Masters of Deception: The Gang That Ruled Cyberspace (4 page)

Just as a fire truck blazes past.

The siren is gone. They look at one another, their hearts pound. They can see the outline of the Triborough Bridge through the leafy trees. The green-and-white lights along its suspension beckon like a distant Ferris wheel, and it's an adventure again. They kneel on the handball court and rip the sacks open and paper printouts spill like entrails. The night is hot and the streets are hopping and you can probably even see stars. They don't look up.

Most of the dumpster's bags are full of garbage or containers of half-eaten Chinese food. But one bag is worth the trouble, because inside is a piece of paper that lists the phone numbers of about a dozen phone company computers in Queens.

It's like a directory. No ordinary White Pages, though, this is a secret list of internal New York Telephone Company numbers. It's an excellent find. Now when you call up the phone company business office, pretending to be Lou in Provisioning, you can let it drop that you know all about a certain computer at a certain phone number. You're a part of the great Bell family, and of course the business office is going to give you the information you request. You can sound like you know the person: "Don't you remember me, Barry? We've talked before, fella. "

Another great thing about the list is that it's like a schematic diagram that tells which computers are in Queens, and how they're related. How it all fits together.

The list is a map of a trip that, until now, Paul and Eli had been taking separately. Before they met tonight, they were just your typical lone spelunkers, rubbing their hands along cave walls in the dark. Now, with this shared experience, this set of directions, they're part of a team. There's a new breathlessness to them, a warm guy-feeling, because when you're trying to figure out something as labyrinthine as the nation's phone system, it helps to have friends.

The phone system is intentionally closed off to outsiders. Adolescent boys aren't supposed to be hooking up their computers to it, exploring its intricacies. But Paul and Eli and their friends are just playing an adventure game. This is merely a little trespassing. The very fact that they have to dive into a dumpster to get something as mundane as phone numbers for company computers only heightens their desire to get inside the system.

A few days ago, just before they decided to meet for the garbage run, there was a moment on the phone when Paul decided to give Eli something. He told him a secret.

Paul told Eli about the strange computer that answers the phone when he dials 555-9940, a number in Laurelton, Queens. "I think it has something to do with the phone system, " Paul said, in a typically understated way.

In fact, Paul had found three separate phone numbers that all seemed to dial the same computer in Laurelton. Almost every day, Paul had been hooking up to this computer and trying to figure out what it does. The work was tedious.

At first, Paul would sit hour after hour at the keyboard in the basement, trying one combination of letters, then another, hoping to stumble across some command that the computer would respond to. He had plenty of time because Paul wasn't the type to do homework. Even though he was number one in his class, he did better when he didn't study too much.

Studying could actually make him freeze up on a test, could confuse him when it came time to think through the questions and write down the answers. So forget that. Besides, you learn more from a computer than from any book. Computers interact with you. You do something. The computer responds. It's almost organic. So while his mom watched TV in the living room, he tried to hack the strange computer. When his brother went off to work on the night shift in the subway, he tried to hack it. It was like jiggling a handle on a door, wondering what was on the other side. He knew it was technically illegal. But who would know, and who was he hurting, and who could possibly care? He didn't think it was morally wrong.

555-9940

555-9941

555-9942

But each number seemed to lead to a separate place in the computer, because each one behaved differently, he told Eli.

It was one of those absorbing puzzles that would ultimately teach him something. This was far more complicated than programming in BASIC; there was no manual to tell him how to proceed.

The last phone number was useless, actually, but it took him a long time to figure that out. Whenever he called 555-9942, he heard a sound, as if the computer were pulse-dialing, like one of those old rotary phones. He was calling the computer, and here it was calling someone else on a rotary phone.

Paul couldn't tell who the computer was calling, although all he had to do to figure it out was to count the clicks. But it dialed so fast he couldn't. He thought about this for a while, and then he dug out an old Panasonic cassette deck and recorded the clicks. He played it back, over and over, but still couldn't make out the number.

The problem was that at normal playback speed, it was still too fast. There must be some way to slow it down. There was no variable-speed switch on the cassette deck, like on a dictating machine. He couldn't put his finger on the capstan while it spun. What could he modify? He pulled out one of the four C batteries that ran the tape recorder, put it in backward to offset the voltage, and that slowed the speed.

After he figured out the phone number, he had his computer dial it. He was calling another computer in Jamaica, Queens, and he knew he connected because he heard the crash-and-bang of his modem colliding with another one. But his computer screen stayed black; whatever he was connected to refused to acknowledge him. He got no prompt on his screen. Nothing. He couldn't figure out what the computer wanted him to type. No combination of keys disturbed the blackness on his screen.

That happens. When you're trying to feel your way through the cave, sometimes you just walk into the wall.

Paul had better luck with 555-9940.

At least this number responded. The trouble was, the responses were wacky. The modem would connect, but when he'd try to communicate with the computer, any key he hit on his keyboard seemed to be the wrong key. The computer at the other end would send back to his screen this inscrutable message: S. He'd try again, this time dialing the 555-9941

number, and the computer would tell him: W. And that's what he'd get regardless of what he typed in response.

SSS

WWWWW

WW

He was trying every key combination.

WWWW

SS

SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

One day in frustration he picked up his phone receiver and blew into the mouthpiece. A short airy blast, maybe three hundred milliseconds long. And now, his computer would sputter a string of bizarre characters across the screen. Paul figured it was some arcane timing pattern. Stranger still, now whenever he pressed a key, his own computer would ring a bell in response. Bing!

He realized that his susurrations had somehow reset the computer at the other end. Now he could get it to respond. He would blow into it again, and then a question mark would appear on the screen. Paul could tell it what he wanted to do:

? login

He was inside the phone system.

Paul experimented by typing various commands he knew from different operating systems he'd fooled with. No good.

Then one day he typed "SHOW USERS, " and boom

a list of authorized users appeared on his screen. He wrote down

the names. The next time he logged in, he assumed one of their identities. Now he was an authorized user. He learned that if he typed "PRINT, " and then the name of a file, he'd see a very helpful help file, which would explain what the directory was and what he could do with it. Like most computer systems, the phone company's computers were designed, after all, to help people. They were designed long before teenage hackers existed. They weren't built to repel a hacker menace once he had gotten into the system. So Paul got the computer to explain what the commands meant. For instance, by typing "PRINT QDN, " he coaxed the computer to explain that the command QDN meant "query directory number. "

He knew he was logged in to something powerful because one day when he was noodling around, he found a way to list phone numbers of people who lived in nearby Laurelton. Awesome. He looked for the phone number of a friend of his, a guy who worked at the Village Voice. He found it. But what could he do with it? He had a brilliant idea. He typed:

> QDN 5551234

Using QDN was a way to ask the computer to pull up the records of a particular phone number. Say the number in question was (718) 555-1234. The computer asked Paul if he wanted to place a "service order" to modify service: SO:

Using the commands that Paul had found in the helpful help files, Paul typed:

> ADD $ 5551234 3WC $

Three-way calling, or 3WC, was now installed. Now when his friend wanted to add a third person to a phone conversation, he merely had to hit the flash hook on his phone. Paul could have just as easily typed "CWT" to add call-waiting to the line. The computer did the hard part. But Paul had all the power.

His friend never got billed for 3WC, and probably still has the feature to this day.

By the time he told Eli about some of this in the summer of 1989, Paul had been hooked into the phone company computer for about a year.

But what kind of a computer was it?

"It sounds like an SCCS, " Eli said.

"What's that?" Paul asked.

"A Switching Control Center System, " Eli said vaguely, something to centralize switches in one area. The explanation didn't satisfy Paul. Something didn't sound right. Of course, there was no reason it would be right. Eli had much less experience than Paul in actually penetrating the phone company's computers.

"An SCCS?" Paul repeated.

"Yeah, it's really big, and beyond my expertise, " Eli said.

But that wasn't really a problem.

Even if Eli didn't know that much about hacking, he certainly knew a lot of hackers. He knew where to go for help.

Because this is who Eli is: a kid who knows everybody, a kid who everybody likes, a kid who everybody wants to help.

Paul, in the guarded way he warmed to anyone, had certainly come to like him just from talking on the phone. That's why Paul went along on the dumpster dive. That's why, a few days later, when they were talking about the mysteries of the Laurelton computer again, Paul went along with another suggestion Eli made.

Eli says they ought to find someone who would be interested in Paul's information, a phone company computer specialist who might be able to get inside other telco computers. Paul says OK.

Eli says, "I know this guy. " But it turns out that Eli is not talking about just any guy. This is the dude. Eli's talking about Phiber Optik, says he's even encountered Phiber while roaming through cyberspace. Eli's never met him in person (but then, who has?), but Eli knows enough about Phiber Optik to know that he's the man with the answers. He's in the Legion of Doom, isn't he? He's the gang's phone guy, for God's sake. The Legion's exploits are legendary. The Legion is rumored to know how to break into ongoing phone calls. The Legion is rumored to have hidden the gang's own private bulletin boards inside corporate computer systems. The Legion's archives are rumored to be the repository for the best technical information in the underground.

Paul doesn't know anybody in the Legion of Doom, doesn't even know who's in this gang founded by a notorious hacker named Lex Luthor. Eli says that if Phiber Optik got into the Legion of Doom, then Phiber Optik must be good.

You have to be a little brave to even suggest calling a guy like that. You have to be pretty sure of yourself, not afraid at all that the guy is going to hang up on you, or worse, listen to what you say and then ridicule you. You have to have a lot of confidence in yourself.

"Let's call him, " Eli says.

Paul says okay.

"What do you want?" the voice demands. "I'm Phiber Optik of the LOD. "

If you heard it, you'd think it was the Wizard of Oz himself, standing behind his curtain and making steam hiss and fires roar. Phiber Optik of the LOD. Both Paul and Eli hear it, the outrage in the deep voice that has answered the phone.

Now, Eli once "met" Phiber Optik on a bulletin board. But that's little comfort now, not with a real live member of the Legion of Doom on the other end of the phone, thundering and aggressive.

A guy like that doesn't like you, he can turn you into a toad or at least turn your home phone into a pay phone. Every hacker has heard the stories, heard of some poor rodent whose mom picks up the phone in the kitchen to call Linda next door and instead of a reassuring tone hears the recording, "Please deposit twenty-five cents. " Explain that to your mom.

Not that Phiber's response is totally unexpected. How does he know that he's not talking to a couple of lame wannabes on the phone? He gets these calls all the time. Ever since word spread that he's in the Legion of Doom.

What do Eli and Paul want of Phiber? It's obvious. They heard he was the dude who was into phone company switches.

But that's the simple answer. They really want much more, don't they? They want him to teach them not only about the phone system, but also about all the sophisticated computers he's cracked, about the rare commands he can type, about the way his mind works. They want what any two boys with a little knowledge and a great curiosity want. They want a leader to show them the way.

They tell him they have access to a computer in Laurelton, and they want to know what it is, what it's capable of doing.

"We think we have this SCCS. "

"You think or you know?" Phiber asks.

Hey, check it out, they say.

And then Paul, for the first time since he hacked into the computer, tells another living human the computer's phone numbers. Check it out.

So Phiber does.

He hangs up, plops down in front of the TV screen he has hooked up to his TRS-80 computer in his bedroom and dials away. It's a monastic setup for such an ambitious adventurer. A neatly made cot, a low bureau, a desk, a chair, makeshift bookshelves in the corner. The room is so small that the corners of everything touch.