Masters of Deception: The Gang That Ruled Cyberspace (13 page)

But to John, it was cool. He had actually figured out how to get his modem to call this number, figured out how to connect to another sentient being, just by using his computer.

He learned to post electronic messages:

I'M INTERESTED IN BECOMING A HACKER.

SIGNED,

DAMAGE

Now he had his first hacker handle. Damage. It was the first word he thought of when he was typing. It was an honest-to-God nickname, a passport in cyberspace.

This was so cool, this bulletin board stuff, that he had to share the experience. He found a friend in his neighborhood, someone who, of course, didn't have a computer. He invited the kid back to his house. John activated the modem, and they heard the clicks as it dialed Papa Bear's Den. The image of the growling bear face filled the screen. John's friend just looked at the bear, then at John. He thought John was ridiculous.

Of course, the friend had a very different reaction the next time John invited him over to play with the computer. That day, a few months later, John logged into TRW's national database of credit records and started to read people's credit histories. No argument, that was cool.

By that time, John had abandoned his old handle. He was calling himself Corrupt now. That had been his street name. It should do just fine in cyberspace.

John educated himself so fast that within a few months after he bought his modem, he was on track with the other MOD

boys. For one thing, John figured out that some rules are the same, whether you're on the street or in cyberspace. If you want to get ahead, no one is going to just let you. You have to take what you want and get there yourself. He played a little game sometimes. He called it Let a Hacker Do the Work. Like the time he called a hacker named Signal Interrupt in Florida, and sweet-talked the kid out of all kinds of information, just by claiming to be a member of the Legion of Doom.

Another way cyberspace was like the street was that it helps to have friends.

John hung around on a German chat board with some hackers who called themselves the Eight-Legged Groove Machine.

One of the four members had been busted in England, so there was an opening for two legs. Now they were teaching John how to crack VAX machines.

The hacking scene is really big in Europe, where, in fact, it's not even against the law for kids to log into private computers and look around. That's why so many European hackers cross the Atlantic to dig around in U. S. computers. Where they come from it's like a sport. Lots of European bulletin boards and chat systems are popular with U. S. kids because the quality of information traded online is so high.

How did a guy from Brooklyn get on a chat board in Hamburg, Germany? Some philes on local bulletin boards had told John about Tymnet, a private network that businesses use to connect their computers to one another around the world.

It's like a phone system that computers, not people, use. Every major company, it seems, is a Tymnet customer and communicates on Tymnet's pervasive network of computers and phone lines. On Tymnet, Johnson & Johnson operates a sub-network to link its computers in different cities and countries. So does the Bank of America. And so does TRW. Even the federal government is a Tymnet customer and uses the network to link sensitive National Security Administration computers to one another.

If you're a Tymnet customer, it's easy to use the network to call another computer anywhere in the world. You just dial a local phone number that hooks you to the system, then type in your user name and password. Theoretically, the password keeps the system secure from unauthorized intruders.

But John learned that there were all sorts of ways to circumvent the security to get inside the Tymnet system. All you had to do was call Tymnet's local phone number, and then when the modems connected, simply type a certain NUI, which stands for Network User Identification. Then you type in a password. The philes told John what NUIs and passwords to use.

But John still hung out on American bulletin boards, too. On Phuc the Pheds, he met this guy from the Bronx who has the same sense of humor as John. He's younger, but he seemed pretty cool. His name was Julio Fernandez, and he called himself Outlaw.

Julio really looked up to John. That's because in the years since his sixth-grade teacher gave him a book that introduced him to computer programming and games, Julio hasn't met too many people who knew more than he did about computers. John definitely knew more. Julio spent hours every day trying to break into other people's computer systems

and so did John. John always had suggestions of new things to try, a command that might work, a back door that nobody else had thought of. Julio, who was only fifteen, lived in a fantasy world, where the computer underground was an exciting place, and outwitting the law was something a cool hacker could do forever. Julio's mother encouraged him to stay in the apartment and play on his computer. She figured that it was dangerous to play outside on the streets of the Bronx; her son was safer at home. What could be dangerous about sitting at a keyboard and typing all day and all night?

John would log in to Sage pretty often, so it's no wonder Eli noticed him there. For a while, after that first phone call, John developed a telephone relationship with both Eli and Mark. They traded mutually beneficial information. They get along because they see things the same way.

John starts to think about joining up with MOD later in the fall. Somehow, he'd been bounced out of Stuyvesant, because things didn't work out, and he ends up at City-As-School.

One day, while he's hanging around out in front of school, break-dancing, dreadlocks flying, John leaps up into the air, straddling, and jumps right over another kid's head. Like he's flying.

He lands and turns, as a skinny white kid watches his moves. The kid has dark hair, meticulously groomed. The kid is Mark.

And now, the two know each other outside the confines of cyberspace. They meet from time to time at school, on the days when they bring in their journals to show their advisers. John carries around a lot of heavy books on VAX/VMS programming, and Mark likes to see that. It shows that John is serious.

Paul went to college after the summer ended, to Polytechnic University on Long Island. It was only about an hour east of Queens, and not such an odd choice for the valedictorian, because the school offered him a Presidential Scholarship. The only other school he'd considered was Queens College. He didn't want to go too far away from home.

But Paul often wondered if he's made the right choice. He thinks it's a depressing campus, with so many engineering students plunked down on this isolated island of square, modern buildings. The school isn't in a college town, no bookstores or pizza hangouts or coffeehouses to walk to. No revival movie house for whiling away the weekends. The campus is on the edge of a town called Farmingdale, which is just a typical middle-class suburb, with a bank and a stationery store and a hardware shop. Not much of a lure, and it's a long walk. So once Paul was at school, he was stuck.

Neither Paul nor his mom had a car. Paul got sick of playing Ping-Pong and foosball in the basement of the dorm. He went home as many weekends as possible.

One Friday during the fall, Paul rode home from school on the Long Island Railroad, looking forward to marathon hacking sessions alone in his basement. Although he was sharing information with the other MOD boys, he hasn't told anyone about some of the systems he explores. He's noticed that soon after Eli and Allen get into a computer, it closes down. Not that they crash it, necessarily. But they're careless. Paul thinks that after a week or so, system administrators get wise to the trespass and lock out all intruders. So Paul was keeping a few Unix systems just for himself.

On the train ride from Farmingdale to Queens, he sits by the window. Monopoly tract houses whiz by. Town squares that got swallowed by six-lane roads and fast food. A Japanese grocery store in a strip mall. Five-story office buildings crouching on lots barely big enough for the houses they displaced. Gas stations and cars waiting in traffic. And now, he notices the telephone poles and the thick black cable strung between them, and the cables to the buildings and to the gas stations and to the homes.

Everyone is harnessed to that electronic tether. These people are all under my control, Paul thinks. And it feels good to be so powerful.

But there's something that nags him, too. He'd told Eli and some of the other boys about one system that he should have kept secret. It's called The Learning Link. Hac, who had found The Learning Link in the first place, had warned him not to give the phone number to anyone else. But Paul eventually did.

It was hard not to.

Eli and other MOD members had been complaining that they didn't have enough systems. And Hac had pretty much dropped out of the scene and into the Marines. After he'd gone to boot camp on Parris Island, the last thing he'd be thinking about was hacking. So Paul didn't see the harm. He felt as though he should give them this Unix because it wasn't that sensitive, at least not compared to a phone company computer. Besides, they were all in this adventure together.

What the adventure was and where it was leading was unclear. The whole point, for Paul at least, seemed to be to satisfy a craving to explore new computers, new territory. The world was full of computers, glorious unknown computers crammed with information, each exhibiting its own permutation of programming language and full of its own specific mysteries.

All you had to do was find them.

Paul found lots of computers back when he was scanning 800 numbers. Allen had stumbled on the Eye Center computer by accident. For months now, the MOD boys had been looking for uncharted systems. That's what hackers do; they're always scouting for new properties. In a way, they're just like horse traders. If you're a hacker, you swap computer systems. What's a really good Unix worth? Two VAXes? A switch dialup? Is it AT&T or a local phone company? To be a hacker in the late 1980s was to be a kid with a notebook stuffed with passwords for Unixes and VAXes, switch dialups, and all kinds of university mainframes. Of course, the passwords don't last forever. So the hackers needed new horseflesh. So Paul gave them The Learning Link.

But Eli and the others aren't under my control, Paul thinks.

The Learning Link is one of the first great experiments hi networked education. Owned by Channel 13/WNET, New York City's public broadcasting television station, the network is like a collection of bulletin boards. Originally, it was a way for teachers to order rebroadcasts of educational shows. Say a science teacher wanted to show a Nova episode. She merely requested it through The Learning Link, and if WNET could handle it, the station would transmit the show during dead air time, maybe at three A. M. That way, the teacher could record it on a VCR.

The Learning Link has evolved, like everything in the networked world, into a novel way to communicate. Educators and librarians can send electronic messages to each other over the system. The Learning Link is extremely useful for thousands of schoolteachers and students throughout New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. Educators post announcements and participate in discussion forums. For the teaching community, it's a vital link. A school has only to buy a subscription to the system.

Non-subscribers can log in and look around the system with limited privileges, simply by signing on as GUEST.

For more than a year, ever since Hac saw The Learning Link's phone number advertised in a brochure at Flushing High School, Hac and Paul had been doing just that. They were quiet about it. No one even knew they were there.

For Eli and other MOD members, though, The Learning Link is a new conquest, and they concentrate on wresting control of the system. On the surface, it looks like one of those computers that seems largely uninteresting, just a Unix computer, no more, no less. It doesn't run any particularly exotic flavor of the Unix operating system; there isn't anything intrinsically interesting in the data stored in the system. From a veteran hacker's standpoint, there is nothing to be learned here. If Eli had a lot of other systems to explore, he might not even log in to The Learning Link.

But Eli is enchanted by The Link's connection to the mass media. If the media notice you, you become famous.

Earlier this year, the media had latched on to a story about the trial of a hacker named Robert Morris, a Cornell University student who unleashed a rogue computer program that shut down the global web of computer networks known as the Internet. It was the first time the hidden world of cyberspace, the hidden world of computer hackers, surfaced. People realized there was this new, uncharted universe of activity out there, and they wanted to know more. Oh, the things the MOD boys could tell them. If only someone would ask.

Eli couldn't stay away from the WNET computer.

Now, in November, MOD members have gotten root access to the system, meaning that they can exercise complete control over The Learning Link. Root access means you are a super user. You have the power to execute any command you type. You have the power to look at any file in the system. You have the power to modify the system in any way you choose. It's not so hard to figure out how to get root access on a system with security so lax that any wanderer can log in as GUEST. These were the days before people started locking their doors in cyberspace. Besides, why would anyone want to crack a totally benign educational network that attracts public schoolteachers and guidance counselors?

There are any number of ways to crack an unprotected Unix computer. You might find a hole that allows you to write a program that you could hide in the system. When such a program (aptly known as a Trojan Horse) is unwittingly executed by the system administrator, it adds a new password file to the system enabling you to log in as an authorized super

user. Once you're a super user, you can create and delete user accounts. You can read anybody's mail. You can shut the whole thing down.

Why would the MOD boys want to shut The Learning Link down? The more systems they "own, " the more power they have, right? But here was the catch. Nobody would know they have the power unless they advertised.