Masters of Deception: The Gang That Ruled Cyberspace (6 page)

He started posting. He explained one acronym. Then another. The thing that immediately set his postings apart from everyone else's was that his were so obviously correct. Here was a guy who appeared to understand the whole system central office to junction box and every multiplexer in between.

Word spread to Lex Luthor himself. Check out this new dude. The telco wizard, Phiber Optik. Where did he come from?

How does one become a member of LOD? It wasn't like you had to prick your finger and swap blood with Lex's protege, Erik Bloodaxe, or anything. Gang members on the electronic frontier don't live in the same states, wouldn't recognize each other if they were standing shoulder to shoulder on the bus. In fact, Mark swears he never spoke to Bloodaxe before joining LOD. But the way Bloodaxe remembers it, the encounter occurred like this: One day down in Texas, where he was a college student, Bloodaxe noticed that Mark had started signing his postings "Phiber Optik of the LOD. " And Bloodaxe thought, who is this kid?

He immediately phoned north.

"Hi, is this Mark?"

"Yeah. "

"This is Chris

Erik Bloodaxe, " said Bloodaxe, whose real name is Chris Goggans. "Why in the hell are you signing your name LOD? You're not in LOD. "

Mark thought for a second, then said solidly, "I'm in LOD. "

"No one is in LOD unless we all vote on it, " corrected Chris, who explained the rules. A unanimous vote is necessary.

Then, for some reason, the tone of the conversation shifted to what both teenagers really cared about. Hacking the phone company. And Chris realized that Mark really did know as much as people had been saying, maybe more. This guy was good.

The actual vote came a few weeks later. Mark was in.

Just like any schoolyard pack of boys born in the shadow of The Dirty Dozen, "Hogan's Heroes, " and "Mission: Impossible, " the LOD members all fancied themselves specialists in some dark art. One kid might know how to make a wicked blue box, a device cobbled together from top-secret Radio Shack parts that simulated the tones of coins dropping into a pay phone. Another might be an expert in programming BASIC.

And Mark? He could trace the route of a phone call, from New York to Paris, recalling in loving technobabble each photonic hop. He could describe, in detail, the different kinds of computers that run different aspects of the phone company's business. He knew the meaning of the phone system's every English language-mangling acronym: MIZAR, COSMOS, SAG, LMOS. He could explain it to anyone. Indeed, he loved to, in eye-glazing, brain-fogging, soporific detail.

And he had just turned seventeen.

To tell you the truth, a few members got a little sick of the new prodigy. He was brash and had what some out-of-state members recognized as a New York attitude. And he didn't give a rat's ass who thought so.

He seemed to revel in belittling blustery hackers who posted misinformation. He loved nothing better than trapping some nitwit who thought COSMOS was some double-secret key to the phone company kingdom. (Duh, the name sure sounds important, doesn't it?)

People were starting to notice. Like Chris. One day he and a friend, Dr. Who, were hanging out on a hot bulletin board called The Phoenix Project. Who did they run across but Phiber Optik of the LOD, eviscerating some poor pretender.

And this was what Chris thought about Mark: a real arrogant, smart-ass punk.

It's a hot July day, nighttime already, when Eli cruises up to Mark's house in his black Supra.

As Mark comes down off the stoop, before he even gets in the car, it's clear he looks nothing like his megabass voice would lead you to believe. He's as thin and pale as the underside of an index finger and has otter-sleek black hair, meticulously clipped and combed. He styles it himself, doesn't trust a barber to preserve the precise geometric layering.

His jeans look like they're just about John Candy's size, so they're beyond baggy on Mark, cinched with a thick belt and pooling over his shoes. His shirt is clean and pressed, his pants are clean and rumpled, his hair is clean and shiny. He gives off a good smell as he gets into the car, a fresh, soapy fragrance that fills a space and makes a car owner self-conscious about all the crumbs on the floor and all the dust motes on the dashboard.

Eli says Paul is hanging out at the Continental, the outdoor strip of stores at 71st Avenue and Continental Boulevard, so they drive over there and pick him up. And now, of course, the evening's main activities can commence.

You might call it hanging out. Eli calls it "The Mission. " Maybe they barely know one another, but already they've got a bond. Imagine meeting the only other two people in the world who think exactly like you, who have totally the same goals in life, who would rather hack into a phone company computer than do anything else you could suggest. And they live in Queens.

Maybe it is a mission.

They cut across the borough, and end up at Eli's house in Jamaica. They don't see his mom, even though she should be home from her job as a receptionist by now, so they don't have to endure the exquisite embarrassment of encountering her and worse! maybe having to say hello

before they get to the privacy of Eli's room. Eli's dad is a cook, and his parents don't get along. A lot of people think they might get divorced.

Eli's computer is set up in his bedroom, a room that screams "TEENAGE BOY LIVES HERE, " with a life-size poster of a bikini-clad model on the closet door, a white cordless phone, a second desk phone with two lines, a TV and cable box. Eli has a York cassette recorder, a Spectron telephone speaker amplifier, and a shoe box containing 120 floppy disks. The bed is made, the dresser is dusted, the clothes are put away. If Eli had a refrigerator in here, he might never have to come out of this room. Eli walks to the computer table and flips the switch on his Commodore 128. The machine whirs to life.

Mark loves to explain, and Paul and Eli crowd around him at the monitor. As they log into the Laurelton switch to start exploring, he describes every command they're typing even the commands they already know

in precise, easy-to-

understand language. He knows everything. And Mark is just as excited by this session as they are, because he senses that finally he's met two other hackers who can ride at his pace. For his part, Mark will always think of this evening as "a meeting of the minds. " They forgot who they were, and where they were, and thought only about where they were headed.

Mark has shown them how to use the NYNEX Packet Switched Network to jump off into other switches as well, and tonight they traipse around in the Hollis switch system for a while. In earlier phone conversations, Mark has told them different ways he's found to get into phone company computers, and Paul took it all in. So tonight Mark never has to repeat a phone number, never has to explain the meaning of a command to Paul. Mark types it and Paul absorbs it, because the progression of commands on the monitor is distinctly logical. Paul watches just once, and the new numbers are committed to memory. An hour later, when the three boys want to return to a computer they'd said good-bye to, Paul is at the keyboard and competently types in the commands again, no misses, no questions.

Imagine the feeling. Every pathetic BBS is filled with philes on how to crack this computer system and how to crack that one. Anyone but a moron knows that it's baloney, a farce, techno-silliness that doesn't work. Any kid with a modem talks about hacking the phone system in the same way that any teenager talks about getting laid. In other words, it happens.

But rarely and usually to someone else.

But now, here they are, typing on a piece of $300 equipment, hooked into what seems like one of the mightiest computers in the world. For someone else, it might have all sorts of catastrophic appeal. You could do anything, even cut off phone service to the whole Laurelton neighborhood. But that's anathema to them; they'd no sooner crash a computer system than they would cut off a finger. That's what they tell each other. They believe in the hacker ethic: Thou shalt not destroy.

It's OK to look around, but don't hurt anything. It's good enough just to be here.

It's late now, the mission has turned into an all-nighter, and it's the bold hour when all the authority figures they've ever known are already asleep, oblivious to the escalation of the shared kinetic energy in this room.

They log in to one of New York Telephone's COSMOS computers, whose intricacies Mark is happy to explain. COSMOS

is a grand-sounding acronym that turns up on any self-respecting hacker BBS. Phile after phile is written about it, as if the system with the fancy name was somehow the very key to the Bell System. It's all nonsense, explains Mark: COSMOS, he says, stands for Computer System for Mainframe Operations, and is nothing more than a giant database of work orders. It's an operations system that phone company employees use when they have to change something on a phone line. COSMOS has a directory of customers' phone numbers, archives that list the number of the cable and pair that run down from the big silver box on the telephone pole outside and into your house. You can look up anybody's phone service on COSMOS. Just read the code line for somebody's service, and you suddenly know such intimate details as whether the customer has three-way calling, or call waiting, or call forwarding. That's what it is, Mark explains. Nothing to it.

Mark shows them how to call up actual service orders for the phone lines that lead into each of their own houses. It's so exciting seeing it there on the screen. They're doing this with a laughably slow modem, a modem that pumps data at the rate of 1200 bits of data per second. It takes forever for the screen to refresh itself at that rate, but it's oh so sweet when it happens. They see Eli's own phone number. They see the features he has on his phone. The boys have an uncontrollable urge to crow, to scrawl graffiti across this privileged line of computer code as it blinks on the screen. If any one of the boys were hacking alone, in his bedroom, he wouldn't feel the same way. But here they are, together, and they need to mark their shared journey. Thou shalt not destroy, no, of course not. But they traveled here, this is their turf, and they want to plant a flag. That wouldn't be destroying anything, would it? And COSMOS is inviting them to do just that, with its tantalizing prompt:

JA%

They decide to write Eli's hacker handle on his phone line! Right there, right on the computer! Just write it in. They know the commands to type. Mark was the first to figure them out. They tell the computer to execute a service order: JA% SOE

Then they tell the computer that the service order will modify service on Eli's phone number (let's say his number is 555-9365):

_I TN=555-9365

Then they tell the computer to execute the order on the next day:

_H ORD = C1AP1234, OT = CH, DD = 07-13-89, FDD = 07-13-89

Then they tell the computer to add remarks to Eli's phone number:

_I RMKT = ACIDPHREAK

That's the end of the service order, they tell the computer:

_E

It's dizzying, the risk, because what if some phone company employee calls it up the next day and sees "ACID PHREAK"

written into the code? On the other hand, why would anyone call it up ever, unless the Ladopoulos family requests a change in service? The boys leave it. They aren't hurting anything.

They write "PHIBER OPTIK" on Mark's phone line. They leave it that way.

By the time Eli drives them home, in the late-late part of a night that's ready to become morning, they are talking about what they'll do when they log in again in a few hours. There are so many places to go, so many things to learn. Is it possible to listen in on ongoing phone conversations? Is there a way to get into the phone company's automated message accounting, which contains billing information and lists the phone numbers that a certain customer calls?

By the time the night ends, all three know one thing: They can't wait to get together again.

There's a big street map of Queens on one wall in Eli's room. From the East River to Long Island, the map details the hundreds and hundreds of crisscrossing streets and avenues and boulevards and highways that cut up the borough. It identifies the parks, the airports, and the jail at Rikers Island.

Stand in front of the map, and trace the grid with a finger, and you could see how Eli's house was the natural hub. It was smack in the center of all of Queens, with Mark's redbrick house at the end of a spoke on the northwest and Paul's frame house at the end of another spoke that stretches southeast. Not only is Eli's house positioned perfectly for a command center, but his Commodore 128 was more powerful than the computers that Mark and Paul owned. Mark never went to Paul's house, except once to drop him off, and then he certainly never set foot inside. Paul sometimes went to Mark's house, but there was usually nothing good to eat. Mark wasn't interested in snacks, so he didn't offer any. One time Paul and Hac brought their own dinner, lasagna in foil, and they ate on Mark's front stoop. Just to make a point.

A lot of times, the guys got together at the Queens Mall, where Paul liked his coffee sweet, and Mark liked to get mashed potatoes from the Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet. He was queasy a lot, stuck to bland food, and rarely ate before the afternoon. It was just part of who he is. The problem with real mashed potatoes is that people make them lumpy, but he could eat several portions of those reconstituted, processed starchy ones at the mall. Go figure.

But how often could you go to the mall? There was no computer there.

So Eli's house, Eli's bedroom, that was the place. It was the closest thing to a clubhouse that they'd ever have. Four or five guys could hang out comfortably in that room, on the bed, on the chair, on the floor, on the computer, drinking caffeine in any of its splendid forms, running the modem off one phone line while keeping the second line free for voice calls.

They were learning a lot about the phone system. From the inside. If Eli called it "The Mission, " Mark thought of it as "The Project. " And Paul? He just wanted to know more. Even when they were at home, hacking on their respective computers, they kept in contact, phoning two or three times a day, updating each other on what they were finding in phone company computers. What does this command do? What does this acronym mean? Often, though, they ended up working together, at least by evening.