Masters of Deception: The Gang That Ruled Cyberspace (7 page)

They knew so much now, collectively, so much more than they did on their own. But nobody knew they knew. It was frustrating being so omnipotent. Imagine being able to fly. Imagine being invisible, and now imagine not being able to tell anyone about it.

Then one night, about eight o'clock, they got an idea. The three of them were hanging in Eli's room, looking at the map of Queens on the wall, and realized there was at least one place in the borough that the three of them could fly to.

It was called Anarchy.

It was a virtual neighborhood, actually, this computer bulletin board called Anarchy. Some kid ran it from his bedroom in

"Outer Queens, " as Mark calls it.

The boys in Eli's room had some unfinished business with Anarchy.

Paul had discovered the phone number for the Anarchy board once when he was on a different board. Just for the fun of it, Paul had even signed up as a user on the board, which had a special section for posting philes specific to hacking and phreaking (hacking the phone system). And one time when Paul was at Eli's they had all logged in to take a quick tour of the hack/phreak archives. The philes were garbage. One phile said that COSMOS ran the whole phone system! Another example

a bunch of philes blathered about REMOBS, the actual physical units that attached a pair of phone line cables to allow remote access. Well, the lamers on Anarchy bought into the stupid misconception that if you possessed some magic phone number, you could dial it to access REMOBS, then key in a three-digit code and someone else's phone number

and eavesdrop on conversations. That might have been true in a parallel universe, but in the Bell system?

Please.

The boys in Eli's room had tried to set things straight, posting a correction on Anarchy: YOU'RE WRONG. But that just started a flame war, with all the board's users joining in to defend the status quo. It was a pushing and shoving match, a schoolyard brawl that the boys in Eli's room had never really forgotten.

The kid who ran Anarchy called himself The Graduate. He was the kind of puffed-up wannabe that Mark calls a "larva hacker, " a kid who says "I specialize in networks, " as if he really knows the first thing about networks.

It burned, if you want to know the truth. Here were Mark, Paul, and Eli, putting in the hours, doing the real work, truly figuring out how the System works. Then along came some kid like The Graduate, some poser type who knew nothing, and the kid was spewing online, beating his chest, and giving everyone a headache.

What could you do about it?

Actually, the boys could do a lot, knowing what they did now.

It so happened that the Anarchy phone number was archived on a switch that the boys in Eli's room could control.

Maybe what happened next was inevitable, maybe not, but one thing was for sure. There was no turning back.

"Let's take over Anarchy, " someone said.

Maybe there was a split second when one of them could have demurred. Probably not. And besides, no one did. A group mind had already taken over. Something bigger than all of them had been born.

The first phone call the boys make in their scheme to overthrow Anarchy is to a company we'll call it PhoneBox that operates a voice-mail system in Manhattan.

This is how PhoneBox does business: it rents out voice-mail boxes, which are kind of like post office boxes for phone messages. PhoneBox has dozens of phone lines assigned to it, which customers rent. The customer's business associates and friends can then leave messages in the voice-mail box. All the numbers that PhoneBox rents to customers begin with the Manhattan area code 212, followed by the prefix 333. The last four digits, the extension, are unique to each customer.

Places like PhoneBox promise customers anonymity and therefore attract a certain clientele. There's an odor about the place that hackers find irresistible, like a carnival midway where all sorts of sleazy transactions are consummated in the back alleys. The boys in Eli's room would hack a customer's line (the default password is the same as the last four digits of the phone number or sometimes there'd be no password at all smart) and listen to private messages. They would hear nameless voices leave what sounded like stolen calling card numbers.

It takes the boys in Eli's room no time to set up their own voice-mail box on a vacant line in the PhoneBox system. They record a genial greeting on the PhoneBox answering machine.

Next, they log in to the phone company switch on which The Graduate is a customer. On the screen they call up the phone number for the Anarchy bulletin board, and add a feature to its phone service call-forwarding. Then they forward all the bulletin board's calls to the answering machine on the PhoneBox line.

It's a fine hack.

Now any kid who tries to log in to Anarchy will unknowingly bypass the bulletin board. The phone call will be routed automatically to the PhoneBox voice-mail box, where a voice will greet the caller with this message: "Hi, this is The Graduate. The board crashed, and I lost all the files. If you want to keep your account, leave your login and your password now, and we'll set it up for you as soon as the system is up again. " The message will pipe through the little speaker on the computer. "Pick up the phone, and leave your password now. " Beautiful.

Of course, the calls come streaming in, one after another, and every caller leaves a message. Nobody can get through to the real Anarchy board, which sits dormant, as neglected as an unplugged vending machine.

Everything's cool, the boys are culling all the logins and passwords they could possibly want, listening to each voice message and laughing uproariously as the callers leave their private information on the machine.

The boys are hacking hackers.

Then, one of the messages on the voice-mail box gets their attention. The message has a different tone to it. Worried, confused. Something's wrong. The caller isn't your everyday lame hacker, no, he's the co-system operator for the whole Anarchy bulletin board. He's The Graduate's best friend, the only one entrusted with running the system when The Graduate is out of town. Which it turns out he is, visiting his grandmother in New Jersey.

The co-system operator must believe that the system really crashed and that The Graduate is trying to patch it back together, because he leaves his login and password. Too funny! Doesn't even pick up on the fact that the voice claiming to be The Graduate is an impostor, but hey, that's voice mail for you.

The boys in Eli's room decide to bypass the voice-mail box now, they're having such a good time. They change the call-forwarding instructions, so that the calls are forwarded directly to Eli's house. Eli's answering the phone himself, live, taking down everybody's login and password, and the calls keep coming in over the white cordless phone.

But then the co-system operator calls back. It must have really rankled him, or maybe just seemed strange, because he's on the line again and you can tell he's suspicious.

He hangs up. The phone rings, almost immediately.

Paul answers this time, and he starts to say, "Hello, this is The Graduate"

But then the caller breaks in.

"I'm The Graduate, " the caller says.

It is The Graduate himself, no lie, calling from New Jersey to try to figure out what went wrong with his bulletin board. The co-system operator had given him the heads up. But The Graduate thinks he's calling a phone line that leads to his own bedroom. That's the number he dialed and he has no idea that anyone has forwarded the number to another location.

So what The Graduate thinks is: Who's standing in my bedroom, in Outer Queens, rifling through my disks and my notebooks and my hard drive? And who knows, maybe even my underwear drawer?

"Who is this?" The Graduate demands from New Jersey. "What are you doing at my house?"

Paul, whose strengths do not lie in verbal volleying, shoots the phone over to Eli.

Without missing a beat, Eli says into the receiver, using a deadly serious voice: "We're the Secret Service special task force and we're taking away all your computer equipment. "

My, my, my. You can practically hear the thud when The Graduate's heart falls right on Granny's rug. Because, as every teenage hacker in America knows, this is how a promising young man gets cut down in the prime of his underground BBS

life. The Secret Service busts you. It's well known that the Service handles investigations of electronic intrusions. And every hacker in America fancies himself a clever intruder. The Graduate is no exception to this conceit, and, all the laughter in the background of Eli's end of the conversation notwithstanding, The Graduate does what any kid would do confronted with the dreadful certainty that the jig, finally, is up.

He panics.

He's being raided! He's headed to jail, where he will be forced, no doubt, to be another man's wife!

Worse, what will his parents say?

"You're in a lot of trouble, " Eli says.

"I didn't do anything wrong!" The Graduate yells. But not convincingly. "What do you want?"

The Graduate will do anything to make this agony end. There's a hitch in his voice, he's near hysteria.

"We're packing up your stuff, and your parents aren't going to like this, " Eli says. "Don't worry. We'll call you. "

The boys are listening in, and somebody yells, "Hey! Let's see what's in his refrigerator while we're here!" But apparently The Graduate doesn't hear that part, or if he does, he assumes that refrigerator searches are standard procedure, because he says, "OK, OK, OK. "

And then, just like that, he volunteers his own login, and his own password, which is believe it or not SUPRA, like Eli's car. Since The Graduate is the system operator, his password gives the boys in Eli's room the power to do anything they want with his bulletin board. Change things, rewrite programs, delete philes, you name it.

After they hang up, the boys in Eli's room start to pack up. They erase the message on the voice-mail box. They erase the call-forwarding command on The Graduate's phone line, and they also give Anarchy a new phone number that hasn't been assigned to another New York Telephone customer: (718) 555-0000. That's to keep anyone from calling and tying up the line.

Then Eli calls the new phone number, types "SUPRA, " and starts looking around in the guts of the Anarchy system.

The boys are looking over his shoulder, shouting suggestions, having a good time, when something happens.

PLIK

This weird word appears on Eli's monitor. If it's an acronym, even Mark has never heard of it. Plik! Eli tries to type something, and hits return. But the Anarchy system is not responding to commands. Who knows why?

PLIK

Eli is pounding the keyboard, but nothing happens. It's a disaster! He breaks the connection, calls back again. This time the Anarchy system is not responding at all, it's acting just plain dead. Who knows why. A disaster.

Paul says, "Damn. It crashed. "

Nobody ever heard from The Graduate again. He never posted another message on a bulletin board, at least not a message that any of the boys in Eli's room had heard of. About a week or so after Anarchy went down, Paul tried calling the board's phone number, and it was disconnected.

"The number you are trying to reach is no longer in service. " The phone company Kaddish.

Paul wondered if The Graduate ever told his parents what happened, or if he waited in fear for the Secret Service to return. The other boys didn't mention the incident, didn't talk about how whatever they did that day got away from them. It was an odd experience, crashing something. Even a lamer board. Never would any of the three have harmed a system intentionally. Never would any of them have violated the hacker ethic by destroying anything. They only mentioned the experience obliquely after that. Whenever something struck them as weird and inexplicable, this is what they would say:

"Plik. "

The summer had turned out to be a great one. By the time August rolled around, Paul, Mark, and Eli felt as if they'd known one another forever. They'd learned a lot, and there was more to learn one night in August, when New York Telephone's employees walked off the job to form strike lines.

At midnight, New York Telephone management changed the network password to connect to COSMOS to protect the system from disgruntled workers. Now, in the middle of a session, Paul, Eli, and Mark were suddenly locked out.

How dare they!

At 12: 20 A. M., the phone company's Technical Assistance Center got a call.

"Hi, I'm a craft worker and I'm trying to finish this job, see. And you changed the password on me. "

The manager who answered the phone had to admire the worker's dedication. We're not going to let a little thing like a strike get in the way of customer service! "Stay on the job, stay on the job, " the thankful manager said. "Here's the password

Y6NEQ2. "

By 12: 21 A. M., the boys were back in business. They were on a roll, they couldn't be stopped. They were all-powerful.

Where were they headed? Where would it end? It didn't matter, because they were going together.

Plik indeed. Now, if Tom Kaiser could have seen the kind of activity that the boys in Eli's room were engaged in during the summer of 1989, the events that were to follow, that changed all of their lives, might never have occurred.

But Kaiser couldn't see through walls.

As a lawman on the electronic frontier, Kaiser did have some unusual powers, to be sure. He could attach one of those black boxes, a Hekemian Dial Number Recorder (DNR), to your phone. He could keep track of every call you made, every number you dialed, every time you lifted the receiver off the hook.

But Tom Kaiser was not a magician. The security specialist for New York Telephone had no way of knowing the identities of the trespassers he tracked through the labyrinthine confines of the phone company's privately owned, privately operated computers. To him, all the criminals who broke into his computers were equal. All he could do was follow their footprints. And all the footprints were the same size.

Kaiser was not a policeman in the traditional sense. He didn't carry a gun or handcuffs, nor did he have the power to arrest anyone. But he was responsible for maintaining order across all the millions of miles of phone lines that New York Telephone owns. He patrolled the busiest beat in America, because it was his job to keep the peace on that last mile where twisted copper wires connect every home and business in New York to the rest of the world. If you broke into New York Telephone's system, it was Tom Kaiser's job to track you. And stop you.