Masters of Deception: The Gang That Ruled Cyberspace (9 page)

Kaiser and Staples knew that unless they could show that the intrusions had caused at least a thousand dollars' worth of damage or loss of service, they wouldn't get the U. S. Attorney's office interested. And it was important to prosecute. If the hackers were kids, it was still a good idea to send a message, scare them, come down on them with the full, heavy weight of the law. Kids wouldn't end up in jail for this kind of bravado trespassing, they figured hell, they had kids of their own.

But the hackers would learn their limits if they got a stern lecture from a judge, coupled with a couple hundred hours of community service.

Since 1987, the phone company had, in fact, snared other teenagers snooping around in the phone system. Kids with names like Bill from RNOC and Delta Master and Ninja NYC. Those cases, involving juveniles under the age of eighteen, were disposed of quietly. Sometimes with only a phone call to a parent.

That's what happens if you're dealing with kids. That is, if you know for sure that you're dealing with kids.

Staples spouts a blue stream of Marlboro smoke, considering the options. With Staples in the office the smoke gets so thick it reaches down to the floor. The room was in a haze. Months from now, Kaiser would move a picture on the wall and see the darkened outline of the frame's original position. Staples smokes so much that it gets into the paint.

One option is going to the media, going public with the fact that it is nearly impossible to fool around undetected in phone company computers. Announce the intrusions and at the same time show how the system has been secured. Another possibility, assuming the hackers were all kids, is creating an educational program to channel some of this misdirected energy. The phone company, after all, has a hard enough time finding qualified people to train as telecommunications engineers.

But that's academic. And this is the real world. The facts for Kaiser and Staples are these: We don't know who we are dealing with. And we are witnessing a more dangerous level of infiltration than ever before.

In the end, they realize there is only one option.

Kaiser awakens early one morning and thinks, today could be the day that we nab the hackers. He already feels the summer heat through his shirt as he leaves his house on Long Island to make an early train to Manhattan.

This morning he will have to convince more literal-minded lawmen that crimes committed on computers are as much their concern as the drug buys on Forty-second Street.

Today, Kaiser has reserved the big conference room, and the meeting is full of phone company people, and investigators from the New York City police department's special frauds unit and the U. S. Secret Service.

Knowing that the technical aspect of the case might make it difficult for non-technicians to grasp, Kaiser and Staples explain the case in general terms.

"We may be corning to you with this case we have, and how should we do that?" Kaiser says.

"What have you got?" asks one of the investigators.

"We have three hackers, " Kaiser says.

Staples gives it a shot and talks about how the phone company switches are being targeted. He talks about the dial hubs, and about how it would be relatively easy for New York Telephone to simply close the holes in the system to lock out these particular hackers. But the problem is bigger than that, he says. If the hackers could get into New York Telephone's computers, they might be able to get into the phone system in other regions as well.

"The problem is national, " Staples says.

The investigators are taking all of this in, nodding, jotting down notes. Somebody says Staples and Kaiser should meet soon with the U. S. Attorney's office. A Secret Service agent says he will report this to his supervisors.

Staples and Kaiser are feeling pretty good, like they got the message across and everyone in the room understands the magnitude of the problem.

Then one of the investigators raises his hand. All of the New York Telephone Company people look at him.

"What's a switch?" he asks.

It was autumn now, and the heat of the city summer seemed to have been absorbed by the people walking the picket line that Kaiser has to cross to reach the revolving glass doors of his skyscraper. Crossing the picket line really doesn't bother Kaiser. Sometimes they threw eggs, but in his teens Kaiser was a Teamster. He could handle a few eggs from the Communication Workers of America.

One day in October, late in the afternoon, the black box told Kaiser that someone from the Ladopoulos residence had just placed a call to New York Telephone's business office. Right under his very nose. And it was still in progress.

What were the hackers after now?

It was a long phone call. Kaiser thought the connection would last forever, the minutes were just ticking by, and he was dying to find out who the hackers were calling at his shop.

Finally, the DNR told him the connection was broken.

Immediately, Kaiser punched the digits to connect him to the same number at the business office.

The employee who answered the phone was an old supervisor of Kaiser's, from the days when he worked in the business office. Normally, she wouldn't be answering the phone at all, not when Kaiser calls and not when a hacker phones. But her strike duty was to take field calls that came to the business office.

"Who was that on the phone?" Kaiser asked her.

"Some poor plant guy who's stuck up on the pole, " she said. She was surprised that Kaiser was calling and that there was a problem with what seemed like such a routine request.

Kaiser winced as she explained that the caller said he was a repair technician named John Gilmore who needed a phone number transferred from New York to New Jersey. Of course she'd put through the work order. The request was perfectly ordinary. Kaiser recognized the name John Gilmore: Gilmore was a former hacker who went on to become a millionaire writing code at Sun Microsystems.

Kaiser quickly countermanded the work order.

Every day was an exercise in frustration. It seemed like the case would drag on forever, and all Kaiser and Staples could do was run around putting out fires. By the end of the summer, they thought they had accumulated enough evidence, and they finally met with an assistant U. S. Attorney right after Labor Day. They went downtown to his office, scrupulously prepared for the meeting, organizing all the information they had collected about unauthorized intrusions in notebooks with neat colored tabs. They had charts, too.

The prosecutor told them his office was definitely interested. Just keep accumulating evidence.

More meetings followed

uptown, downtown, in Brooklyn, where the Eastern District of the U. S. Attorney's office is headquartered. Meetings with the Secret Service near Wall Street. Meetings with the police.

The tarantula was still creeping.

Just sitting there, forced to watch the hackers logging in to their computers, was starting to drive Kaiser and Staples a little crazy.

They decided to go undercover in cyberspace. The only disguises they needed were anonymous computer handles. They had some phone numbers for so-called underground bulletin boards, so they called one named Shadoworld. They logged right in, just like hackers would.

They used the handles Splinter and Rapier. They felt a little silly doing it, being grown men and all, but at the same time, it was useful. They cruised the philes, and got a real sense of the kind of information that your run-of-the-mill wannabe hacker possessed. Kaiser said, "It increases our level of knowledge. "

They feel like spies, reading philes and looking for clues that the hacker intrusions might be more widespread than anyone suspects. Who's to say this case is limited to just three hackers? Who's to say it's limited to phone company computers in the New York area?

Evidence of a broader problem might interest the U. S. Attorney's office, they figure.

Then, one day they are in the prosecutor's office, explaining the case again. Some of the faces are old. Some of the faces are new. It seems clear to everyone that the three hackers have repeatedly entered phone company computers. It seems clear that the evidence is irrefutable. Kaiser and Staples are ready for a sign, ready for search warrants, ready to put an end to the damn thing.

And someone raises a hand, and asks, "What's a switch?"

Sometimes you just have to blurt out the news, not even try to cushion the impact. When the whole world shifts and heaves, you just have to come out and say what happened.

Mark got kicked out of the Legion of Doom.

There it is, in all its horrible bluntness. He's kicked out. He's gone. He's unplugged.

Word of his expulsion leaks out, all over the underground. How did it happen? Some kind of a fight. Who knows? But it's posted on bulletin boards from here to Germany. It's the talk of the hacker elite: Phiber Optik got into a feud with Erik Bloodaxe, and to hear Erik Bloodaxe tell it, Phiber Optik lost. Here's how it happened.

One day in 1989, while Chris is working on his big hacker project, a directory of the computers on a large data network known as Telenet, the phone rings.

The caller is LOD member Mark Abene, up in New York City.

Mark is really upset. His account on the NYNEX Packet Switched Network was killed. Can you imagine? Phiber Optik without access to the NYNEX Packet Switched Network. It was like James Dean without a motorcycle. Mark desperately wants to get back in the system, and knows that Chris has a secret route to the computer. Mark asks for it.

Now, Chris knows Mark has access to a list of addresses of certain phone company computers that you can reach over Telenet, Chris wants to include those addresses in his directory.

"Why don't you just go on there and get that and give me the list?" Chris asks Mark. Chris is calling the shots, after all.

"I can't do that right now, but you can just go do it yourself, " Mark says, giving Chris an account name to get the list.

When Chris tries, the account doesn't work.

"All right, I'll try to find another one, " Mark says.

But now for the outrageous part, the part that will make Chris sputter with rage even years later.

After they hang up, Mark calls Bob, a hacker friend of Chris's who lives in Massachusetts. And Mark asks Bob for the secret route. "Chris said it's OK, " Mark convinces him.

Bob calls Chris later that day, and says, "Well, Mark called up and I gave him the information. "

"You did what?"

"He said you said it was all right. He was really convincing. "

"Did he give you the account?" Chris asks.

"No, he said he was going to give it to you later. "

Chris is totally furious. Right away, he gets Mark on the phone. "Mark, what are you doing calling Bob and telling lies to get that route? Give me the account like you promised. I need that list. "

"I don't owe you shit!"

There it is again, that New York attitude.

"Excuse me?"

"I don't owe you shit. I didn't get it from you. I got it from Bob. Fuck you. "

"What?" Chris says.

"No, man, I don't have time for this, " Mark says, hanging up the phone on Erik Bloodaxe!

Well, you can imagine how mad Chris was.

He calls every single member of the Legion of Doom and tells them what went down. One by one, he gets their votes.

Mark is out.

Out.

Out.

"You don't screw people like that, " Chris says.

Of course, Mark told his own version. His version rambled a little.

Let's see, from Mark's perspective, the name Legion of Doom had outlived its reputation. He was so far ahead of what anyone in that gang knew that it was ridiculous.

LOD had its own bulletin boards, of course, which only members could visit. Catch-22, the first LOD board that Mark logged on to, was just one of many. You also got access to Plovernet. But plenty of good boards weren't controlled by LOD. Sherwood Forest, which actually was located in Forest Hills, Queens, was run by a kid who called himself Magnetic Surfer.

Mark told people he got bored with LOD. In his opinion, the text philes on its boards were moronic, supposedly instructing you in how to hack COSMOS, how to hack a Unix computer. Utter silliness, in Mark's opinion, written by pretenders who knew so little about their subjects that they listed incorrect commands, wrong descriptions.

Who wanted to be associated with that? Did Mark actually say he quit?

Well, in Mark's version of the story, yes, there was this guy, and yes, his name was Chris Goggans, and he ran around acting like he was in charge of LOD. Like he was the boss. Everybody up north had heard he was some rich kid who lived in the Lonestar State. Of course no one really knew this because no one had met him face-to-face. All contact was through bulletin boards and phone calls.

Mark heard that Chris was talking Mark down. He was furious with Mark, for some reason, and Mark heard that Chris was going around posting stuff on bulletin boards, telling people not to trust Mark with information. Chris was saying that Mark was not in the LOD!

Chris was telling people that Mark cheated him out of information.

"Not true, " Mark said.

Mark doesn't bother to argue much about what Chris said. What does he care? he tells people. Still, it has to hurt. He has a personal phone number: 949-4LOD. What was he going to do, change it to 949-XLOD? It's pretty clear that Chris had been out to get him from the beginning. And it wasn't fair. That has to hurt.

Mark had other problems. He'd just changed high schools again. Don't ask. It was a long story, about how the first public high school, Francis Lewis High School, cracked down on him for breaking into the computer where they keep the grades and attendance records. He didn't change anything the scientist was just making a few observations but his mom had to come in for a meeting, and Mark got suspended. They were pretty rigid at that school.

Then the second school, Newtown, didn't give anybody a locker, and Mark had to carry all his books around all day long, in a big black bag with the logo "UNIQUE" written across it in rainbow colors. Newtown scheduled Mark's math class at 7: 30 A. M. It was kind of hard to learn trigonometry when you felt like puking, and Mark was queasy in the morning. He spent most days cutting school, smoking Benson & Hedges Ultra Lite Menthol 100s (the really long ones), and eating buttered bagels in the pizzeria across the street.