Masters of Deception: The Gang That Ruled Cyberspace (20 page)

how to hack into the computer system of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan. The 414s had messed around with some files for a while, but the main effect of their actions had been to get arrested.

Back in the days of Kryton, or maybe soon after, Scott and Chris discovered they had a lot in common. They were close in age, babies conceived on the cusp of the 1970s, both born and raised in the secure style afforded the white middle class in Texas.

Both Scott and Chris grew up in a place where their status in society was assured by who they were and where they came from. Maybe, at some level, that was the comfortable quality they recognized in each other when they first started corresponding on Kryton.

Or maybe the foundation of their friendship was built on similar childhood journeys of electronic discovery. Both had been intoxicated while still in grade school by the blink-and-whir of a desktop machine. Both endured their parents' divorces.

Each had been the third party in computer love triangles by age ten, falling for machinery already claimed by another.

There was something illicit about it, which made each keyboard stroke mean more somehow, with Chris hunkered down in front of an old Apple that belonged to a friend's father, and Scott gingerly stealing processing time off a PC that had been a gift to his older sister.

Whatever the source of their affinity, by the time they cavorted on Fifth Amendment, Chris and Scott were unquestionably allies.

The two friends spoke on the phone a lot, too. They did conference bridges. Bridges were the best.

Chris and Scott were part of the mad rush of excited hackers who all glommed on the same open phone line, crowding into a conversation like it was a rush-hour subway. The phone line in question belonged to Well, let's just say it was

temporarily liberated from the phone company, allowing anarchic hackers to engage in huge transcontinental conference calls that bridge across this city and through that state as one kid after another gets on the line. If you were on the line, and you had three-way calling on your phone, you could invite a friend to join the conference call, too. Simply hit the flash button that disconnects a call, then call your friend, then flash again. Your friend is three-wayed in now. And if he has three-way calling, he can recruit yet another caller to the conference. These daisy chains lasted for hours, for days, for marathon amounts of time that adults couldn't even imagine. There was so much to say.

Bridges were a great way to get acquainted. You could take a tour of the world on a bridge, talk to one hacker in Holland at the same time you converse with somebody in New York City. In fact, a couple of mysterious New York newcomers named Corrupt and Outlaw brushed up against Texas kids pretty often during conferences. Chris and Scott had never actually met the New York boys, but they'd heard of them. Vaguely. They'd heard that Corrupt and Outlaw came from the "inner-city ghetto, " but they seemed to know their stuff.

One night on a bridge about five or six hackers all kids from Texas, you understand are hanging out on the line. What

were they talking about? Random stuff. Chris says he wasn't on. Scott is on. Suddenly, another voice calls in to the conference, joins the group in mid-sentence. The unknown newcomer does not have an accent common to these parts.

"Yo, dis is Dope Fiend from MOD, " the newcomer says in distinctly non-white, non-middle-class, non-Texan inflection.

One of the Texans (who knows who) takes umbrage.

"Get that nigger off the line!"

The newcomer is silent.

In fact, the whole conference bridge is suddenly silent, all the chattering boys brought up hard and cold against the implacable feel of such a word. You might as well have slapped their faces. Interminable seconds pass. Who wants to fill that void?

Then the newcomer speaks with a different accent, and the words he says to the white boys from Texas are these: "Hi.

This is Corrupt. "

And that's how it happened. It was as simple as uttering one ugly word. The racial epithet instantaneously moved northward over hundreds of miles of cable, ringing in the ear of John Lee, who sits at his Commie 64 in his Brooklyn bedroom way at the other end of the line.

That word hit John like a billyclub. Here he was, calling up probably some of the same guys he's chatted with who knows how many times, and the class clown decided to tease them a little. He's got a million voices, you know that, from middle-aged phone lineman to street-corner pimp. He never figured that his joke would elicit such a response.

"Get that nigger off the line!"

Who yelled it? It's really immaterial at this point, because John was going to make them cry.

Nothing would ever be the same again. Not for Chris and Scott, not for the boys from MOD, not for the loose-knit community that made up the hacker underground.

With that one word, war had been declared.

You don't survive on the street by allowing white boys to call you "nigger. "

Of course, John didn't say any of this to them. Not then. In fact, they all chatted amiably for a while, long enough for Scott to decide that John really knew his stuff. A few days later, after learning more about John and Julio and MOD

Scott

offered John an account on Fifth Amendment.

You've got a good reputation as somebody who knows a lot about VAXes, Scott said to John. We could use somebody like you down here in Houston.

Thanks a lot, John said.

Just one thing, Scott warned. "We'll give you an account, but don't give it to your buddy Mark up there, or your buddy Acid Phreak. " In the wake of the Harper's forum and the Secret Service raids, Mark and Eli had become notorious, and Eli in particular was gaining a reputation for being a media hound.

Sure, said John. Right. Whatever you say, dude.

A few days went by, and John logged in to Fifth Amendment, calling himself Corrupt. He read the philes, he typed messages, he abided by Scott's injunction that he shouldn't try to copy anything that was on the board.

Then one day, two new users showed up on the board. They called themselves Broken Leg and Flaming Carrot. They were really obnoxious whenever they logged in. Nobody knew who these guys were. John said he didn't know, either.

John ventured back into conference bridges, bringing along his friend, Julio. The Texas boys were quite civilized to them, real friendly in fact, John thought.

One night, John and Julio called into a bridge and a bunch of people were on the line. John couldn't tell who was talking and who was listening. But he could hear the way the Texans referred to him and Julio the niggers and spies from New

York.

John and Julio stayed quiet on the line. They didn't give themselves away.

This time, John wasn't as shocked.

But Julio is mad, madder than John had ever seen him. They don't know who specifically has been slurring them; they don't recognize a voice, but they know from the accent that it's a southerner. They want to get back at somebody, and the only southerners they know of who call people "nigger" are the Texans who hang out on Fifth Amendment.

"Come on, let's do something to these guys, " Julio says.

And John agrees that it's time to make their move. Abandoning their handles of Corrupt and Outlaw, they don their alter-ego personas Broken Leg and Flaming Carrot

for it was they who had needled LOD members

and creep stealthily

back into the Texans' seat of power. They storm Fifth Amendment.

There happened to be a particularly juicy phile posted on Fifth Amendment. It was a technical treatise on how to crack a Rolm-made PBX phone system.

Rolm PBXs, as any hacker in 1990 could have told you, are valuable properties. They are favored by large corporations and government agencies, which need to route thousands of calls a day to their employees. The phile on Fifth Amendment said that this particular type of PBX had a back-door entrance to enable repairs by remote maintenance support staff. The phile went on to explain how to break into the system using the back door, and how, once inside, to monitor phone lines. Armed with such knowledge, virtually anyone anywhere could crack a Rolm PBX.

The patrons of the Fifth Amendment board didn't want such information widely disseminated for one simple reason. If lamers got hold of it, they'd go into a PBX and screw something up. Rolm would get complaints from customers, and the whole system would be overhauled to close up the holes. So, while the phile was available for perusal, you weren't supposed to copy it. Don't share it with anybody who didn't have access to Fifth Amendment.

What better way to tweak the Texans than to spread their precious secrets?

John, acting as Broken Leg, snatched the phile, surreptitiously copying it right off its super-secure resting place on the BBS. It was a fine deception.

Less than a week later, the Rolm Revelation was posted on bulletin boards all over the country. The Texans were incensed. Such highly specific, technical information could only have come from one source: a leak from one of Fifth Amendment's users. Who among the chosen could have been so disloyal?

Scott started to monitor all the users, and within days, he noticed a pattern. Whenever John logged in, he copied philes, then logged back out. Scott and Chris immediately suspected that John was operating on the instructions of someone else, a mastermind who lurked in the background and directed John to do his bidding. Scott and Chris had the same thought

Mark Abene.

This suspicion they could not abide. Scott confronted John, electronic style. The next time John logged in to Fifth Amendment using the Corrupt handle, he saw this message flash across his screen: APPARENTLY CORRUPT HAS BEEN

DISTRIBUTING INFORMATION POSTED ON THIS

BOARD TO HIS LITTLE BUDDIES. WE HAVE

EVIDENCE.

The battle lines were drawn now. No matter that Mark Abene had nothing to do with the Fifth Amendment escapade.

Scott and Chris didn't care any more about the specifics than John did the day he heard someone calling him "nigger"

over a conference bridge.

It was New York City against Texas.

Chris decided it was time to improve the image of LOD. In the aftermath of the raids, a lot of its core hackers had just plain disappeared. Maybe they'd gotten jobs. Maybe they'd gone to college. Or maybe they just got scared. In any case, Chris wanted to attract new talent, and use that talent toward "positive knowledge. "

It was all part of his plan to change his life. The raid at his house had really spooked him, and his grades were going to hell this semester because he was so bummed; so it was only natural that Erik Bloodaxe decided to take action. There was no future in the underground, any fool could see it was a bunch of kids living dangerously. And Chris was getting a little old for that break-into-the-phone-system-and-control-the-world fantasy. He only saw one choice for him.

He had to change the way he viewed computers, because he couldn't give up computers. He spent twelve hours a day at the keyboard, what was he going to do without it? He had no other hobbies, wasn't interested in much else, didn't even believe in politics or the electoral college.

His plan was simply to stop fighting the establishment. To join it instead and beat on your enemies at the same time. Ever since he'd read a book by Donn Parker, Fighting Computer Crime, he'd been nursing the idea. You could get paid for this stuff? Chris thought. It was a great book. He'd bought it in hardcover.

In his plan, Chris saw himself evolving. No longer was he a threat to corporate computer security. No longer was the LOD

a dark gang of anarchic kids trying to subvert phone company security efforts. No, in Chris's plan, he and LOD emerged from this bad period to become the new force for good, the hackers in the white hats who would police cyberspace for the rest of us.

He liked that vision.

Chris could see himself tracking down errant hackers

like the bad boys of MOD.

He could see himself making the judgment about whether specific hacking activities are worthy or dangerous.

He could even see himself turning people in. Yeah, he definitely could see that, because the whole scene has been getting... out of control.

There was a career in this. Chris began to tell people he'd like to get into computer security. He'd be a hired gun. The idea appealed immediately to Scott Chasin, who'd wanted to be a computer consultant since the age of twelve. It probably would have appealed to just about any teenage hacker in America, because in each dirty-sock-strewn bedroom sits a boy who nurses a dream of being "discovered" and offered a job doing computer security.

The dream goes like this: ENTER COMPANY NAME HERE will be so impressed with my abilities to crack its system that the CEO will call me up and offer to put me on the payroll. I'll show them how to plug the holes and to keep other people just like me from penetrating the system.

A lot of boys were waiting for the phone to ring (or would be, if they were off the phone). Erik Bloodaxe didn't wait. He put phase one of his plan into action immediately: reform LOD's image with new blood so the gang could earn the kind of squeaky-clean reputation that the Boy Scouts used to enjoy.

The transformation of LOD was cause for talk. Every hacker on every bulletin board seemed to know about it, and of course Mark Abene got word, too. He couldn't get back into any LOD controlled by Chris, that was for sure, but at this point he didn't even want to. He had new friends, for one thing. In the aftermath of the raid on his house, Mark was a little skittish. That didn't stop him from hacking. Mark got a laptop computer in a trade, and started hacking from phone booths, even allowing a couple of writers from Esquire to tag along for the sessions. But Mark was more than a little wary about being identified with an organized hacking group. To him, MOD had always been a joke. To try to resurrect the carcass of an actual, well-known gang like LOD, well, that seemed like waving something in the face of the government. You were asking for trouble.

But Mark would not be Mark if he kept his opinions to himself. Mark counseled other hackers not to join LOD: "It's boneheaded, you'll get into trouble. " LOD doesn't know squat. They have nothing but moronic, out-of-date philes.