Masters of Deception: The Gang That Ruled Cyberspace (10 page)

The pizzeria was a walk-in place, no chairs, so Mark and his non-hacker friends Howie and Gustavo and Jaime, who lived up the block, would sit on the floor and philosophize. They argued about the speed of light. When the pizza place eventually burned down, the principal came out on the street, rejoicing.

The counselors at Newtown suggested that Mark might do better in an alternative school. His aunt had heard of City-As-School in Manhattan. This is a place that doesn't resemble any school you ever attended. It's one of those places you have to come to New York to see. No classes, no strict schedule, no patrols in the hall. To graduate, all Mark had to do was complete some practical internships around the city. You see, the city is the school, get it? He had to keep a journal, the worst part. And he had to check in with his adviser once a week. The rest of the time, he was an intern. He Xeroxed papers at the city's Department of Investigations, or worked at the Queens Hall of Science, explaining the inside of the eyeball to groups of kids on field trips. It was his favorite exhibit.

There was another exhibit at the museum, one Mark really liked. The Anti-Gravity mirror, and if he stood perpendicular to it, it looked like he was floating.

But if Mark could float away from the Legion of Doom without a look back, Eli couldn't. The feud pissed Eli off, frankly, on behalf of his friend. Who did these LOD guys think they were, dissing Phiber Optik of the LOD? Why did everyone say the Legion of Doom was so great anyway? What made them special?

Eli had had a lot of friends in LOD, the original LOD, back before Goggans took control. Now it seemed like everybody was in a gang, and most of them were the saddest excuse for hackers that Eli had ever seen.

Maybe the Legion of Doom was elite simply because it existed. If it was not the only gang out there in the underground, it was certainly the only one that boasted a decade of history and dozens of members nationwide who answered to a Texas leader. It was the biggest. It was the baddest (that Eli knew of so far). But if another group of hackers challenged the Legion's superiority, well, who knows what might happen.

Eli had been thinking.

There was an idea he's had for a while, it turned out, and one day he told Paul on the phone.

"MOD, " Eli said.

"Mod?" Paul asked.

"M-O-D, " Eli spelled.

So what was it?

"We should call ourselves MOD, " Eli said. It was like a joke, a finger in the eye of LOD. He explained that it was an allusion to LOD, the Legion of Doom. From L to M, the next iteration, the new "kewl dewds" of cyberspace. The boys from New York were the opposite of the boys from Texas. How better to define themselves? The boys from New York could figure out who they were simply by opposing the Legion of Doom and everything it stood for. Whatever it stood for. That wasn't important right now. What was important, Eli said, is the joke: MOD. It stands for nothing. It stands for everything.

Masters of Disaster. Mothers on Drugs.

Masters of Deception.

Paul thought it was a great joke, a great way of spoofing the Legion of Doom's cachet. Everyone had to belong to something. Later, Eli started writing a phile called "The History of MOD. "

He wrote:

MoDmOdMoDmOdmoDmOdMoDmOdMoDmOdMoD

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

[The History of MOD]

BOOK ONE: The Originals

MOD: it was a mysterious name and it needed some good narrative to fill it out. But these gang members didn't go anywhere, physically, or do anything, physically. Mainly, they sat around in their bedrooms, talking on the phone and typing on their computers. They also went to the mall.

"The History of MOD" had to elevate the gang to the status of a modern-day Magnificent Seven, riding into the sunset of cyberspace. And why shouldn't it? The MOD boys were definitely riding the ragged regions of the electronic frontier, even as the whole territory was still being carved up. It was the Wild West, right? There weren't any laws yet that would tame these desperados. Information was out there for the taking, and they were grabbing.

How to bring it all to life. This was Eli's quandary. He recounted what happened after he met Paul and Hac: Soon the three were partaking in all sorts of mischievous pranks, and... they took to knocking down the locals who thought "I know all there is about hacking. " It was in the midst of all this fun that they agreed to form an underground group called MOD (approx. June 1989).

But looking for the stuff of legend here, Eli wanted to introduce the group's golden member, formerly of the Legion of Doom, ladies and gentlemen, Phiber Optik.

Eli wrote about how he and Mark became friends. He would always remember a challenge he'd issued a challenge that

Mark so easily crushed. If you're so great, Eli told Mark the first time he phoned him, try figuring out who I really am.

Here's the only clue, my phone number: 555-ACID.

Now, 555-ACID was not the home phone number assigned by New York Telephone to the Ladopoulos family. It was a number specially created for Eli on the Hollis switch (and unknown to New York Telephone). When a caller dialed this customized number from anywhere in the world, the call was forwarded to the Ladopoulos's real and unpublished number. So a caller could connect with Eli but not know who Eli really was or where he lived.

Armed with 555-ACID, and a phone number to connect to the Hollis switch, Mark went to work. Of course, for Mark, the task was moronically simple.

Within minutes, the phone rang in the Ladopoulos household.

Mark calmly read off the Ladopoulos's real phone number, as well as selected billing information. You had to be impressed.

Eli was:

Another hacker and telco computer specialist also seemed to be very prominent and knowledgable then as well. He wasn't liked very much, because he seemed to have a rather large ego, which I may add, makes it okay to have when you know so much as he did. He declared he was "Phiber Optik of the LOD!" Scorpion, Acid, and Phiber exchanged ideas on switching theory for a long while, but then came the time when PO wanted to know Acid Phreak's phone number since he found it "unfair. " AP mentioned that he could prove himself by finding it for himself. Armed with a dialup, PO called Acid back on his real number and casually proclaimed victory. And so, Phiber Optik was "brought into" the group.

Months later, when Mark would actually see "The History of MOD, " he would smile, the way he always did, and pronounce it all "nonsense, " the way he always did.

But it grew and grew and grew. It was the nonsense that legends are made of, like Billy the Kid. "The History of MOD"

would be widely disseminated, passed along in one perfect copy after another, freely distributed across the electronic bulletin boards of cyberspace, where publishing costs nothing. It was read more hungrily than any dime store western.

Eli loved to write. He always had. He created MOD as a joke, and then the joke became real. He kept adding new members to the joke, until after awhile it wasn't a joke anymore. It was a gang. It attracted some of the quirkiest talent to roam the wired wilderness.

Like Supernigger. Eli met him on a New York City bulletin board called The Toll Center. The handle was not the most politically correct, nor did it accurately invoke the person who uses it. Supernigger according to some people who claim to have met him was a slight white kid, a teenager who affected a remarkable array of accents and voices to trick people into giving him information. Nobody was a better social engineer than Supernigger. He held the world's speed record for talking a phone company employee out of his password. Supernigger just called up, said, "This is Bob from Service.

What's your password?" He got it, clocked the whole call under ten seconds. Usually he spoke in a lazy southern drawl, telling the woman in the business office, "Lady, I'm twenty feet up on the pole. " She gives him whatever he wants. On a BBS, Eli tells Supernigger to give him a call, at (718) 555-ACID. Supernigger dials, connects, and is blown away. Imagine having your own customized phone number. Absolutely free. Phone company doesn't even know it's there. Sign me up.

Supernigger, it turned out, had social engineered the phone number of a conference bridge. A conference bridge is a lot of fun. Big corporations use conference bridges all the time. They're really just big party lines for companies. A dozen people in different cities can be on a conference bridge at once, hearing the chairman of the board predict the quarterly earnings. Supernigger gave the number to everybody in MOD, and the MOD conference bridge was born. Every day, at the same time, all the MOD members would call the number and talk to one another. It was way cool for a while. But after a few days, it got kind of boring. What good was a conference bridge if nobody knew you had one? So they started phoning lamers. They called preadolescent dorks who posted stupid things on BBSes, giving real hackers a bad name.

Somebody on the MOD bridge dialed a lamer, and then a dozen kids all started screaming into the phone, rampaging, scaring the kid. And if you were really lucky, his mom would get on and say, "David? Who is it?" She'd be all confused, as a dozen voices caterwauled, "David? David? Who is it?" And then someone would yell, "It's the MOD!"

The name started to get around.

Eli met a lot of people. He got friendly with a hacker who used two handles: Thomas Covenant and Sigmund Fraud. But everyone knew him as Pumpkin Pete, a nickname he hated but couldn't shake. He's from Brooklyn, but he joined the Air Force and got stationed in Florida. He was obsessed by the phone system, was so desperate to get phone company technical manuals that he pulls an outlandish stunt. He tries to order hundreds of manuals from Bellcore, the research and development arm of the seven regional telephone companies. He tells Bellcore that they're building a new central office in Florida and they need the manuals right away. It doesn't work it just prompts a military investigation. But the stunt's good enough to give him a reputation. And besides, he's from Brooklyn. Now he was in MOD.

Paul's friend Hac is also inducted into MOD. He was good to have along on trashing expeditions.

Eli and Mark spent a lot of time cruising bulletin boards. They rode out across the vast wilderness of cyberspace, staking claim to anything they discovered. They came to think of it all as their own territory. They defined themselves as being somehow different, and therefore better, than the other hackers they encountered. They roust lamers and ask competent hands to ride with them. Mark thinks of himself as "maintaining" the area.

When the MOD boys come across any new bulletin board that aspires to be a hacker's board, they phone the system operator to give him the once-over, to see if he should be shut down or invited to join. That's how Mark met a kid named Zod, who was running an inane bulletin board in the 212 area code. Zod is a great name, borrowed from the evil genius who attempted to thwart Superman (in the movie). Zod's got his own gang, called Ace, which Eli is scouting for local talent.

Mark logs in to Zod's board as Phiber Optik. That should be enough of a calling card. Everyone in the underground knows who Phiber Optik is by now.

But Zod disses Mark. No one automatically gets access to this board. Not even Phiber Optik. Zod demands that all aspirants fill out a questionnaire first to show they are worthy. If you don't know the answers, you don't get a password.

Zod has larded the questionnaire with phone company acronyms. What does PREMIS stand for? What does MIZAR

stand for? LMOS?

As far as Mark could tell, Zod didn't know the answers himself.

Mark, of course, knows what they all stand for, as well as what they do. Angrily, he logs out of Zod's board.

He takes a tour of those same acronyms, in fact, to figure out who this Zod character really is. He logs in to one system, where he finds out the cable and pair number for Zod's bulletin board's phone line.

With the cable and pair number, Mark checks into another phone company computer, where he sees another phone number assigned to the same house. He still doesn't know the name of the subscriber, but he dials the number anyway.

A man answers the phone, and believe it or not, instead of saying hello like a normal dad, he gives his whole name. First and last name.

His last name's Perlman. Mark asks for Mr. Perlman's son. Zod gets on the phone.

"Perlman, " says scarily deep-voiced Mark. "This is Phiber Optik. " Zod is flabbergasted. "How did you get this number?"

Mark says, in the understatement of the year, "I looked it up. "

One kid who Eli met was really aggressive. He was pretty young, but he'd already taught himself a lot. This kid called himself The Wing, on a bulletin board called Altos. Altos is really one of the main boards for young cyberdudes. It's like Dodge City. Every aspirant, every kid with a modem and a desire to hack hangs out there. The Wing said he was a specialist in Unix, a language spoken by most telephone company computers and many computers on the international web of computer networks known as the Internet.

You needed a Unix guy on the team. Unix is seductive to budding hackers because it's so versatile. A computer running Unix can "multi-task, " run many different applications simultaneously. But there's a beauty to the cryptic Unix language that's just as important. Unix is like the King's English. There's an eliteness attached to any machine that runs it. And by extension, any hacker who knows how to speak it.

Unfortunately, Unix was not that accessible to most kids in 1989, because you needed one of the newest, fastest, most expensive home computers on the market to run it. A Commodore 64 was woefully inadequate. A TRS-80 was out of the question. For Unix, you needed at least an IBM-compatible computer with an 80386 chip and four megabytes of RAM.

(Today they're practically giving those computers away at gas stations with a fill-up. But back then, the system cost about three thousand dollars. )

Only kids who had more money than the boys from Queens could run Unix. The hacker who Eli met on Altos was one of those kids. The Wing lived in Pennsylvania, just over the state border from Trenton. His real name was Allen Wilson. It was easy to strike up a friendship on Altos, because the board had a chat system, a place where a few kids at a time can log in and type conversations isochronously, in real time. You see someone's message appear on the screen as soon as it's typed. He sees your response as soon as you type it and hit ENTER.