Masters of Deception: The Gang That Ruled Cyberspace (3 page)

Scorpion mastered the art of cracking games. He needed new places to go, new worlds to conquer with his computer. By the time Paul entered high school, a friend had slipped him a sheet of paper with some phone numbers on it. The phone numbers were for hacker bulletin boards. They were electronic meeting places, these bulletin boards. All you needed was a modem that could connect you to electronic networks and a computer that could whisper a password, and you were in, reveling in the allure of the forbidden. Or so it seemed to teenage boys.

Your computer did the knocking for you. Just tell it what phone number to dial, type the password when you're prompted for one, and you'd be connected. Then you could type messages to other people who had logged in. People who liked the same things you did. People who might know a little bit more than you. People to hang out with.

At a time when boys in other parts of the country were out getting their driver's licenses, Paul was saving up to buy the one thing that stood between him and all the electronic bulletin boards in the world. A modem. A modem took the digital language of your computer and translated it into analog, the continuously varying sound waves that the telephone network was built to carry. Without a modem, Paul was just a hermit in a basement, typing alone. Without a modem, the phone numbers he carried around in his pocket were useless.

Any kid with a halfway decent computer setup and his own phone line for the modem (nothing pissed the folks off faster than having the house line tied up all night long) could procure the software to run his own bulletin board. The boards all had evocative names. You'd hear of a board called Pirates Cove, and you'd know it attracts software crackers who want to trade pirated games. You'd hear of a board called Phuc the Feds, and you'd know you're dealing with something else entirely.

These boards were real places, though some operated for less than a week before they imploded. Kids congregated on certain boards where they knew they'd find their friends. Sometimes they even arranged to meet at a certain time and go to other boards together. It was like an electronic street corner where they'd meet. Then cruise together. Through cyberspace. And nobody ever had to leave his bedroom.

A good board would also attract its share of hacker celebrities, kids who had built up reputations through their computer exploits, or by boasting of their prowess, or maybe just because they'd use a really clever hacker handle. A good board would attract "elite" hackers, the top tier of guys with really cool names like Erik Bloodaxe and Phiber Optik, guys who were in gangs, voted in because of their specialized expertise. There were wannabe gangs, and then there were real gangs, whose members would crow and scrawl their proud graffiti over bulletin boards throughout cyberspace. But no gang was more real, more revered, than the Legion of Doom.

The Legion of Doom was the best of the best from the fifty states.

A few of the Legion's members lived in New York. One LOD member, the brash and brilliant Phiber Optik (who arguably knew more about the intricacies of the phone system than anyone alive) was rumored to live in Queens. He cruised all the local boards, and if Phiber Optik graced a bulletin board with comments about this or that phone company secret, then other hackers spread the word: Phiber's on. This place is hot. A crowd would congregate. The phone lines would become busy. Hackers desperately calling, instructing their computers to redial, trying anything to get through, trying to get past a busy signal that was as implacable as any nightclub bouncer.

You could find anything on a good board. A good board would be honeycombed with all sorts of treats in the form of text files you could read

recipes for homemade bombs, pilfered long-distance calling card codes, advice on how to cheat pay phones. Only the files weren't called "files. " They were called philes, an homage to the phone. The telephone, that holy device, is the most important tool a hacker has, since it connects him to the biggest computer system in the world: the phone network.

So you can see why Paul needed a modem. He saved. It took a few months, lunch money here, a sixteenth birthday there. The Master modem cost fifty dollars. It was the affordable modem, the VW Beetle of modems. It was slow, and it pulse-dialed like a rotary phone instead of using tones like a pushbutton. But it got the job done and it was the only one at Radio Shack in Paul's budget range. He also had to buy a phone jack and the cable to snake the phone line from the first floor down to the cellar, where the computer was set up. That stuff would cost between ten and twenty dollars; Paul wasn't exactly sure how much, so he didn't want to waste money on bus fare to the mall.

On a Sunday morning in April, his parents still in bed, Paul quietly slipped out the front door and breezed up 227th Street.

Mock-Tudor townhouses all in a row. Cracks in the sidewalk. First daffodils in somebody's curbside garden. Cambria Heights was always held up as an integration success story; maybe because the whole process of one ethnic group moving out when another moved in was quieter here, less turbulent than in other parts of the city. Other Lithuanian families just like Paul's used to live in the neighborhood. In fact, before they died, Paul's grandparents lived within walking distance. But now a black family would move in, a white family would move out. After a few years, you realized that most of the white families with kids had sneaked over the border into Nassau County, Long Island. Soon you were the only white boy in your class at Public School 147Q. Of course, it was probably a lot easier to be the only white kid in a class in Queens than to be the only black kid in a class in Nassau County, and Paul, in his understated way, got along with everyone.

He turned left and walked another five blocks to reach an underpass beneath a rotting parkway that divided the city from suburbia, divided Queens from Long Island. Instantly, the roads were better paved, the houses spaced a little farther apart, the litter not as noticeable and graffiti nonexistent. And still he walked, south now, through Elmont and Valley Stream, a good three miles, so desperate was he to spend his sixty dollars and change.

Why did he want this so much? He didn't know. He couldn't answer that question, just like he couldn't tell you why he once painstakingly wrote out a list of the dozens of conversation forums offered by CompuServe, a computer information service that a friend showed him. There was no point to the list that took up pages in his noteback back then it was like

Columbus having a map before he even had a boat.

Paul got home from Green Acres Mall before his parents woke up. He had the thing hooked up before eleven that morning. It made a marvelous clicking noise when it dialed the phone.

He logged into a couple of bulletin boards, but he was just too excited to stay. He wanted to log in everywhere but was limited to the phone numbers on his list.

Within a week, Paul wrote a little program to help the modem find other computers. The program made the modem stay up all night after Paul went to sleep. The modem's job was to dial toll-free 800 numbers sequentially. It was a lot like in the movie War Games, a movie that influenced Paul and his friends in the same way that Rebel without a Cause had captivated an earlier generation of lost boys. In fact, this type of program is known as a War Games dialer. The modem might start by dialing 800-555-0000. If someone answered the phone, or if the phone just rang and rang, the modem would disconnect. Then it would dial 800-555-0001. And so on. The modem was hunting for other computers. When it found one, when the modem heard a fellow modem beep a greeting, Paul instructed his computer to make a note of that phone number.

All night long, Paul could hear the modem pulse-dialing. Clickety, clickety, click. It took a long time to scan numbers this way, but it didn't matter. Calling toll-free numbers doesn't cost anything.

The next morning, Paul would look over the night's work and see ten or even twenty computers' phone numbers on the list.

Within four years, he would have the numbers to a thousand computers.

During his junior year, Paul was a system operator of the high school electronic bulletin board. It was really more of a chat board, because nobody posted anything illegal, like credit card numbers, or sexy, like how to blow up the toilet. Hardly anybody called, in fact, except this guy who used the handle Hac, who also owned a Commie 64 and went to high school in Flushing. He lived near Shea Stadium, where the Mets play baseball. One night on the board Paul and Hac got into one of those arguments, where at the end you realize you're both saying the same thing. They argued over the definition of the word hacker.

First, Hac said that hackers didn't exist anymore. He said the word referred to the pioneering hardcore computer programmers of the 1960s. Those guys at MIT loved nothing more than writing, also called hacking, code. They were people whose love for computing bordered on the obsessive. They weren't guys who broke into computers, unless you count the times they sneaked processing time on the big mainframes, locked up in climate-controlled rooms.

Paul said he knew that. But he said hacking wasn't dead, pointing out that hackers today were interested in the same things only they cadged processing time by sneaking in over telephone lines. They were different from crackers, who just like to break into systems and have no idea of what to do once they get there.

It was then that they realized they held the same opinion. About a lot of things. So they met face-to-face. It's a funny thing about the computer world. You can talk to a guy for hours, have the most kick-ass conversations, and never know what the dude looks like.

They would hang out at the Queens Mall. Paul slouched through the shopping center, wearing his nylon "Black Ice"

windbreaker and listening to Hac talk for hours. They sipped from really huge cups of mall coffee with lots of milk and sugar. Paul could drink four cups.

Paul would tell Hac about the new computers that his modem had found scanning. Hac, it turned out, had also been scanning 800 numbers. Paul told Hac that he explored new computers by calling back the number from his computer. He figured most of them were owned by private companies. Some would prompt: PASSWORD. Others wouldn't prompt him at all. They would just wait, passively, for a certain amount of time. Then they would disconnect him. Paul would try to figure out what sort of computers they were, and he would try to guess passwords. The computer system would identify itself as belonging to, say, the XYZ Corporation, and sometimes the password would be a variation of the company's name, like ZYX. Sometimes the password would simply be "test, " or "guest, " or "password. " One out of thirty times, Paul could guess the password.

One day Paul sat at his desk randomly dialing telephone numbers. He was searching for a phone company computer. He knew from reading messages on bulletin boards that the phone company computer lines were often stashed up in the high numbers, up above 9900. Let's say Paul was looking in exchange 555. He would dial 555-9900, just to see what happened. Nothing. Then he would dial 555-9922, just for variety. He hated to dial numbers in sequence. He could dial any couplet, from 00 to 99, haphazardly, but without hitting any number twice.

555-9973. Nothing.

555-9918. Nothing.

555-9956. Nothing.

Then he hit one. 555-9940. And things got weird. He told Hac about it. Neither of them could make much of the thing.

Paul got a second phone line installed in his house and put up his own hacker bulletin board, called Beyond the Limit. The name came from a movie Paul saw advertised in TV Guide. He never watched the movie, just liked the name.

Not many hackers called Paul's board. In fact, only three did, and Hac was one of them. Hac got another kid he knew in Flushing to call, too. Hac was good at meeting people.

A year after they graduated from high school, Hac called Paul and told him he had met this incredibly elite dude who seemed to know a lot about hacking. The dude claimed a blind guy in the neighborhood had taught him to make free phone calls. Hac really wanted Paul to meet this guy. His name was Acid Phreak.

Skulking in the lamplight, Eli is supposed to watch out for telephone company security goons and for anyone else who might want to know why these scraggly-ass teenagers are climbing over an eight-foot fence. Down on the pavement, Eli can see the whole length of 30th Street.

It's crazy to climb over a fence onto private property when you're depending on a guy you hardly know as your lookout. If it had been anyone else but Acid Phreak, Paul probably wouldn't have done it. But there was something about Eli, this new kid, that made Paul want to be a part of whatever he's planning. Eli is a few months older than Paul, and even if he doesn't know as much about the mechanical aspects of computers and programming as Hac had been led to believe, he has other skills. He got his computer when he was fourteen, and ever since he's been calling people all over the world with his modem. Eli has friends everywhere. He's always game to try to break into different computer systems. He says he does it for "brags. "

Paul hoists a bag over his shoulder, over his head, and hands it up to Hac. Then Hac hands it down to the sidewalk.

That's the routine. But just as Hac's about to hand off the final bag, a man comes out of the telephone building and pauses a second longer than he should, and then gets into a car and rolls down the windows and just sits there. The boys freeze.

"What's he doing?" Paul whispers.

"I don't know. He's just sitting in his car. "

Paul and Hac stand there, crazed alley cats, backs high, ears cupped, tensed on tiptoes.

And then the worst happens.

In the distance, they hear a siren. It's not an ambulance, whose aural signature Paul would recognize at this point in the evening. But it's definitely a siren, and it's getting louder. Closer. It's a banshee now, and it's just around the corner, and Paul, for one, has had it with dumpster diving. He climbs over the fence, as fast as he can, and follows a retreating Hac to the sidewalk. The siren's just about upon them, and they dash madly across the street, bags in tow, past the guy who's sitting in the car, now wide-eyed, watching the kids come leaping over the fence. Their sneakers hit the pavement with heavy slaps, and with barely a second to spare, they dive into a dark, safe spot in the park.