Masters of Deception: The Gang That Ruled Cyberspace (21 page)

When Chris discovered the propaganda campaign, he was enraged, because he saw Mark's comments as part of a bigger pattern of harassment. You see, someone had been messing around with Chris on the phone. Chris suspected MOD. Who else could it be?

Well, in fact, it was the work of John Lee.

John never runs from a fight. One thing he likes is to see his enemy cry. He's not sure why, but he really enjoys that.

Chris is John's enemy, will be forever. But at this point he doesn't even know him by the name Chris. He just knows Erik Bloodaxe. John had decided to make his enemy's life miserable. First John had to learn Erik Bloodaxe's real name. You couldn't exactly call directory assistance in Austin and ask for a listing for a resident named Bloodaxe that's "axe" with

an "e. " But Chris was so notorious in the underground that it didn't take John long to get the information he needed.

. John bypassed directory assistance altogether. He instead called a Southwestern Bell computer, from there logged in to a switch, and simply looked up Chris's phone number for the three-bedroom suburban-type house he was renting in north Austin.

Then the calls started.

Sometimes John uses his ghetto accent to harass Chris. Other times, John and a friend call Chris and whisper into the receiver, "Mr. Elite, Mr. Elite, " in a very mocking tone. Chris suspects that it's John and Julio, but he can't prove it, and the calls drive him crazy. Part of the problem is that Chris can't make out the words for sure and sometimes the ominious whisperers sound like they're saying "Mystery Elite, Mystery Elite. " Which makes no sense to Chris.

The phone calls are constant. It doesn't help to hang up. The receiver is barely down before the phone rings again. And again. And again. You have to take it off the hook, and leave it off the hook for hours. Sometimes, when they prank Chris, the callers say, "Here, talk to your friend, " and then before Chris can hang up, he hears a click, and then Scott is on the line, too, three-wayed into the call against his will, and he's saying, "Hello? Hello? Who is this?"

In Chris's mind, this type of harassment definitely fell into the category of behavior that is unacceptable. If he were already working in computer security, he could put a stop to it. He and Scott talked about the situation a lot; they even came up with a name for the company they wanted to create.

Comsec Data Security was the full, stuffy name, but neither of them ever thought of it in that formal way. No, for Chris and Scott, the venture would always simply be Comsec.

In December, a couple of momentous things happened. First, Scott and Chris met face-to-face for the first time. Whether they looked like what the other expected neither ever says. Chris is lanky and long-haired, looks like a hippie. And Scott is shorter and wiry, hair cut close like an army cadet.

The two met at Ho-Ho Con, an annual hackers' conference that kids travel from all over the country to attend. They're the new iteration of Shriners, and every year they converge in Texas for the purpose of holing up in the cheapest hotel in Houston that will take them, right before Christmas (thus, Ho-Ho). They stay up all night, hacking and talking Acronym to one another. They sleep all day, and wake toward dusk to forage for Tastee cakes, colas, and similar sustenance.

Ho-Ho Con is invitation only, but it still gets a little rowdy, and midway through the so-called conference this year, the group got evicted from La Quinta Travelodge and checked in to Howard Johnson's. Thus, Ho-Ho-Ho-Jo.

Chris and Scott were telling everybody they met about Comsec, about their vision for its future, and right away they hooked up with another hacker named Kenyon Shulman. He lives in Houston, and he's a lot richer than the other hackers.

In fact, his mom is a genuine socialite, and before his arrival at the conference, the rumor was that Kenyon drives a black BMW.

When he pulled up, he was in a Mercedes. Just a Mercedes.

Kenyon was pretty excited about the whole Comsec scheme, in fact he had the deep pockets that might actually transform the idea into reality. Kenyon has an old friend in Atlanta who was about to graduate from Emory University.

Kenyon's friend was headed for a job trading securities, and the two had been toying with the idea of a little startup venture.

Kenyon got on the phone at Ho-Jo's, called down to Atlanta, and before anybody knew it, Comsec was a reality.

The four of them

Chris, Scott, Kenyon, and Rob in Atlanta

figured that they'd need about a hundred thousand dollars

for startup costs, but that was no problem, because Kenyon was willing to put down eighty thousand as a basis to get a loan. They figured they'd need an office to set up business, but that was no problem because Kenyon's mom would give them free footage in some real estate she owns, a one-story office building behind a strip mall in Houston.

Can you imagine how exciting this all sounded to a bunch of students? It was really great to have so many options in life, to know the right people, to have access to money when you needed it. It was the end of the 1980s, and the news hadn't sunk in yet that the decade's great leverage and expansion possibilities were threatened. No, it was still the land of opportunity out there, and all it took to capitalize on it was a few bright ideas hatched in a Howard Johnson's. Oh yeah, and a lot of cash.

But that was no problem if you made your new friend Kenyon an equal partner.

After Ho-Ho Con ended, Chris had to go back to Austin to finish up the spring semester. But Scott wasn't a student, he was working in Houston at what he called a "poor-slob job. " He entered data all day into the computers of the Academy Corporation, which owns a chain of sporting-good stores throughout the state. Scott and Kenyon were working all night, every night, to lay the foundation for Comsec before Rob and Chris moved to town in the spring.

Scott went to the library to look up all the computer security firms in the United States and counted them. Not too many.

He researched what each company specialized in, analyzing the industry to see how best to position Comsec. Research, research, every night. He even researched how to buy office supplies, where to get the best deal.

Of course, there is one major distraction: the MOD-LOD war, which reaches a crescendo in the winter of 1990.

One day, Chris gets hold of a copy of "The History of MOD. " The spurned Alfredo gives it to him, proving again there is a high price to pay for adolescent cruelty.

Chris feels he has been teased and provoked enough; the MOD boys have logged into the Southwestern Bell switch that controls his phone service and switched his long-distance carrier from Sprint to AT&T. Chris didn't know that had happened until he tried to dial long-distance. He doesn't hear the familiar click. So then, of course, he had to call up the phone company. Try explaining the situation to a clerk in the business office and you'll know why he's so annoyed.

Chris figures that John was the one who switched his longdistance carrier on him. He also believes, incorrectly, that John is the author of "The History of MOD. " So Chris gets hold of the Boswellian tale and decides to pull a little mischief.

Chris has an old computer program that will translate any file into a new "language. " In this case, when he feeds "The History of MOD" to the program, out pops a "jived" version of the document. The program simply searches for certain words or word forms, and replaces them with others.

In goes the original language that Eli wrote: "In the early part of 1987, there were numerous amounts of busts in the U. S.

and in New York in particular. "

Out comes, "In de early part uh 1987, dere wuz numerous amonts uh busts in de U. S. and in New Yo'k in particular. "

In goes Eli's description of his own activities in 1989: "It came about when Acid Phreak, then using another handle, had been running a semi-private bbs off his Commodore piece of shit and ten generic Commie drives. "

Out comes the jived version: "It came about when Acid Phreak, den usin' anoda' handle, had been runnin' a semi-private fuckin' bbs off his Commodo'e piece uh shit and 10 generic Commie drives. "

The jive program also adds racially offensive phrases to the text. Every couple of lines, for instance, the phrase "slap mah

'fro" or "sheeeiit" appears in the text as a kind of hateful refrain: "Hims handle wuz De Win', and he ran some Unix systum fum his crib in Pennsylvania. Sheeeiit. Sco'pion wuz always some Unix guru while Acid had only jest across it in college two years back. "

Using the jive program is the electronic equivalent of appearing in blackface.

Chris does his work in the gracious surroundings of Kenyon's townhouse. An English tapestry depicts a hunt scene on one wall of the office, bookshelves line another. On the shelves, looking down at Chris's work, are the unjived versions of books by Hume, Freud, Plato. It takes Chris a couple of hours to get the jive program to work right, to convince it to insert spaces in the right spots between words, and to add punctuation where called for. He works intently, enveloped by a red leather chair that's roomy enough to sleep in: "Some nigga' name Co'rupt, havin' been real active befo'e, duzn't gots'

some so'kin'computa'anymo'e and so... sheeit, duh. "

Chris doesn't consider himself a racist. He has black friends at work, he says. If you ask him why he jived "The History of MOD, " he says it just seemed funny. Hilarious, he says. If you're out to get someone, you're going to do anything you can to make him mad, Chris says. Anything. He didn't have a translation program to turn the MOD boys' prose into, say, a Lithuanian accent or something, he only had a jive program. So what was he supposed to do?

If you lived in Texas, you'd understand, Chris says. "Down here, we all have boots and hats. We all ride on the range. "

Long before the jive version gets officially published in the April 1991 issue of Phrack, John sees a copy of Chris's handiwork.

Of course, John isn't sitting in a red leather chair in a room adorned by tapestries when he sees it. He's sitting in front of a computer system that looks like it was cobbled together from junkyard parts. He has a big old TV console for a monitor, a messed up keyboard, and his old Commie 64, bandaged with electrical tape. His computer is a street box, a guerrilla machine.

It's about seven in the evening, dark enough already to warn you away from ideas that spring might come early to New York City, and John's sitting in the same chair he always uses at the computer in his bedroom. From time to time, he hears sirens scream down faraway streets. He can also hear, through the open windows, the rapacious demands of rap music. The lyrics and the insistent beat drift up from the sidewalk, as one boombox after another passes under the window of his row house. Inside, the only things on John's walls are a couple of posters advertising NYNEX yellow pages.

Their messages are funny, and that's why John has them on the wall. One shows Barbie and Ken looking under the entry for "Plastic surgeons. " Another shows the entry "Chicken ready to serve" under a picture of a hen with a tennis racket.

John has a third handle, Netw1z (Corrupt and Broken Leg somehow just don't say it all for him). He sees that a file has been sent to his Netw1z account. And there it is on the screen, the jived "History of MOD. "

"De legacy uh de underground 'clandestine' netwo'k continues and so's duz de war (and ridiculing) against all de self-proclaimed, so-called 'elite. '"

John can't believe it at first, it's too outlandish. He reads through it, slowly, amazed. Slap mah 'fro.

John finishes reading, then sits for a minute, staring at the screen, staring away from the screen just kind of staring. And he thinks, This guy really doesn't like me. This is aimed right at me, and only me.

One day Tom Kaiser's phone rings, and on the other end of the line is an official from Tymnet.

Tymnet, you will recall, is the sprawling, privately owned data network that computers use to send information to one another around the world. You dial a local phone number. It's called a dialup, because you're literally dialing up the Tymnet computer. Once you're in, you can connect to any computer worldwide that's hooked up to the system.

Today, the Tymnet official tells Kaiser that Tymnet has a problem. The huge network has somehow been penetrated by an unknown hacker. The hacker is roaming through computers that belong to a rather influential customer. The customer's computers are all hooked up to one another, forming what is known as a subnetwork within the Tymnet structure. The official says Tymnet has only been able to trace back to the general area where the calls are originating: New York City.

Oh, and one other thing. The Tymnet official would rather not identify the customer. It's a sensitive situation. You understand.

Kaiser understands sensitive situations. The lawman says he thinks he can help.

The trick here will be to figure out where the intruder lives. Tymnet traced the call as far back as the New York City dialup that the hacker used to enter the Tymnet system. Of course, Tymnet has hundreds of dialups in major cities worldwide, and more than one in New York City. So even if the hacker phoned a specific New York City dialup one day, he could easily call another one the next time. There's no way that Kaiser can instruct dozens of phone switches around the country to monitor, or trap, all the calls coming in to every single one of Tymnet's phone numbers.

Kaiser, however, can try to do a live trace while the hacker is on the phone. That's dicier, because if the hacker hangs up before the trace is completed, the intruder is gone. There's no way to say where he called from.

Kaiser has no clue about the culprit's identity. The last people he suspects are members of the MOD squad. After all, a year after the raids, cases are still pending against Mark, Eli, and Paul. It's winter again in New York City, a slushy yucky affair that's been slopping over the tops of Kaiser's shoes every morning as he tromps up the steps from the subway into his office building. It's been a little frustrating for the lawman, waiting for the federal government to resolve the hacker cases. In fact, the assistant U. S. Attorney in the Eastern District who handles the cases has been running into some roadblocks. It seems that his bosses don't think that prosecuting a handful of teenagers is a good thing to do with the resources of the office. It seems that the bosses don't really grasp the significance of the case. "What's a switch?" they ask.