regarding
Bellcore's GARDEN project. GARDEN (Generalized
Automatic Remote Distributed Electronic Network) is a
telephone-switch programming tool that makes it possible
to develop new telecom services, including hold-on-hold
and customized message transfers, from any keypad
terminal, within seconds. The GARDEN prototype
combines centrex lines with a minicomputer using UNIX
operating system software."
(B) "Crimson Flash 512 of the Centrex Mobsters
reports: D00dz, you wouldn't believe this GARDEN
bullshit Bellcore's just come up with! Now you don't even
need a lousy Commodore to reprogram a switch -- just log
on to GARDEN as a technician, and you can reprogram
switches right off the keypad in any public phone booth!
You can give yourself hold-on-hold and customized
message transfers, and best of all, the thing is run off
(notoriously insecure) centrex lines using -- get this --
standard UNIX software! Ha ha ha ha!"
Message (A), couched in typical techno-
bureaucratese, appears tedious and almost unreadable.
(A) scarcely seems threatening or menacing. Message
(B), on the other hand, is a dreadful thing, prima facie
evidence of a dire conspiracy, definitely not the kind of
thing you want your teenager reading.
The *information,* however, is identical. It is
*public*
information, presented before the federal government in
an open hearing. It is not "secret." It is not
"proprietary."
It is not even "confidential." On the contrary, the
development of advanced software systems is a matter of
great public pride to Bellcore.
However, when Bellcore publicly announces a project
of this kind, it expects a certain attitude from the public
--
something along the lines of *gosh wow, you guys are
great, keep that up, whatever it is* -- certainly not
cruel
mimickry, one-upmanship and outrageous speculations
about possible security holes.
Now put yourself in the place of a policeman
confronted by an outraged parent, or telco official, with a
copy of Version (B). This well-meaning citizen, to his
horror, has discovered a local bulletin-board carrying
outrageous stuff like (B), which his son is examining with a
deep and unhealthy interest. If (B) were printed in a book
or magazine, you, as an American law enforcement officer,
would know that it would take a hell of a lot of trouble to
do
anything about it; but it doesn't take technical genius to
recognize that if there's a computer in your area harboring
stuff like (B), there's going to be trouble.
In fact, if you ask around, any computer-literate cop
will tell you straight out that boards with stuff like (B)
are
the *source* of trouble. And the *worst* source of trouble
on boards are the ringleaders inventing and spreading
stuff like (B). If it weren't for these jokers, there
wouldn't
*be* any trouble.
And Legion of Doom were on boards like nobody
else. Plovernet. The Legion of Doom Board. The Farmers
of Doom Board. Metal Shop. OSUNY. Blottoland.
Private Sector. Atlantis. Digital Logic. Hell Phrozen
Over.
LoD members also ran their own boards. "Silver Spy"
started his own board, "Catch-22," considered one of the
heaviest around. So did "Mentor," with his "Phoenix
Project." When they didn't run boards themselves, they
showed up on other people's boards, to brag, boast, and
strut. And where they themselves didn't go, their philes
went, carrying evil knowledge and an even more evil
attitude.
As early as 1986, the police were under the vague
impression that *everyone* in the underground was
Legion of Doom. LoD was never that large --
considerably smaller than either "Metal
Communications" or "The Administration," for instance --
but LoD got tremendous press. Especially in *Phrack,*
which at times read like an LoD fan magazine; and
*Phrack* was everywhere, especially in the offices of telco
security. You couldn't *get* busted as a phone phreak, a
hacker, or even a lousy codes kid or warez dood, without
the cops asking if you were LoD.
This was a difficult charge to deny, as LoD never
distributed membership badges or laminated ID cards. If
they had, they would likely have died out quickly, for
turnover in their membership was considerable. LoD was
less a high-tech street-gang than an ongoing state-of-
mind. LoD was the Gang That Refused to Die. By 1990,
LoD had *ruled* for ten years, and it seemed *weird* to
police that they were continually busting people who were
only sixteen years old. All these teenage small-timers
were pleading the tiresome hacker litany of "just curious,
no criminal intent." Somewhere at the center of this
conspiracy there had to be some serious adult
masterminds, not this seemingly endless supply of myopic
suburban white kids with high SATs and funny haircuts.
There was no question that most any American
hacker arrested would "know" LoD. They knew the
handles of contributors to *LoD Tech Journal,* and were
likely to have learned their craft through LoD boards and
LoD activism. But they'd never met anyone from LoD.
Even some of the rotating cadre who were actually and
formally "in LoD" knew one another only by board-mail
and pseudonyms. This was a highly unconventional
profile for a criminal conspiracy. Computer networking,
and the rapid evolution of the digital underground, made
the situation very diffuse and confusing.
Furthermore, a big reputation in the digital
underground did not coincide with one's willingness to
commit "crimes." Instead, reputation was based on
cleverness and technical mastery. As a result, it often
seemed that the *heavier* the hackers were, the *less*
likely they were to have committed any kind of common,
easily prosecutable crime. There were some hackers who
could really steal. And there were hackers who could
really hack. But the two groups didn't seem to overlap
much, if at all. For instance, most people in the
underground looked up to "Emmanuel Goldstein" of
*2600* as a hacker demigod. But Goldstein's publishing
activities were entirely legal -- Goldstein just printed
dodgy stuff and talked about politics, he didn't even hack.
When you came right down to it, Goldstein spent half his
time complaining that computer security *wasn't strong
enough* and ought to be drastically improved across the
board!
Truly heavy-duty hackers, those with serious
technical skills who had earned the respect of the
underground, never stole money or abused credit cards.
Sometimes they might abuse phone-codes -- but often,
they seemed to get all the free phone-time they wanted
without leaving a trace of any kind.
The best hackers, the most powerful and technically
accomplished, were not professional fraudsters. They
raided computers habitually, but wouldn't alter anything,
or damage anything. They didn't even steal computer
equipment -- most had day-jobs messing with hardware,
and could get all the cheap secondhand equipment they
wanted. The hottest hackers, unlike the teenage
wannabes, weren't snobs about fancy or expensive
hardware. Their machines tended to be raw second-hand
digital hot-rods full of custom add-ons that they'd cobbled
together out of chickenwire, memory chips and spit. Some
were adults, computer software writers and consultants by
trade, and making quite good livings at it. Some of them
*actually worked for the phone company* -- and for those,
the "hackers" actually found under the skirts of Ma Bell,
there would be little mercy in 1990.
It has long been an article of faith in the
underground that the "best" hackers never get caught.
They're far too smart, supposedly. They never get caught
because they never boast, brag, or strut. These demigods
may read underground boards (with a condescending
smile), but they never say anything there. The "best"
hackers, according to legend, are adult computer
professionals, such as mainframe system administrators,
who already know the ins and outs of their particular
brand of security. Even the "best" hacker can't break in
to
just any computer at random: the knowledge of security
holes is too specialized, varying widely with different
software and hardware. But if people are employed to run,
say, a UNIX mainframe or a VAX/VMS machine, then
they tend to learn security from the inside out. Armed
with this knowledge, they can look into most anybody
else's UNIX or VMS without much trouble or risk, if they
want to. And, according to hacker legend, of course they
want to, so of course they do. They just don't make a big
deal of what they've done. So nobody ever finds out.
It is also an article of faith in the underground that
professional telco people "phreak" like crazed weasels.
*Of course* they spy on Madonna's phone calls -- I mean,
*wouldn't you?* Of course they give themselves free long-
distance -- why the hell should *they* pay, they're running
the whole shebang!
It has, as a third matter, long been an article of
faith
that any hacker caught can escape serious punishment if
he confesses *how he did it.* Hackers seem to believe
that governmental agencies and large corporations are
blundering about in cyberspace like eyeless jellyfish or
cave salamanders. They feel that these large but
pathetically stupid organizations will proffer up genuine
gratitude, and perhaps even a security post and a big
salary, to the hot-shot intruder who will deign to reveal to
them the supreme genius of his modus operandi.
In the case of longtime LoD member "Control-C,"
this actually happened, more or less. Control-C had led
Michigan Bell a merry chase, and when captured in 1987,
he turned out to be a bright and apparently physically
harmless young fanatic, fascinated by phones. There was
no chance in hell that Control-C would actually repay the
enormous and largely theoretical sums in long-distance
service that he had accumulated from Michigan Bell. He
could always be indicted for fraud or computer-intrusion,
but there seemed little real point in this -- he hadn't
physically damaged any computer. He'd just plead guilty,
and he'd likely get the usual slap-on-the-wrist, and in the
meantime it would be a big hassle for Michigan Bell just
to bring up the case. But if kept on the payroll, he might
at
least keep his fellow hackers at bay.
There were uses for him. For instance, a contrite
Control-C was featured on Michigan Bell internal posters,
sternly warning employees to shred their trash. He'd
always gotten most of his best inside info from "trashing" -
-
raiding telco dumpsters, for useful data indiscreetly
thrown away. He signed these posters, too. Control-C had
become something like a Michigan Bell mascot. And in
fact, Control-C *did* keep other hackers at bay. Little
hackers were quite scared of Control-C and his heavy-duty
Legion of Doom friends. And big hackers *were* his
friends and didn't want to screw up his cushy situation.
No matter what one might say of LoD, they did stick
together. When "Wasp," an apparently genuinely
malicious New York hacker, began crashing Bellcore
machines, Control-C received swift volunteer help from
"the Mentor" and the Georgia LoD wing made up of "The
Prophet," "Urvile," and "Leftist." Using Mentor's Phoenix
Project board to coordinate, the Doomsters helped telco
security to trap Wasp, by luring him into a machine with a
tap and line-trace installed. Wasp lost. LoD won! And
my, did they brag.
Urvile, Prophet and Leftist were well-qualified for
this activity, probably more so even than the quite
accomplished Control-C. The Georgia boys knew all about
phone switching-stations. Though relative johnny-come-
latelies in the Legion of Doom, they were considered some
of LoD's heaviest guys, into the hairiest systems around.
They had the good fortune to live in or near Atlanta, home
of the sleepy and apparently tolerant BellSouth RBOC.
As RBOC security went, BellSouth were "cake." US
West (of Arizona, the Rockies and the Pacific Northwest)
were tough and aggressive, probably the heaviest RBOC
around. Pacific Bell, California's PacBell, were sleek,
high-
tech, and longtime veterans of the LA phone-phreak wars.
NYNEX had the misfortune to run the New York City area,
and were warily prepared for most anything. Even
Michigan Bell, a division of the Ameritech RBOC, at least
had the elementary sense to hire their own hacker as a
useful scarecrow. But BellSouth, even though their
corporate P.R. proclaimed them to have "Everything You
Expect From a Leader," were pathetic.
When rumor about LoD's mastery of Georgia's
switching network got around to BellSouth through
Bellcore and telco security scuttlebutt, they at first
refused
to believe it. If you paid serious attention to every
rumor
out and about these hacker kids, you would hear all kinds
of wacko saucer-nut nonsense: that the National Security
Agency monitored all American phone calls, that the CIA
and DEA tracked traffic on bulletin-boards with word-
analysis programs, that the Condor could start World
War III from a payphone.
If there were hackers into BellSouth switching-
stations, then how come nothing had happened? Nothing
had been hurt. BellSouth's machines weren't crashing.
BellSouth wasn't suffering especially badly from fraud.
BellSouth's customers weren't complaining. BellSouth
was headquartered in Atlanta, ambitious metropolis of the
new high-tech Sunbelt; and BellSouth was upgrading its
network by leaps and bounds, digitizing the works left right
and center. They could hardly be considered sluggish or
naive. BellSouth's technical expertise was second to none,
thank you kindly.
But then came the Florida business.
On June 13, 1989, callers to the Palm Beach County
Probation Department, in Delray Beach, Florida, found
themselves involved in a remarkable discussion with a
phone-sex worker named "Tina" in New York State.
Somehow, *any* call to this probation office near Miami
was instantly and magically transported across state lines,
at no extra charge to the user, to a pornographic phone-
sex hotline hundreds of miles away!
This practical joke may seem utterly hilarious at first
hearing, and indeed there was a good deal of chuckling
about it in phone phreak circles, including the Autumn
1989 issue of *2600.* But for Southern Bell (the division
of
the BellSouth RBOC supplying local service for Florida,
Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina), this was a
smoking gun. For the first time ever, a computer intruder
had broken into a BellSouth central office switching
station and re-programmed it!
Or so BellSouth thought in June 1989. Actually, LoD
members had been frolicking harmlessly in BellSouth
switches since September 1987. The stunt of June 13 --
call-forwarding a number through manipulation of a
switching station -- was child's play for hackers as
accomplished as the Georgia wing of LoD. Switching calls
interstate sounded like a big deal, but it took only four
lines of code to accomplish this. An easy, yet more
discreet, stunt, would be to call-forward another number to
your own house. If you were careful and considerate, and
changed the software back later, then not a soul would
know. Except you. And whoever you had bragged to about
it.
As for BellSouth, what they didn't know wouldn't hurt
them.
Except now somebody had blown the whole thing
wide open, and BellSouth knew.
A now alerted and considerably paranoid BellSouth
began searching switches right and left for signs of
impropriety, in that hot summer of 1989. No fewer than
forty-two BellSouth employees were put on 12-hour shifts,
twenty-four hours a day, for two solid months, poring over
records and monitoring computers for any sign of phony
access. These forty-two overworked experts were known as
BellSouth's "Intrusion Task Force."
What the investigators found astounded them.
Proprietary telco databases had been manipulated:
phone numbers had been created out of thin air, with no
users' names and no addresses. And perhaps worst of all,
no charges and no records of use. The new digital
ReMOB (Remote Observation) diagnostic feature had
been extensively tampered with -- hackers had learned to
reprogram ReMOB software, so that they could listen in
on any switch-routed call at their leisure! They were
using
telco property to *spy!*
The electrifying news went out throughout law
enforcement in 1989. It had never really occurred to
anyone at BellSouth that their prized and brand-new
digital switching-stations could be *re-programmed.*
People seemed utterly amazed that anyone could have
the nerve. Of course these switching stations were
"computers," and everybody knew hackers liked to "break
into computers:" but telephone people's computers were
*different* from normal people's computers.
The exact reason *why* these computers were
"different" was rather ill-defined. It certainly wasn't the
extent of their security. The security on these BellSouth
computers was lousy; the AIMSX computers, for instance,
didn't even have passwords. But there was no question
that BellSouth strongly *felt* that their computers were
very different indeed. And if there were some criminals
out there who had not gotten that message, BellSouth was
determined to see that message taught.
After all, a 5ESS switching station was no mere
bookkeeping system for some local chain of florists.
Public service depended on these stations. Public
*safety* depended on these stations.
And hackers, lurking in there call-forwarding or
ReMobbing, could spy on anybody in the local area!
They could spy on telco officials! They could spy on police
stations! They could spy on local offices of the Secret
Service....
In 1989, electronic cops and hacker-trackers began
using scrambler-phones and secured lines. It only made
sense. There was no telling who was into those systems.
Whoever they were, they sounded scary. This was some
new level of antisocial daring. Could be West German
hackers, in the pay of the KGB. That too had seemed a
weird and farfetched notion, until Clifford Stoll had poked
and prodded a sluggish Washington law-enforcement
bureaucracy into investigating a computer intrusion that
turned out to be exactly that -- *hackers, in the pay of the
KGB!* Stoll, the systems manager for an Internet lab in
Berkeley California, had ended up on the front page of the
*New York Times,* proclaimed a national hero in the
first true story of international computer espionage.
Stoll's counterspy efforts, which he related in a
bestselling
book, *The Cuckoo's Egg,* in 1989, had established the
credibility of 'hacking' as a possible threat to national
security. The United States Secret Service doesn't mess
around when it suspects a possible action by a foreign
intelligence apparat.
The Secret Service scrambler-phones and secured
lines put a tremendous kink in law enforcement's ability to
operate freely; to get the word out, cooperate, prevent
misunderstandings. Nevertheless, 1989 scarcely seemed
the time for half-measures. If the police and Secret
Service themselves were not operationally secure, then
how could they reasonably demand measures of security
from private enterprise? At least, the inconvenience
made people aware of the seriousness of the threat.
If there was a final spur needed to get the police off
the dime, it came in the realization that the emergency
911 system was vulnerable. The 911 system has its own
specialized software, but it is run on the same digital
switching systems as the rest of the telephone network.
911 is not physically different from normal telephony. But
it is certainly culturally different, because this is the
area
of telephonic cyberspace reserved for the police and
emergency services.
Your average policeman may not know much about
hackers or phone-phreaks. Computer people are weird;
even computer *cops* are rather weird; the stuff they do is
hard to figure out. But a threat to the 911 system is
anything but an abstract threat. If the 911 system goes,
people can die.
Imagine being in a car-wreck, staggering to a phone-
booth, punching 911 and hearing "Tina" pick up the
phone-sex line somewhere in New York! The situation's
no longer comical, somehow.
And was it possible? No question. Hackers had
attacked 911 systems before. Phreaks can max-out 911
systems just by siccing a bunch of computer-modems on
them in tandem, dialling them over and over until they
clog. That's very crude and low-tech, but it's still a
serious
business.
The time had come for action. It was time to take
stern measures with the underground. It was time to start
picking up the dropped threads, the loose edges, the bits
of braggadocio here and there; it was time to get on the
stick and start putting serious casework together. Hackers
weren't "invisible." They *thought* they were invisible;
but the truth was, they had just been tolerated too long.
Under sustained police attention in the summer of
'89, the digital underground began to unravel as never
before.
The first big break in the case came very early on:
July 1989, the following month. The perpetrator of the
"Tina" switch was caught, and confessed. His name was
"Fry Guy," a 16-year-old in Indiana. Fry Guy had been a
very wicked young man.
Fry Guy had earned his handle from a stunt involving
French fries. Fry Guy had filched the log-in of a local
MacDonald's manager and had logged-on to the
MacDonald's mainframe on the Sprint Telenet system.
Posing as the manager, Fry Guy had altered MacDonald's
records, and given some teenage hamburger-flipping
friends of his, generous raises. He had not been caught.
Emboldened by success, Fry Guy moved on to credit-
card abuse. Fry Guy was quite an accomplished talker;
with a gift for "social engineering." If you can do
"social
engineering" -- fast-talk, fake-outs, impersonation,
conning, scamming -- then card abuse comes easy.
(Getting away with it in the long run is another question).
Fry Guy had run across "Urvile" of the Legion of
Doom on the ALTOS Chat board in Bonn, Germany.
ALTOS Chat was a sophisticated board, accessible
through globe-spanning computer networks like BITnet,
Tymnet, and Telenet. ALTOS was much frequented by
members of Germany's Chaos Computer Club. Two
Chaos hackers who hung out on ALTOS, "Jaeger" and
"Pengo," had been the central villains of Clifford Stoll's
CUCKOO'S EGG case: consorting in East Berlin with a
spymaster from the KGB, and breaking into American
computers for hire, through the Internet.
When LoD members learned the story of Jaeger's
depredations from Stoll's book, they were rather less than
impressed, technically speaking. On LoD's own favorite
board of the moment, "Black Ice," LoD members bragged
that they themselves could have done all the Chaos break-
ins in a week flat! Nevertheless, LoD were grudgingly
impressed by the Chaos rep, the sheer hairy-eyed daring
of hash-smoking anarchist hackers who had rubbed
shoulders with the fearsome big-boys of international
Communist espionage. LoD members sometimes traded
bits of knowledge with friendly German hackers on ALTOS
-- phone numbers for vulnerable VAX/VMS computers in
Georgia, for instance. Dutch and British phone phreaks,
and the Australian clique of "Phoenix," "Nom," and
"Electron," were ALTOS regulars, too. In underground
circles, to hang out on ALTOS was considered the sign of
an elite dude, a sophisticated hacker of the international
digital jet-set.
Fry Guy quickly learned how to raid information from
credit-card consumer-reporting agencies. He had over a
hundred stolen credit-card numbers in his notebooks, and
upwards of a thousand swiped long-distance access codes.
He knew how to get onto Altos, and how to talk the talk of
the underground convincingly. He now wheedled
knowledge of switching-station tricks from Urvile on the
ALTOS system.
Combining these two forms of knowledge enabled
Fry Guy to bootstrap his way up to a new form of wire-
fraud. First, he'd snitched credit card numbers from
credit-company computers. The data he copied included
names, addresses and phone numbers of the random
card-holders.
Then Fry Guy, impersonating a card-holder, called up
Western Union and asked for a cash advance on "his"
credit card. Western Union, as a security guarantee,
would call the customer back, at home, to verify the
transaction.
But, just as he had switched the Florida probation
office to "Tina" in New York, Fry Guy switched the card-
holder's number to a local pay-phone. There he would
lurk in wait, muddying his trail by routing and re-routing
the call, through switches as far away as Canada. When
the call came through, he would boldly "social-engineer,"
or con, the Western Union people, pretending to be the
legitimate card-holder. Since he'd answered the proper
phone number, the deception was not very hard.
Western Union's money was then shipped to a
confederate of Fry Guy's in his home town in Indiana.
Fry Guy and his cohort, using LoD techniques, stole
six thousand dollars from Western Union between
almost unheard of, for a small-scale software pirate to be
prosecuted. Once "cracked" of its copy protection, the
program, being digital data, becomes infinitely
reproducible. Even the instructions to the game, any
manuals that accompany it, can be reproduced as text
files, or photocopied from legitimate sets. Other users on
boards can give many useful hints in game-playing tactics.
And a youngster with an infinite supply of free computer
games can certainly cut quite a swath among his modem-
less friends.
And boards are pseudonymous. No one need know
that you're fourteen years old -- with a little practice at
subterfuge, you can talk to adults about adult things, and
be accepted and taken seriously! You can even pretend to
be a girl, or an old man, or anybody you can imagine. If
you find this kind of deception gratifying, there is ample
opportunity to hone your ability on boards.
But local boards can grow stale. And almost every
board maintains a list of phone-numbers to other boards,
some in distant, tempting, exotic locales. Who knows
what they're up to, in Oregon or Alaska or Florida or
California? It's very easy to find out -- just order the
modem to call through its software -- nothing to this, just
typing on a keyboard, the same thing you would do for
most any computer game. The machine reacts swiftly
and in a few seconds you are talking to a bunch of
interesting people on another seaboard.
And yet the *bills* for this trivial action can be
staggering! Just by going tippety-tap with your fingers,
you
may have saddled your parents with four hundred bucks
in long-distance charges, and gotten chewed out but good.
That hardly seems fair.
How horrifying to have made friends in another state
and to be deprived of their company -- and their software -
- just because telephone companies demand absurd
amounts of money! How painful, to be restricted to
boards in one's own *area code* -- what the heck is an
"area code" anyway, and what makes it so special? A few
grumbles, complaints, and innocent questions of this sort
will often elicit a sympathetic reply from another board
user -- someone with some stolen codes to hand. You
dither a while, knowing this isn't quite right, then you
make up your mind to try them anyhow -- *and they work!*
Suddenly you're doing something even your parents can't
do. Six months ago you were just some kid -- now, you're
the Crimson Flash of Area Code 512! You're bad -- you're
nationwide!
Maybe you'll stop at a few abused codes. Maybe
you'll decide that boards aren't all that interesting after
all,
that it's wrong, not worth the risk -- but maybe you won't.
The next step is to pick up your own repeat-dialling
program -- to learn to generate your own stolen codes.
(This was dead easy five years ago, much harder to get
away with nowadays, but not yet impossible.) And these
dialling programs are not complex or intimidating -- some
are as small as twenty lines of software.
Now, you too can share codes. You can trade codes
to learn other techniques. If you're smart enough to catch
on, and obsessive enough to want to bother, and ruthless
enough to start seriously bending rules, then you'll get
better, fast. You start to develop a rep. You move up to
a
heavier class of board -- a board with a bad attitude, the
kind of board that naive dopes like your classmates and
your former self have never even heard of! You pick up
the jargon of phreaking and hacking from the board. You
read a few of those anarchy philes -- and man, you never
realized you could be a real *outlaw* without ever leaving
your bedroom.
You still play other computer games, but now you
have a new and bigger game. This one will bring you a
different kind of status than destroying even eight zillion
lousy space invaders.
Hacking is perceived by hackers as a "game." This is
not an entirely unreasonable or sociopathic perception.
You can win or lose at hacking, succeed or fail, but it
never
feels "real." It's not simply that imaginative youngsters
sometimes have a hard time telling "make-believe" from
"real life." Cyberspace is *not real!* "Real" things are
physical objects like trees and shoes and cars. Hacking
takes place on a screen. Words aren't physical, numbers
(even telephone numbers and credit card numbers)
aren't physical. Sticks and stones may break my bones,
but data will never hurt me. Computers *simulate* reality,
like computer games that simulate tank battles or
dogfights or spaceships. Simulations are just make-
believe, and the stuff in computers is *not real.*
Consider this: if "hacking" is supposed to be so
serious and real-life and dangerous, then how come
*nine-year-old kids* have computers and modems? You
wouldn't give a nine year old his own car, or his own rifle,
or
his own chainsaw -- those things are "real."
People underground are perfectly aware that the
"game" is frowned upon by the powers that be. Word gets
around about busts in the underground. Publicizing busts
is one of the primary functions of pirate boards, but they
also promulgate an attitude about them, and their own
idiosyncratic ideas of justice. The users of underground
boards won't complain if some guy is busted for crashing
systems, spreading viruses, or stealing money by wire-
fraud. They may shake their heads with a sneaky grin, but
they won't openly defend these practices. But when a kid
is charged with some theoretical amount of theft:
$233,846.14, for instance, because he sneaked into a
computer and copied something, and kept it in his house
on a floppy disk -- this is regarded as a sign of near-
insanity from prosecutors, a sign that they've drastically
mistaken the immaterial game of computing for their real
and boring everyday world of fatcat corporate money.
It's as if big companies and their suck-up lawyers
think that computing belongs to them, and they can retail
it with price stickers, as if it were boxes of laundry soap!
But pricing "information" is like trying to price air or
price
dreams. Well, anybody on a pirate board knows that
computing can be, and ought to be, *free.* Pirate boards
are little independent worlds in cyberspace, and they don't
belong to anybody but the underground. Underground
boards aren't "brought to you by Procter & Gamble."
To log on to an underground board can mean to
experience liberation, to enter a world where, for once,
money isn't everything and adults don't have all the
answers.
Let's sample another vivid hacker manifesto. Here
are some excerpts from "The Conscience of a Hacker," by
"The Mentor," from *Phrack* Volume One, Issue 7, Phile
3.
"I made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait
a second, this is cool. It does what I want it to. If it
makes a
mistake, it's because I screwed it up. Not because it
doesn't like me.(...)
"And then it happened... a door opened to a world...
rushing through the phone line like heroin through an
addict's veins, an electronic pulse is sent out, a refuge
from day-to-day incompetencies is sought... a board is
found. 'This is it... this is where I belong...'
"I know everyone here... even if I've never met them,
never talked to them, may never hear from them again... I
know you all...(...)
"This is our world now.... the world of the electron
and
the switch, the beauty of the baud. We make use of a
service already existing without paying for what could be
dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and
you
call us criminals. We explore... and you call us criminals.
We seek after knowledge... and you call us criminals. We
exist without skin color, without nationality, without
religious bias... and you call us criminals. You build
atomic
bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat and lie to us and
try to make us believe that it's for our own good, yet we're
the criminals.
"Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity.
My crime is that of judging people by what they say and
think, not what they look like. My crime is that of
outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me
for."
#
There have been underground boards almost as long
as there have been boards. One of the first was 8BBS,
which became a stronghold of the West Coast phone-
phreak elite. After going on-line in March 1980, 8BBS
sponsored "Susan Thunder," and "Tuc," and, most
notoriously, "the Condor." "The Condor" bore the singular
distinction of becoming the most vilified American phreak
and hacker ever. Angry underground associates, fed up
with Condor's peevish behavior, turned him in to police,
along with a heaping double-helping of outrageous
hacker legendry. As a result, Condor was kept in solitary
confinement for seven months, for fear that he might start
World War Three by triggering missile silos from the
prison payphone. (Having served his time, Condor is now
walking around loose; WWIII has thus far conspicuously
failed to occur.)
The sysop of 8BBS was an ardent free-speech
enthusiast who simply felt that *any* attempt to restrict
the expression of his users was unconstitutional and
immoral. Swarms of the technically curious entered 8BBS
and emerged as phreaks and hackers, until, in 1982, a
friendly 8BBS alumnus passed the sysop a new modem
which had been purchased by credit-card fraud. Police
took this opportunity to seize the entire board and remove
what they considered an attractive nuisance.
Plovernet was a powerful East Coast pirate board that
operated in both New York and Florida. Owned and
operated by teenage hacker "Quasi Moto," Plovernet
attracted five hundred eager users in 1983. "Emmanuel
Goldstein" was one-time co-sysop of Plovernet, along with
"Lex Luthor," founder of the "Legion of Doom" group.
Plovernet bore the signal honor of being the original
home of the "Legion of Doom," about which the reader will
be hearing a great deal, soon.
"Pirate-80," or "P-80," run by a sysop known as "Scan-
Man," got into the game very early in Charleston, and
continued steadily for years. P-80 flourished so flagrantly
that even its most hardened users became nervous, and
some slanderously speculated that "Scan Man" must have
ties to corporate security, a charge he vigorously denied.
"414 Private" was the home board for the first *group*
to attract conspicuous trouble, the teenage "414 Gang,"
whose intrusions into Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and
Los Alamos military computers were to be a nine-days-
wonder in 1982.
At about this time, the first software piracy boards
began to open up, trading cracked games for the Atari 800
and the Commodore C64. Naturally these boards were
heavily frequented by teenagers. And with the 1983
release of the hacker-thriller movie *War Games,* the
scene exploded. It seemed that every kid in America had
demanded and gotten a modem for Christmas. Most of
these dabbler wannabes put their modems in the attic
after a few weeks, and most of the remainder minded their
P's and Q's and stayed well out of hot water. But some
stubborn and talented diehards had this hacker kid in
*War Games* figured for a happening dude. They simply
could not rest until they had contacted the underground --
or, failing that, created their own.
In the mid-80s, underground boards sprang up like
digital fungi. ShadowSpawn Elite. Sherwood Forest I, II,
and III. Digital Logic Data Service in Florida, sysoped by
no less a man than "Digital Logic" himself; Lex Luthor of
the Legion of Doom was prominent on this board, since it
was in his area code. Lex's own board, "Legion of Doom,"
started in 1984. The Neon Knights ran a network of Apple-
hacker boards: Neon Knights North, South, East and
West. Free World II was run by "Major Havoc." Lunatic
Labs is still in operation as of this writing. Dr. Ripco
in
Chicago, an anything-goes anarchist board with an
extensive and raucous history, was seized by Secret
Service agents in 1990 on Sundevil day, but up again
almost immediately, with new machines and scarcely
diminished vigor.
The St. Louis scene was not to rank with major centers
of American hacking such as New York and L.A. But St.
Louis did rejoice in possession of "Knight Lightning" and
"Taran King," two of the foremost *journalists* native to
the underground. Missouri boards like Metal Shop,
Metal Shop Private, Metal Shop Brewery, may not have
been the heaviest boards around in terms of illicit
expertise. But they became boards where hackers could
exchange social gossip and try to figure out what the heck
was going on nationally -- and internationally. Gossip
from Metal Shop was put into the form of news files, then
assembled into a general electronic publication, *Phrack,*
a portmanteau title coined from "phreak" and "hack." The
*Phrack* editors were as obsessively curious about other
hackers as hackers were about machines.
*Phrack,* being free of charge and lively reading,
began to circulate throughout the underground. As Taran
King and Knight Lightning left high school for college,
*Phrack* began to appear on mainframe machines linked
to BITNET, and, through BITNET to the "Internet," that
loose but extremely potent not-for-profit network where
academic, governmental and corporate machines trade
data through the UNIX TCP/IP protocol. (The "Internet
Worm" of November 2-3,1988, created by Cornell grad
student Robert Morris, was to be the largest and best-
publicized computer-intrusion scandal to date. Morris
claimed that his ingenious "worm" program was meant to
harmlessly explore the Internet, but due to bad
programming, the Worm replicated out of control and
crashed some six thousand Internet computers. Smaller-
scale and less ambitious Internet hacking was a standard
for the underground elite.)
Most any underground board not hopelessly lame
and out-of-it would feature a complete run of *Phrack* --
and, possibly, the lesser-known standards of the
underground: the *Legion of Doom Technical Journal,*
the obscene and raucous *Cult of the Dead Cow* files,
*P/HUN* magazine, *Pirate,* the *Syndicate Reports,*
and perhaps the highly anarcho-political *Activist Times
Incorporated.*
Possession of *Phrack* on one's board was prima
facie evidence of a bad attitude. *Phrack* was seemingly
everywhere, aiding, abetting, and spreading the
underground ethos. And this did not escape the attention
of corporate security or the police.
We now come to the touchy subject of police and
boards. Police, do, in fact, own boards. In 1989, there
were
police-sponsored boards in California, Colorado, Florida,
Georgia, Idaho, Michigan, Missouri, Texas, and Virginia:
boards such as "Crime Bytes," "Crimestoppers," "All
Points" and "Bullet-N-Board." Police officers, as private
computer enthusiasts, ran their own boards in Arizona,
California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Missouri,
Maryland, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee
and Texas. Police boards have often proved helpful in
community relations. Sometimes crimes are reported on
police boards.
Sometimes crimes are *committed* on police
boards. This has sometimes happened by accident, as
naive hackers blunder onto police boards and blithely
begin offering telephone codes. Far more often, however,
it occurs through the now almost-traditional use of "sting
boards." The first police sting-boards were established in
1985: "Underground Tunnel" in Austin, Texas, whose
sysop Sgt. Robert Ansley called himself "Pluto" -- "The
Phone Company" in Phoenix, Arizona, run by Ken
MacLeod of the Maricopa County Sheriff's office -- and
Sgt. Dan Pasquale's board in Fremont, California. Sysops
posed as hackers, and swiftly garnered coteries of ardent
users, who posted codes and loaded pirate software with
abandon, and came to a sticky end.
Sting boards, like other boards, are cheap to operate,
very cheap by the standards of undercover police
operations. Once accepted by the local underground,
sysops will likely be invited into other pirate boards,
where
they can compile more dossiers. And when the sting is
announced and the worst offenders arrested, the publicity
is generally gratifying. The resultant paranoia in the
underground -- perhaps more justly described as a
"deterrence effect" -- tends to quell local lawbreaking for
quite a while.
Obviously police do not have to beat the underbrush
for hackers. On the contrary, they can go trolling for
them.
Those caught can be grilled. Some become useful
informants. They can lead the way to pirate boards all
across the country.
And boards all across the country showed the sticky
fingerprints of *Phrack,* and of that loudest and most
flagrant of all underground groups, the "Legion of Doom."
The term "Legion of Doom" came from comic books.
The Legion of Doom, a conspiracy of costumed super-
villains headed by the chrome-domed criminal ultra-
mastermind Lex Luthor, gave Superman a lot of four-color
graphic trouble for a number of decades. Of course,
Superman, that exemplar of Truth, Justice, and the
American Way, always won in the long run. This didn't
matter to the hacker Doomsters -- "Legion of Doom" was
not some thunderous and evil Satanic reference, it was not
meant to be taken seriously. "Legion of Doom" came
from funny-books and was supposed to be funny.
"Legion of Doom" did have a good mouthfilling ring
to it, though. It sounded really cool. Other groups, such
as
the "Farmers of Doom," closely allied to LoD, recognized
this grandiloquent quality, and made fun of it. There was
even a hacker group called "Justice League of America,"
named after Superman's club of true-blue crimefighting
superheros.
But they didn't last; the Legion did.
The original Legion of Doom, hanging out on Quasi
Moto's Plovernet board, were phone phreaks. They
weren't much into computers. "Lex Luthor" himself (who
was under eighteen when he formed the Legion) was a
COSMOS expert, COSMOS being the "Central System for
Mainframe Operations," a telco internal computer
network. Lex would eventually become quite a dab hand
at breaking into IBM mainframes, but although everyone
liked Lex and admired his attitude, he was not considered
a truly accomplished computer intruder. Nor was he the
"mastermind" of the Legion of Doom -- LoD were never
big on formal leadership. As a regular on Plovernet and
sysop of his "Legion of Doom BBS," Lex was the Legion's
cheerleader and recruiting officer.
Legion of Doom began on the ruins of an earlier
phreak group, The Knights of Shadow. Later, LoD was to
subsume the personnel of the hacker group "Tribunal of
Knowledge." People came and went constantly in LoD;
groups split up or formed offshoots.
Early on, the LoD phreaks befriended a few
computer-intrusion enthusiasts, who became the
associated "Legion of Hackers." Then the two groups
conflated into the "Legion of Doom/Hackers," or LoD/H.
When the original "hacker" wing, Messrs. "Compu-
Phreak" and "Phucked Agent 04," found other matters to
occupy their time, the extra "/H" slowly atrophied out of
the name; but by this time the phreak wing, Messrs. Lex
Luthor, "Blue Archer," "Gary Seven," "Kerrang Khan,"
"Master of Impact," "Silver Spy," "The Marauder," and
"The Videosmith," had picked up a plethora of intrusion
expertise and had become a force to be reckoned with.
LoD members seemed to have an instinctive
understanding that the way to real power in the
underground lay through covert publicity. LoD were
flagrant. Not only was it one of the earliest groups, but
the
members took pains to widely distribute their illicit
knowledge. Some LoD members, like "The Mentor," were
close to evangelical about it. *Legion of Doom Technical
Journal* began to show up on boards throughout the
underground.
*LoD Technical Journal* was named in cruel parody
of the ancient and honored *AT&T Technical Journal.*
The material in these two publications was quite similar --
much of it, adopted from public journals and discussions
in the telco community. And yet, the predatory attitude of
LoD made even its most innocuous data seem deeply
sinister; an outrage; a clear and present danger.
To see why this should be, let's consider the following
(invented) paragraphs, as a kind of thought experiment.
(A) "W. Fred Brown, AT&T Vice President for
Advanced Technical Development, testified May 8 at a
Washington hearing of the National Telecommunications
and Information Administration (NTIA), regarding
Bellcore's GARDEN project. GARDEN (Generalized
Automatic Remote Distributed Electronic Network) is a
telephone-switch programming tool that makes it possible
to develop new telecom services, including hold-on-hold
and customized message transfers, from any keypad
terminal, within seconds. The GARDEN prototype
combines centrex lines with a minicomputer using UNIX
operating system software."
(B) "Crimson Flash 512 of the Centrex Mobsters
reports: D00dz, you wouldn't believe this GARDEN
bullshit Bellcore's just come up with! Now you don't even
need a lousy Commodore to reprogram a switch -- just log
on to GARDEN as a technician, and you can reprogram
switches right off the keypad in any public phone booth!
You can give yourself hold-on-hold and customized
message transfers, and best of all, the thing is run off
(notoriously insecure) centrex lines using -- get this --
standard UNIX software! Ha ha ha ha!"
Message (A), couched in typical techno-
bureaucratese, appears tedious and almost unreadable.
(A) scarcely seems threatening or menacing. Message
(B), on the other hand, is a dreadful thing, prima facie
evidence of a dire conspiracy, definitely not the kind of
thing you want your teenager reading.
The *information,* however, is identical. It is
*public*
information, presented before the federal government in
an open hearing. It is not "secret." It is not
"proprietary."
It is not even "confidential." On the contrary, the
development of advanced software systems is a matter of
great public pride to Bellcore.
However, when Bellcore publicly announces a project
of this kind, it expects a certain attitude from the public
--
something along the lines of *gosh wow, you guys are
great, keep that up, whatever it is* -- certainly not
cruel
mimickry, one-upmanship and outrageous speculations
about possible security holes.
Now put yourself in the place of a policeman
confronted by an outraged parent, or telco official, with a
copy of Version (B). This well-meaning citizen, to his
horror, has discovered a local bulletin-board carrying
outrageous stuff like (B), which his son is examining with a
deep and unhealthy interest. If (B) were printed in a book
or magazine, you, as an American law enforcement officer,
would know that it would take a hell of a lot of trouble to
do
anything about it; but it doesn't take technical genius to
recognize that if there's a computer in your area harboring
stuff like (B), there's going to be trouble.
In fact, if you ask around, any computer-literate cop
will tell you straight out that boards with stuff like (B)
are
the *source* of trouble. And the *worst* source of trouble
on boards are the ringleaders inventing and spreading
stuff like (B). If it weren't for these jokers, there
wouldn't
*be* any trouble.
And Legion of Doom were on boards like nobody
else. Plovernet. The Legion of Doom Board. The Farmers
of Doom Board. Metal Shop. OSUNY. Blottoland.
Private Sector. Atlantis. Digital Logic. Hell Phrozen
Over.
LoD members also ran their own boards. "Silver Spy"
started his own board, "Catch-22," considered one of the
heaviest around. So did "Mentor," with his "Phoenix
Project." When they didn't run boards themselves, they
showed up on other people's boards, to brag, boast, and
strut. And where they themselves didn't go, their philes
went, carrying evil knowledge and an even more evil
attitude.
As early as 1986, the police were under the vague
impression that *everyone* in the underground was
Legion of Doom. LoD was never that large --
considerably smaller than either "Metal
Communications" or "The Administration," for instance --
but LoD got tremendous press. Especially in *Phrack,*
which at times read like an LoD fan magazine; and
*Phrack* was everywhere, especially in the offices of telco
security. You couldn't *get* busted as a phone phreak, a
hacker, or even a lousy codes kid or warez dood, without
the cops asking if you were LoD.
This was a difficult charge to deny, as LoD never
distributed membership badges or laminated ID cards. If
they had, they would likely have died out quickly, for
turnover in their membership was considerable. LoD was
less a high-tech street-gang than an ongoing state-of-
mind. LoD was the Gang That Refused to Die. By 1990,
LoD had *ruled* for ten years, and it seemed *weird* to
police that they were continually busting people who were
only sixteen years old. All these teenage small-timers
were pleading the tiresome hacker litany of "just curious,
no criminal intent." Somewhere at the center of this
conspiracy there had to be some serious adult
masterminds, not this seemingly endless supply of myopic
suburban white kids with high SATs and funny haircuts.
There was no question that most any American
hacker arrested would "know" LoD. They knew the
handles of contributors to *LoD Tech Journal,* and were
likely to have learned their craft through LoD boards and
LoD activism. But they'd never met anyone from LoD.
Even some of the rotating cadre who were actually and
formally "in LoD" knew one another only by board-mail
and pseudonyms. This was a highly unconventional
profile for a criminal conspiracy. Computer networking,
and the rapid evolution of the digital underground, made
the situation very diffuse and confusing.
Furthermore, a big reputation in the digital
underground did not coincide with one's willingness to
commit "crimes." Instead, reputation was based on
cleverness and technical mastery. As a result, it often
seemed that the *heavier* the hackers were, the *less*
likely they were to have committed any kind of common,
easily prosecutable crime. There were some hackers who
could really steal. And there were hackers who could
really hack. But the two groups didn't seem to overlap
much, if at all. For instance, most people in the
underground looked up to "Emmanuel Goldstein" of
*2600* as a hacker demigod. But Goldstein's publishing
activities were entirely legal -- Goldstein just printed
dodgy stuff and talked about politics, he didn't even hack.
When you came right down to it, Goldstein spent half his
time complaining that computer security *wasn't strong
enough* and ought to be drastically improved across the
board!
Truly heavy-duty hackers, those with serious
technical skills who had earned the respect of the
underground, never stole money or abused credit cards.
Sometimes they might abuse phone-codes -- but often,
they seemed to get all the free phone-time they wanted
without leaving a trace of any kind.
The best hackers, the most powerful and technically
accomplished, were not professional fraudsters. They
raided computers habitually, but wouldn't alter anything,
or damage anything. They didn't even steal computer
equipment -- most had day-jobs messing with hardware,
and could get all the cheap secondhand equipment they
wanted. The hottest hackers, unlike the teenage
wannabes, weren't snobs about fancy or expensive
hardware. Their machines tended to be raw second-hand
digital hot-rods full of custom add-ons that they'd cobbled
together out of chickenwire, memory chips and spit. Some
were adults, computer software writers and consultants by
trade, and making quite good livings at it. Some of them
*actually worked for the phone company* -- and for those,
the "hackers" actually found under the skirts of Ma Bell,
there would be little mercy in 1990.
It has long been an article of faith in the
underground that the "best" hackers never get caught.
They're far too smart, supposedly. They never get caught
because they never boast, brag, or strut. These demigods
may read underground boards (with a condescending
smile), but they never say anything there. The "best"
hackers, according to legend, are adult computer
professionals, such as mainframe system administrators,
who already know the ins and outs of their particular
brand of security. Even the "best" hacker can't break in
to
just any computer at random: the knowledge of security
holes is too specialized, varying widely with different
software and hardware. But if people are employed to run,
say, a UNIX mainframe or a VAX/VMS machine, then
they tend to learn security from the inside out. Armed
with this knowledge, they can look into most anybody
else's UNIX or VMS without much trouble or risk, if they
want to. And, according to hacker legend, of course they
want to, so of course they do. They just don't make a big
deal of what they've done. So nobody ever finds out.
It is also an article of faith in the underground that
professional telco people "phreak" like crazed weasels.
*Of course* they spy on Madonna's phone calls -- I mean,
*wouldn't you?* Of course they give themselves free long-
distance -- why the hell should *they* pay, they're running
the whole shebang!
It has, as a third matter, long been an article of
faith
that any hacker caught can escape serious punishment if
he confesses *how he did it.* Hackers seem to believe
that governmental agencies and large corporations are
blundering about in cyberspace like eyeless jellyfish or
cave salamanders. They feel that these large but
pathetically stupid organizations will proffer up genuine
gratitude, and perhaps even a security post and a big
salary, to the hot-shot intruder who will deign to reveal to
them the supreme genius of his modus operandi.
In the case of longtime LoD member "Control-C,"
this actually happened, more or less. Control-C had led
Michigan Bell a merry chase, and when captured in 1987,
he turned out to be a bright and apparently physically
harmless young fanatic, fascinated by phones. There was
no chance in hell that Control-C would actually repay the
enormous and largely theoretical sums in long-distance
service that he had accumulated from Michigan Bell. He
could always be indicted for fraud or computer-intrusion,
but there seemed little real point in this -- he hadn't
physically damaged any computer. He'd just plead guilty,
and he'd likely get the usual slap-on-the-wrist, and in the
meantime it would be a big hassle for Michigan Bell just
to bring up the case. But if kept on the payroll, he might
at
least keep his fellow hackers at bay.
There were uses for him. For instance, a contrite
Control-C was featured on Michigan Bell internal posters,
sternly warning employees to shred their trash. He'd
always gotten most of his best inside info from "trashing" -
-
raiding telco dumpsters, for useful data indiscreetly
thrown away. He signed these posters, too. Control-C had
become something like a Michigan Bell mascot. And in
fact, Control-C *did* keep other hackers at bay. Little
hackers were quite scared of Control-C and his heavy-duty
Legion of Doom friends. And big hackers *were* his
friends and didn't want to screw up his cushy situation.
No matter what one might say of LoD, they did stick
together. When "Wasp," an apparently genuinely
malicious New York hacker, began crashing Bellcore
machines, Control-C received swift volunteer help from
"the Mentor" and the Georgia LoD wing made up of "The
Prophet," "Urvile," and "Leftist." Using Mentor's Phoenix
Project board to coordinate, the Doomsters helped telco
security to trap Wasp, by luring him into a machine with a
tap and line-trace installed. Wasp lost. LoD won! And
my, did they brag.
Urvile, Prophet and Leftist were well-qualified for
this activity, probably more so even than the quite
accomplished Control-C. The Georgia boys knew all about
phone switching-stations. Though relative johnny-come-
latelies in the Legion of Doom, they were considered some
of LoD's heaviest guys, into the hairiest systems around.
They had the good fortune to live in or near Atlanta, home
of the sleepy and apparently tolerant BellSouth RBOC.
As RBOC security went, BellSouth were "cake." US
West (of Arizona, the Rockies and the Pacific Northwest)
were tough and aggressive, probably the heaviest RBOC
around. Pacific Bell, California's PacBell, were sleek,
high-
tech, and longtime veterans of the LA phone-phreak wars.
NYNEX had the misfortune to run the New York City area,
and were warily prepared for most anything. Even
Michigan Bell, a division of the Ameritech RBOC, at least
had the elementary sense to hire their own hacker as a
useful scarecrow. But BellSouth, even though their
corporate P.R. proclaimed them to have "Everything You
Expect From a Leader," were pathetic.
When rumor about LoD's mastery of Georgia's
switching network got around to BellSouth through
Bellcore and telco security scuttlebutt, they at first
refused
to believe it. If you paid serious attention to every
rumor
out and about these hacker kids, you would hear all kinds
of wacko saucer-nut nonsense: that the National Security
Agency monitored all American phone calls, that the CIA
and DEA tracked traffic on bulletin-boards with word-
analysis programs, that the Condor could start World
War III from a payphone.
If there were hackers into BellSouth switching-
stations, then how come nothing had happened? Nothing
had been hurt. BellSouth's machines weren't crashing.
BellSouth wasn't suffering especially badly from fraud.
BellSouth's customers weren't complaining. BellSouth
was headquartered in Atlanta, ambitious metropolis of the
new high-tech Sunbelt; and BellSouth was upgrading its
network by leaps and bounds, digitizing the works left right
and center. They could hardly be considered sluggish or
naive. BellSouth's technical expertise was second to none,
thank you kindly.
But then came the Florida business.
On June 13, 1989, callers to the Palm Beach County
Probation Department, in Delray Beach, Florida, found
themselves involved in a remarkable discussion with a
phone-sex worker named "Tina" in New York State.
Somehow, *any* call to this probation office near Miami
was instantly and magically transported across state lines,
at no extra charge to the user, to a pornographic phone-
sex hotline hundreds of miles away!
This practical joke may seem utterly hilarious at first
hearing, and indeed there was a good deal of chuckling
about it in phone phreak circles, including the Autumn
1989 issue of *2600.* But for Southern Bell (the division
of
the BellSouth RBOC supplying local service for Florida,
Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina), this was a
smoking gun. For the first time ever, a computer intruder
had broken into a BellSouth central office switching
station and re-programmed it!
Or so BellSouth thought in June 1989. Actually, LoD
members had been frolicking harmlessly in BellSouth
switches since September 1987. The stunt of June 13 --
call-forwarding a number through manipulation of a
switching station -- was child's play for hackers as
accomplished as the Georgia wing of LoD. Switching calls
interstate sounded like a big deal, but it took only four
lines of code to accomplish this. An easy, yet more
discreet, stunt, would be to call-forward another number to
your own house. If you were careful and considerate, and
changed the software back later, then not a soul would
know. Except you. And whoever you had bragged to about
it.
As for BellSouth, what they didn't know wouldn't hurt
them.
Except now somebody had blown the whole thing
wide open, and BellSouth knew.
A now alerted and considerably paranoid BellSouth
began searching switches right and left for signs of
impropriety, in that hot summer of 1989. No fewer than
forty-two BellSouth employees were put on 12-hour shifts,
twenty-four hours a day, for two solid months, poring over
records and monitoring computers for any sign of phony
access. These forty-two overworked experts were known as
BellSouth's "Intrusion Task Force."
What the investigators found astounded them.
Proprietary telco databases had been manipulated:
phone numbers had been created out of thin air, with no
users' names and no addresses. And perhaps worst of all,
no charges and no records of use. The new digital
ReMOB (Remote Observation) diagnostic feature had
been extensively tampered with -- hackers had learned to
reprogram ReMOB software, so that they could listen in
on any switch-routed call at their leisure! They were
using
telco property to *spy!*
The electrifying news went out throughout law
enforcement in 1989. It had never really occurred to
anyone at BellSouth that their prized and brand-new
digital switching-stations could be *re-programmed.*
People seemed utterly amazed that anyone could have
the nerve. Of course these switching stations were
"computers," and everybody knew hackers liked to "break
into computers:" but telephone people's computers were
*different* from normal people's computers.
The exact reason *why* these computers were
"different" was rather ill-defined. It certainly wasn't the
extent of their security. The security on these BellSouth
computers was lousy; the AIMSX computers, for instance,
didn't even have passwords. But there was no question
that BellSouth strongly *felt* that their computers were
very different indeed. And if there were some criminals
out there who had not gotten that message, BellSouth was
determined to see that message taught.
After all, a 5ESS switching station was no mere
bookkeeping system for some local chain of florists.
Public service depended on these stations. Public
*safety* depended on these stations.
And hackers, lurking in there call-forwarding or
ReMobbing, could spy on anybody in the local area!
They could spy on telco officials! They could spy on police
stations! They could spy on local offices of the Secret
Service....
In 1989, electronic cops and hacker-trackers began
using scrambler-phones and secured lines. It only made
sense. There was no telling who was into those systems.
Whoever they were, they sounded scary. This was some
new level of antisocial daring. Could be West German
hackers, in the pay of the KGB. That too had seemed a
weird and farfetched notion, until Clifford Stoll had poked
and prodded a sluggish Washington law-enforcement
bureaucracy into investigating a computer intrusion that
turned out to be exactly that -- *hackers, in the pay of the
KGB!* Stoll, the systems manager for an Internet lab in
Berkeley California, had ended up on the front page of the
*New York Times,* proclaimed a national hero in the
first true story of international computer espionage.
Stoll's counterspy efforts, which he related in a
bestselling
book, *The Cuckoo's Egg,* in 1989, had established the
credibility of 'hacking' as a possible threat to national
security. The United States Secret Service doesn't mess
around when it suspects a possible action by a foreign
intelligence apparat.
The Secret Service scrambler-phones and secured
lines put a tremendous kink in law enforcement's ability to
operate freely; to get the word out, cooperate, prevent
misunderstandings. Nevertheless, 1989 scarcely seemed
the time for half-measures. If the police and Secret
Service themselves were not operationally secure, then
how could they reasonably demand measures of security
from private enterprise? At least, the inconvenience
made people aware of the seriousness of the threat.
If there was a final spur needed to get the police off
the dime, it came in the realization that the emergency
911 system was vulnerable. The 911 system has its own
specialized software, but it is run on the same digital
switching systems as the rest of the telephone network.
911 is not physically different from normal telephony. But
it is certainly culturally different, because this is the
area
of telephonic cyberspace reserved for the police and
emergency services.
Your average policeman may not know much about
hackers or phone-phreaks. Computer people are weird;
even computer *cops* are rather weird; the stuff they do is
hard to figure out. But a threat to the 911 system is
anything but an abstract threat. If the 911 system goes,
people can die.
Imagine being in a car-wreck, staggering to a phone-
booth, punching 911 and hearing "Tina" pick up the
phone-sex line somewhere in New York! The situation's
no longer comical, somehow.
And was it possible? No question. Hackers had
attacked 911 systems before. Phreaks can max-out 911
systems just by siccing a bunch of computer-modems on
them in tandem, dialling them over and over until they
clog. That's very crude and low-tech, but it's still a
serious
business.
The time had come for action. It was time to take
stern measures with the underground. It was time to start
picking up the dropped threads, the loose edges, the bits
of braggadocio here and there; it was time to get on the
stick and start putting serious casework together. Hackers
weren't "invisible." They *thought* they were invisible;
but the truth was, they had just been tolerated too long.
Under sustained police attention in the summer of
'89, the digital underground began to unravel as never
before.
The first big break in the case came very early on:
July 1989, the following month. The perpetrator of the
"Tina" switch was caught, and confessed. His name was
"Fry Guy," a 16-year-old in Indiana. Fry Guy had been a
very wicked young man.
Fry Guy had earned his handle from a stunt involving
French fries. Fry Guy had filched the log-in of a local
MacDonald's manager and had logged-on to the
MacDonald's mainframe on the Sprint Telenet system.
Posing as the manager, Fry Guy had altered MacDonald's
records, and given some teenage hamburger-flipping
friends of his, generous raises. He had not been caught.
Emboldened by success, Fry Guy moved on to credit-
card abuse. Fry Guy was quite an accomplished talker;
with a gift for "social engineering." If you can do
"social
engineering" -- fast-talk, fake-outs, impersonation,
conning, scamming -- then card abuse comes easy.
(Getting away with it in the long run is another question).
Fry Guy had run across "Urvile" of the Legion of
Doom on the ALTOS Chat board in Bonn, Germany.
ALTOS Chat was a sophisticated board, accessible
through globe-spanning computer networks like BITnet,
Tymnet, and Telenet. ALTOS was much frequented by
members of Germany's Chaos Computer Club. Two
Chaos hackers who hung out on ALTOS, "Jaeger" and
"Pengo," had been the central villains of Clifford Stoll's
CUCKOO'S EGG case: consorting in East Berlin with a
spymaster from the KGB, and breaking into American
computers for hire, through the Internet.
When LoD members learned the story of Jaeger's
depredations from Stoll's book, they were rather less than
impressed, technically speaking. On LoD's own favorite
board of the moment, "Black Ice," LoD members bragged
that they themselves could have done all the Chaos break-
ins in a week flat! Nevertheless, LoD were grudgingly
impressed by the Chaos rep, the sheer hairy-eyed daring
of hash-smoking anarchist hackers who had rubbed
shoulders with the fearsome big-boys of international
Communist espionage. LoD members sometimes traded
bits of knowledge with friendly German hackers on ALTOS
-- phone numbers for vulnerable VAX/VMS computers in
Georgia, for instance. Dutch and British phone phreaks,
and the Australian clique of "Phoenix," "Nom," and
"Electron," were ALTOS regulars, too. In underground
circles, to hang out on ALTOS was considered the sign of
an elite dude, a sophisticated hacker of the international
digital jet-set.
Fry Guy quickly learned how to raid information from
credit-card consumer-reporting agencies. He had over a
hundred stolen credit-card numbers in his notebooks, and
upwards of a thousand swiped long-distance access codes.
He knew how to get onto Altos, and how to talk the talk of
the underground convincingly. He now wheedled
knowledge of switching-station tricks from Urvile on the
ALTOS system.
Combining these two forms of knowledge enabled
Fry Guy to bootstrap his way up to a new form of wire-
fraud. First, he'd snitched credit card numbers from
credit-company computers. The data he copied included
names, addresses and phone numbers of the random
card-holders.
Then Fry Guy, impersonating a card-holder, called up
Western Union and asked for a cash advance on "his"
credit card. Western Union, as a security guarantee,
would call the customer back, at home, to verify the
transaction.
But, just as he had switched the Florida probation
office to "Tina" in New York, Fry Guy switched the card-
holder's number to a local pay-phone. There he would
lurk in wait, muddying his trail by routing and re-routing
the call, through switches as far away as Canada. When
the call came through, he would boldly "social-engineer,"
or con, the Western Union people, pretending to be the
legitimate card-holder. Since he'd answered the proper
phone number, the deception was not very hard.
Western Union's money was then shipped to a
confederate of Fry Guy's in his home town in Indiana.
Fry Guy and his cohort, using LoD techniques, stole
six thousand dollars from Western Union between