Masters of Deception: The Gang That Ruled Cyberspace (11 page)

On Altos, Eli learned that Allen has his own Unix machine. Allen ran a bulletin board in Unix, if you could believe it. Allen called his bulletin board the Seventh Dragon. He gave Eli the number. Eli wrote: BOOK TWO: Creative Mindz

With the addition of Allen, came a shitload of pranks and loads of

fun. He hadn't known much about telephone systems, but one thing he knew was how to make Unixes do nifty things. Of course, he and Scorpion had undertaken the task of taking on some worthwhile projects and providing the group with some healthy side-benefits (which cannot be mentioned or commented on at this particular moment in time).

Of course there were things that couldn't be mentioned. That's because they were still going on. And maybe there were things that couldn't even be explained, at least under the hacker ethic.

The "healthy side-benefits" fell under both those categories.

The "worthwhile project" that Paul and Allen had undertaken was this: they were invading a private computer and programming it to find long-distance calling card numbers. It seemed victimless to them. They needed the numbers to fund calls to further their education. Who was being hurt? Not the person whose calling card number got used, because that person would dispute the bill and never have to pay. Not the phone company, because the filched phone calls emanated from a reservoir of limitless capacity. It was like riding the rails. The trains were running anyway, and a hobo wouldn't displace any cargo in the boxcar.

This was how the hack worked. Allen procured the phone number for a computer in the backroom of the Eye Center, which stores and updates customer records. And if you must know, it's where he gets his glasses. Paul doesn't ask Allen how he got the number.

But Paul calls it. Working at his own computer one night long after the Eye Center employees have locked the store and gone home to bed, Paul dials and gets inside this machine that he's never seen. Allen dials and gets inside the machine, too. They're not logged in at the same time, but in a sense they are, since they tell each other what they see. They compare notes.

The Eye Center's machine is just a generic computer connected by a modem to the phone lines. But it has its uses.

Paul writes a program that tells the computer to start working for him every night. What Paul wants the computer to do is what his own Commie 64 used to do for him, scan out useful numbers. That way he can keep the Commie 64 free for other hacking activities while the Eye Center computer works to find International Telephone & Telegraph calling card numbers. He tells the computer to dial a seven-digit number that every ITT customer uses to initiate a long-distance call.

Then the computer dials thirteen digits that adhere to a known formula ITT uses to generate its calling card numbers.

Usually, the number is invalid. But the computer doesn't care. It hangs up and tries again. All night long. Every night.

Whenever the computer hits on a number that works, it records that number. Paul has taught it to keep a list for him.

Early in the morning, say at 5: 30 A. M., Paul instructs the Eye Center computer to reboot, that is, shut itself down and turn itself on again. Rebooting automatically erases all evidence of its moonlighting.

Paul and Allen needed calling card numbers because they did a lot of long-distance dialing. To each other, for starters. A call from Queens to Pennsylvania is a long-distance call, and who can afford that twice a night? They called out-of-state bulletin boards as well.

This went on for months, through the summer and fall of 1989. Paul and Allen shared their "side-benefits" with Eli and other friends. In all, the Eye Center computer found about 150 valid calling card numbers. That was a lot of free longdistance calls you could make. That was thousands of dollars' worth of service that ITT wouldn't collect a penny for. The boys in MOD didn't stop to think about it, really, but there were people who might say this was more than just a prank.

The Eye Center hack got so sophisticated that the boys rigged Allen's computer to dial Eli's beeper with each new ITT number. Eli could be walking around and his beeper would go off and he'd look down and thank you! manna from Heaven.

There were people who might say things were escalating.

But to the boys in MOD, it was just another good hack. Oh, like it was their fault that the Eye Center didn't know how to make the computer secure? No way. They were just doing what they knew how to do. It was all about information. And information should be free. Shouldn't it?

Of course, when you crossed that line, claiming for your own purposes that it's okay to blame the victim for not protecting himself against the thief, you might eventually find yourself living in a world where you become the prey.

That's what would happen to Paul in the late summer of 1989, although he couldn't know that yet. Paul would become the victim of somebody's "prank, " and the consequences would come back to haunt him a few years later.

Some hacker, probably a friend who Paul trusts, gets on to an internal AT&T network of 140 Unix computers nationwide.

The network handles administrative chores. The intruder leaves a trail, muddy footprints that will lead right back to Paul and make people think Paul was the one inside the AT&T network. Here's how: First, the intruder adds passwords on a New Jersey computer that's part of the network. The passwords will grant two new users the highest level of access.

Those users are named "The Wing" and "Scorpion. " The intruder also loads a computer program known as a "logic bomb. " The logic bomb keeps an eye on the network's internal clock, and when it reaches a specified time and day... plik.

The entire system will be wiped out. All that will remain will be this greeting, a greeting that will make people think the logic bomb was set by Paul:

Your system has been crashed by MOD

The Masters of Disaster

Virus installed by Scorpion

GOODNIGHT SUCKERS

Now, it was a good thing that one of AT&T's technicians found the logic bomb almost immediately and disabled it. Had the network crashed, it would have been a disaster indeed for AT&T. And a disaster for Paul.

Why would someone sign Paul's name to this piece of work? Anyone who knew Paul would know that malicious destruction of a computer wasn't the sort of thing he would do, let alone condone someone else's doing. But try to prove that. His name is signed to it. This is the sort of thing that happens when you throw your lot in with a bunch of desperadoes. This is what happens when a joke becomes real.

Who among the ranks of MOD would do such a thing? Paul, even after learning of the existence of the bomb, will never know for sure. There are a lot of people in MOD by now, a lot of people who know Paul's handle is Scorpion.

When you look back at it, there comes a time in any good history where the plot twists unexpectedly. Life is moving along, developing its own routine and rhythm, when all of a sudden, something or someone intervenes and the speed accelerates, faster, and faster still. And you hurtle off in a new direction.

One day, while Eli is maintaining the territory, he decides to check out reports he's heard about some hot hacker who lives in Brooklyn.

The Brooklyn hacker calls himself Corrupt. He's rumored to be a specialist. MOD can always use another specialist, and Corrupt supposedly knows more about a ubiquitous and powerful corporate computer called VAX than the founder of the Digital Equipment Corporation. Which would be some feat, considering that DEC manufactures the damn machine. VAX stands for Virtual Address Extension. You see, in microprocessor design, there's this concept known as virtual memory addressing, which allows a computer to behave as though it has access to more memory than actually exists. It does this by page swapping, or grouping an arbitrary number of consecutive bytes together to call them a page. Then the microprocessor "swaps" pages, and is able to time-share. It's pretty complicated, but Corrupt instinctively understands the process.

An expert who understands the intricacies and nuances of running VAX computers could really widen MOD's power base.

A VAX master could help the other MOD boys navigate through thousands of computers that for now seem tantalizingly obscure. Not only is VAX a type of computer prized by hackers who love the versatility and power of the machine, but VAX is also indispensible to universities, corporations, small companies, database archives, and libraries all over the country. Oh yeah

the government owns a lot of VAXes, too. The government keeps a lot of its secrets hidden on VAXes.

And Corrupt can crack VAXes. Sign him up.

Now, there was plenty that Eli didn't know about Corrupt. He didn't know, for instance, that Corrupt's name is John Lee.

He didn't know that John lives with his mom in a third-floor walkup apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant (that's Bed-Stuy, you've heard of it as surely as you've heard of Cabrini Green and East L. A. ), one of New York's toughest neighborhoods.

Eli didn't know that John would need no introduction whatsoever to the concept of MOD, because John was intimately acquainted with gangs. Out in the real world, out on the streets where you measure distance with your feet instead of your modem, John used to belong to a gang. He was a Decept, a member of the best-known gang in the whole city. Anytime there was a holdup on a subway train, you can bet some cop was going to say the Decepticons pulled the job.

John got out of that scene. But he knew the value of belonging to a group. He knew the kind of protection that's available from friends. He knew what any Decept learns, that it can be cold and lonely out there in the dark. And there were a lot of dark spaces in cyberspace.

The phone rings.

"Hello, " John answers.

"Hey, I hear you know a lot about VAXes, " Eli says. No introduction. No "my-name-is" crap. Just a verbal challenge.

"How did you get my number?" John asks.

"I got it from Sage, " Eli says.

That's all Eli needs to say. Now John knows he's for real; now John will believe Eli when he introduces himself as Acid Phreak.

Sage is the name of a bulletin board. To get access to the board, John had to tell the system operator his hacker handle and his real phone number. Eli says he's got a lock on the Sage system, he can get into the administrative files and pull up any information that he wants about the board's users. In this case, Eli just dipped into the registration file. And there was John's phone number.

John's impressed, because he's only owned a modem for about six months; he's only been into this hacking thing since then, so yeah, it's pretty cool that Eli has this capability. They talk for a while, about VAXes and other things. They hit it off. Eli says he has a friend John should meet, too. John says that's cool.

The next time Eli calls, his friend Mark is on the line with him.

They all start trading information. They have this phone friendship now, talking back and forth, and they realize they have a lot of information to share.

This is the best thing that's happened to John since he started hacking, frankly. He's met other hackers who are cool, but nobody like these MOD guys.

Would Eli and Mark have been so willing to befriend John if they'd known how lame John was a mere six months earlier?

Of course, they'd never know, because John was the kind of guy who doesn't let on. He could convince anybody of anything.

John used to be the class clown. He was always the one who could incite people, get them to do things they really wouldn't have considered on their own. Way back at All Saints Elementary School, nearly ten years ago, he used to get the whole Nut Row in trouble. That's when he rode the train every morning to Williamsburg, where black-sooted All Saints Church rose like a thorn from the concrete. It was private school for poor people. A lot of the students were black, like John, and a lot of students lived with only their mothers, like John. The sign out in front says in both English and Spanish: LOW TUITION

CONVENIENT MONTHLY PAYMENTS.

The "Nut Row" was the unofficial name for the segregated group of desks off to one side of the classroom. The bad boys sat in the Nut Row. There was Jimmy Gold in the row's first desk

Jimmy sitting, jiggling, bouncing, the hard heels of his

lace shoes drumming against the linoleum of the classroom floor. He couldn't help it. Then, behind him was James, and, you don't want to know, but yes, he had his pants unzipped under the desktop as usual. Behind James, staring blankly at the crucifix at the front of the room, was Ernie. And behind Ernie was the class clown. John was taller and thinner than most of the other ten-year-olds, and he had the kind of ideas that got the rest of the Nut Row into a lot of trouble. Like sneaking off on a private unguided tour of the sacristy after mass.

Every day it was something else. There was the time after the bathroom break when somebody in the Nut Row brought back some feces to his desk. That's a problem. There was the fight in class. That was not good. There was the time in the cafeteria that somebody in the Nut Row swallowed an Oreo, regurgitated it in nearly pristine, original shape, and started a terrible chain reaction of nausea at the table.

How did it happen?

"Hey, James, do the thing with the Oreo, " John would say. "Come on, man, do it. "

It was easy to get carried away in John's presence.

Was it any surprise that John was asked to leave All Saints before fifth grade? He had so much promise, but he needed more stimulation, the principal told his mother, Larraine. It wasn't that she wanted to get rid of John, Sister Donna Jean Murphy said. She'd seen boys like him before, who just get distracted and go off on tangents.

From fifth grade on, John attended P. S. 11 in Clinton Hill and he didn't think it was so bad. It had a satellite program for advanced students. There was a roomful of computers, Commodore PETs, one of the first personal computers to hit the market, big boxes with glowing screens. (At All Saints, nobody had ever heard of computers. ) The classroom at P. S. 11

wasn't as fancy as a room that would be called a computer lab, but John just needed a quiet place to sit and type. Like in Sheila's office.