Masters of Deception: The Gang That Ruled Cyberspace (15 page)

JEF POSKANZER: This guy down the street from me sometimes leaves his back door unlocked. If I had the chance to do it over, I would go in the back door, shoot him, and take all his money and consumer electronics. It's the only way to get through to him.

ACID PHREAK: Jef Poskanker (Pus? Canker? yechh) Anyway, now when did you first start having these delusions where computer hacking was even *remotely* similar to murder?

Before publication, Harper's edited the conversation, deleting Eli's name-calling and thereby denying readers a glimpse of the adolescent hiding behind the fearsome nickname. In fact, editing eliminated any flagrantly immature statement that Eli made, rendering him a larger-than-life electronic desperado. It's a one-dimensional portrait, but one that he will find hard to resist in the coming months.

The media and the monster. Which is the creation and which the creator?

The forum participants bristled at the bad-boy attitude Eli sported.

BARLOW: Acid, my house is at 372 North Franklin Street in Pinedale, Wyoming. Heading north on Franklin, go about two blocks off the main drag before you run in to a hay meadow on the left. I'm the last house before the field. The computer is always on.... You disappoint me, pal. For all your James Dean-on-Silicon rhetoric, you're not a cyberpunk.

You're just a punk.

ACID PHREAK: Mr. Barlow: Thank you for posting all I need to get your credit information and a whole lot more! Now, who is to blame? ME for getting it or YOU for being such an idiot?!

The language was heated now, and in cyberspace, the words themselves are all you have to guide you. The words aren't tempered by inflection, or by a wry smile that says you're really just kidding, or by body language that says you're more amused than enraged. No, the words are the whole communication, and they sure could look stark on your computer screen. On Day Ten, Barlow was writing what can only be called fighting words.

BARLOW: Let me define my terms. Using hacker in a mid-spectrum sense (with cracker on one end and Leonardo DaVinci on the other), I think it does take a kind of genius to be a truly productive hacker.... With crackers like Acid and Optik, the issue is less intelligence than alienation. Trade their modems for skateboards and only a slight conceptual shift would occur.

Until now, Mark had read more than he'd written, leaving the boasting to Eli. But now, he was incensed. He couldn't take it anymore. And so the gunslinger, the Fastest Two Fingers in the East, typed this fateful response at 10: 11 P. M. on the evening of the Tenth Day:

PHIBER OPTIK: You have some pair of balls.... Hmm... This

was indeed boring, but nonetheless:

And then he did it. He rendered this theoretical discussion absolutely real. Mark posted a copy of Barlow's private credit report, culled from TRW, right smack in the middle of the forum for all the participants to read.

Barlow, sitting in his office in Cora (post office Pinedale), watched the intimate details of his finances appear before him on the screen.

No matter that the snippet from TRW was abbreviated, and incorrect. No matter that reading credit histories, and then copying the files into his own computer, was far different from actually having the ability to alter a report. No, none of that mattered. For Mark had just demonstrated that some hackers have very real power over the lives of everyday people.

Barlow wondered what life in America would be like without credit.

As Barlow later wrote: "I've been in redneck bars wearing shoulder-length curls, police custody while on acid, and Harlem after midnight, but no one has ever put the spook in me quite as Phiber Optik did at that moment. "

Barlow asked Phiber Optik to call him.

Of course, Mark did. And there, well beyond the spotlight of the electronic forum, the two met, man-to-man, on the phone.

The romantic and the outlaw.

Barlow came to see Mark as a "pencil-necked kid with the same desire to violate the forbidden that has motivated male adolescents since the dawn of testosterone. "

The phone conversation burgeoned into a telephonic friendship, and Barlow came to believe Mark is "surprisingly principled, " with "impulses [that] seemed purely exploratory. "

Mark is Mark, and in explaining his philosophy, that of a lone scientist in his laboratory, he never saw the need to fill Barlow in on the less savory aspects of MOD's adventures. Whatever Eli or other MOD members did to The Learning Link, they did on their own, without Mark's help or commiseration or even knowledge.

Mark was articulate. Mark was earnest. And Mark was nothing if not persuasive. Mark would make a good poster boy for any group that decided to carve out specific civil liberties for hackers in cyberspace.

Barlow wasn't thinking about all these things, not yet at least, when he had his first phone conversations with Mark. The rest would come later.

For now, Barlow began to wonder "if we wouldn't also regard spelunkers as desperate criminals if AT&T owned all the caves. "

January 15, 1990, seems like just another routine day.

On the day that AT&T's system will catastrophically fail, Tom Kaiser commutes on the Long Island Railroad into Manhattan. While he tries to read the paper, he feels the usual early morning anxiety that comes from not knowing what the hackers were doing the night before.

When he arrives at his office at about 8: 30, he immediately checks on the black box. The DNRs show the hackers had a busy night, but nothing appears out of the ordinary. Cat and mouse. But isn't the cat supposed to win?

He updates Staples, who moved back to his own office after the strike ended, on the previous evening's hacking activities.

On the phone they go over it together, and nothing they notice, nothing they talk about, sends an alarm through their heads. Nothing on the DNRs causes either of them to say, "Oh, my God, " pick up the phone and call the authorities.

By midafternoon, however, it is clear that today will be different. Kaiser hears the news first on the radio: AT&T has crashed. Journalists are speculating about the damage. Will the crash spill over to affect other crucial services? Will telephone transmissions at airports be blocked? How long will AT&T customers be cut off from communicating with relatives

aging parents, for instance

in other parts of the country? Meanwhile, hundreds of customers are calling AT&T, demanding an explanation. Hundreds more call New York Telephone, unaware that the local phone company has nothing to do with the long-distance glitches. The average customer doesn't understand and doesn't care about the early 1980s' divestiture that separated AT&T from the local phone companies. To the average customer, the only truth is this: if a phone call isn't going through, then The Phone Company is to blame. Simple. Now fix it.

At his battered metal desk Kaiser listens to the news and all he can think is, Did the hackers do this? And worse, he thinks, did we let this happen?

Almost every day for months, Kaiser and Staples have played the "what if game. What if a hacker makes a mistake and crashes the computer? What if a hacker deliberately sabotages the computer? What if. Every workday has been a game of Russian roulette for the New York Telephone investigators. The hacker's gun is loaded with bullets, and every day the investigators have wondered if he'd shoot one into the brain of the phone company.

And now, AT&T is down. It could be mere happenstance that the nation's first long-distance phone crash was occurring right in the middle of Kaiser and Staples' biggest computer intrusion investigation ever. It could be one of those coincidences that dog Kaiser. But he doesn't like the odds.

Within moments, he and Staples are on the phone again, hashing out possibilities, figuring out what to do next.

"The hackers haven't done anything obvious, " Kaiser says, looking at the DNR menu on his computer screen. He scrolls slowly through each of the phone numbers that the hackers dialed in the past twenty-four hours.

"The initial news reports say AT&T has code problems, " says Staples. They both know that doesn't let the hackers off the hook. "Code problems" is a simple way of saying there's some internal snag in the AT&T operating system, some bug that may have been introduced into the millions of lines of computer code that run the mammoth network. It's the equivalent of saying that somewhere in the world, in one copy of the Bible, it says "Jezus. " How do you find the word, in one line in one page in one copy of the book? For AT&T's technicians, the awesome task ahead would be to isolate the affected area of the code. Find the bug. Maybe there's a misplaced command. Maybe somebody forgot to hit the RETURN key when typing a line. Maybe it was just a few incorrect keystrokes that upset the delicate balance of the entire operating system.

Of course, if the whole phone system crash was caused by a bug, that raises another question. How did the bug get into the code in the first place?

If it was deliberate, then it was malicious. That could point to hackers. If it was a mistake, then it still could point to hackers, because if a bunch of kids were fooling around in the system, who knows what they might type in ignorance?

Even if no obvious connection pops onto Kaiser's screen as he scrolls through the DNR list, he has to wonder. Maybe the crash was precipitated by a hacker or hackers that Kaiser doesn't even know about. He's long suspected that there might be others in the phone company computers, wilier intruders who covered their tracks so well that Kaiser never suspected their presence. And what about all the phone numbers that Kaiser's hackers call from their home phones? Could one of those numbers connect the hackers to a ringleader, some mysterious and dangerous instigator whom Kaiser doesn't even know about? You can "what if" yourself to death in some jobs and Kaiser has one of those jobs.

"Did we make a mistake?" Kaiser asks Staples. "Did we make the right call in which hackers to follow, or is there someone out there who's more important, and we aren't following them?"

But they could indulge in only so much self-flagellation. It hadn't been their idea to drag out this case for so many long months. After all, they've already turned over enough information from the DNRs to enable the prosecutors to apply for search warrants at the hackers' houses. They even passed along the tip about The Learning Link to the Secret Service. It was up to the government now to get the search warrants. The Secret Service and the U. S. Attorney's office kept telling Kaiser that it was in the works. Any day now, they'd say.

At Secret Service headquarters downtown, a certain special agent named Rick Harris was torturing himself with the same questions that were hounding Kaiser and Staples. Harris ran the new telecommunications division in the agency's Manhattan field office. By virtue of that title, he'd been monitoring this case for months, getting regular updates from the agent in charge of the case. Despite the impatience of Kaiser and Staples, the Secret Service had been working steadily on this case. It was an opportunity for the agency to set a precedent in a new area of investigation. You see, the Secret Service had been slowly investigating more and more computer crime cases. Ever since a new federal law in the mid-1980s had given the Secret Service authority to investigate credit card fraud, among other crimes, the agency had been gearing up for the electronic era in crime. Credit card fraud was a natural digression for the Secret Service. The agency is the law enforcement arm of the Treasury Department, after all. More and more credit card fraud was being perpetrated in cyberspace. You didn't have to be Bill Gates to know how to use your computer to log in to an underground bulletin board and find lists of purloined long-distance calling card numbers you can "use. " Of course, in that instance, you'd also be using the telephone lines to commit a crime.

Computers. Telephone lines. Whose jurisdiction was this? It gets complicated out there on the cutting edge of electronic crime, and that was why the Secret Service established a telecommunications division in its Manhattan office in 1989.

The division, under the leadership of Harris, was supposed to figure out exactly what electronic crimes were occurring and how, and

most important

how to fight back. This was a high-profile assignment for an agent still in his thirties.

Harris, who has likable, laughing eyes and the easy shamble of a sheepdog shaking off sleep, believed from the beginning that this area of law enforcement was on the verge of exploding.

His first cases showed him just how pervasive electronic crime had become. The agency was in the middle of investigating several cases involving call-sell operations. A "call-sell" is, simply, a situation where someone illegally sells use of a phone to someone else. You see it all the time in New York City long lines at a street corner, with recent

immigrants waiting their turns to call home to the Dominican Republic or Colombia for five bucks.

Here's how a call-sell operation is set up: First, the mastermind breaks into a PBX. That's a Private-Branch Exchange computer that manages phone calls internally for big corporations. A PBX is just like a mini-switch, handling all the phone traffic in and out of the corporation's offices. By hacking a PBX, an intruder can get control of the system, and then dial out on one of the organization's phone lines to anywhere in the world. In the freewheeling experience of New York City, where 85 percent of all PBX fraud occurs, street entrepreneurs advertise the availability of five-dollar phone calls. Five dollars to talk for half an hour to your cousins in Bangladesh is a bargain.

Although Harris had become familiar with the intricacies of call-sell fraud, Kaiser's hacker case had been his first glimpse of a whole new kind of crime. Harris had been watching, amazed, for months as the evidence accumulated that unknown hackers were climbing around in every sensitive phone company computer that existed. He knew the implications as well as Kaiser. He knew the extent of the harm these hackers were capable of doing. He worried now that he was witnessing the explosion.

In the midafternoon, Harris phones AT&T. He calls the longdistance carrier's operations center in New Jersey. That's where the big maps glow red and top officials are tearing out their hair. Harris explains his concern, then volunteers to help investigate the crash.