Masters of Deception: The Gang That Ruled Cyberspace (5 page)

This is where Phiber comes alive, though, in a Spartan room with one small window. Why would he need a bigger pane of glass? He has a view of the whole world from his computer. Outside this room, he's just another painfully thin adolescent with carefully combed hair, just another teenager colliding with uncertainty and the embarrassment of being himself every time his voice cracks, every time he walks into math class late, every time he says hi to a girl. But inside this room, Phiber is someone else. He's the smartest, coolest dude in cyberspace. He's intuitively hacking out the most complex programs and commands you can imagine. He's learning new things, going new places every day. By himself. He's the dude.

The funny thing about Phiber is, he's so far into the phone system that when he wants to hit a switch, he does it the hard way. He doesn't just dial the switch in question and connect. No, he logs in through something called the NYNEX Packet Switched Network. This network of computers is much more potent than any single switch. In fact, this network ties together every switch in the New York-New England telephone region. Each is one pearl on the necklace and Phiber has his hands on the clasp. But, ironically, he has never possessed a single specific phone number for any one of the switches.

Of course, he hasn't exactly been lusting for one. It's much more exciting to him to be able to envision the context, the vast splendor of a network of switches all working together, than to play around with any single component. As a little boy, he liked to assemble his own technical elements, but back then he wouldn't have recognized that the plastic models of ships he painstakingly constructed were really just networks of topsails and rigging and decks. The finished products were elaborate, though. And they all sailed.

Phiber may not possess the password to a switch. But he certainly knows a switch when he calls one. The Laurelton computer is a switch.

He phones Eli and Paul, and says, "It's not an SCCS. It's a DMS 100. "

Phiber happily rattles on about how DMS stands for Digital Multiplex Switch, cheerfully informing them that the multimillion-dollar computer was manufactured by Northern Telecom, a giant telecommunications company that's one of the world's biggest vendors of phone equipment. Phiber loves to share what he knows with other serious hackers; he even was a kind of mentor to a kid named The Technician for a while. The Technician would call him up, ask a question, get an answer, hang up, try the hack himself, then call back for further instructions. It made Phiber feel like a real teacher.

DMS. The thing that Paul's been wandering around in for more than a year now has a name. And somebody's been there before who is only too pleased to show him the way. Because that's how it is with Phiber. He loves to share what he knows.

Phiber says, "You want to get together?"

And Paul thinks, Who is this guy?

He lives at the top of steep stairs in a redbrick row house just off Junction Boulevard in a part of Queens called Elmhurst.

The neighborhood had been mostly Italian and Irish when Phiber's parents, Charles and Gloria Abene, moved in.

Children of Italian immigrants, the Abenes had moved east from Brooklyn. As a young man, Charles Abene had dreamed of being a jazz saxophonist but ended up an officer in the school custodians' union. Gloria Abene worked in the billing office of the A&S department store in the Queens Mall. One luxury she allows herself every morning is a taxicab ride to work.

Just like Paul's neighborhood, Elmhurst over the years saw one generation of immigrants supplanted by another. This is the natural rhythm of New York City, where waves of newcomers wash in, and up, and out as the strivers move through the city on their way to the suburbs and assimilation. When Dominicans and Puerto Ricans began settling in Elmhurst, the Italian and Irish families headed east to Long Island. But a few hardy souls always seem to grab hold and refuse to be swept out of their neighborhoods. The Abenes stayed and raised three children in their long, narrow house. Their oldest son grew up, got married, and moved out. Their daughter grew up, went to college upstate, and moved out.

And now, the Abenes' precocious baby

who they know as Mark, not Phiber

is staying awake all night, sitting up at his

computer until he sees what he calls "the stupidly sunny light" of dawn trip in through his window. Then he sleeps through math class.

Nobody could ever tell Mark what to do. He knew his ABCs before he was two and was trying to write words before he was old enough to properly grasp a pencil. He held it in his fist, and he shuffled down the steps one at a time, slowly, like the toddler he was, looking for paper. He remembers all this clearly, as if it happened yesterday, because there isn't much Mark hasn't consigned to memory. Phone Company acronyms, obscure dialups, and being small enough to be bathed in the kitchen sink. It's all there, stored in his brain, and he can pull out the requisite memory anytime he wants to review it.

There's no point in suggesting that he go to sleep at a reasonable hour. Ever since he could walk, Mark has been a step ahead of the rest of the household. They've watched him in a kind of wonder, not sure where he's headed but trusting his sense of direction.

As a child, he was always asking how things worked. He liked to pry off the back of a radio to look at the parts inside, trying to see how they interacted. He took apart the cuckoo clock in the kitchen, the one that never worked, and he realigned the gears by intuition. He closed it up, and the bird started trilling. On the hour.

When he was in grade school, one of Mark's mom's friends gave him a dusty green book called Using Electronics. It was published back in the 1950s, and it came from a library that was selling off its obsolete books at garage-sale prices.

Armed with Using Electronics, he headed for Radio Shack. He wanted the parts to build a crystal radio. He asked the salesclerk for a condenser, and for a crystal diode. The clerk looked at him like he was nuts. The vocabulary had changed since the 1950s, when his guidebook had been published. What Mark needed, in the 1970s vernacular, was a capacitor, and a 1N34A germanium diode. That's the thing about electronics. The words might change, but the principles don't. Mark was learning to think like an engineer, breaking things down, seeing how they interact. He was approaching everything in the world radios, cuckoo clocks, model ships

in the same way, as the sum of its parts, always reducing a system to its components, then envisioning how each unit fits together. There is an unassailable logic to this, a truth about how physical objects behave.

After school, in the afternoons, Mark would go down to A&S to wait for his mother to get off work. He hung out in the store's electronics department, acquainting himself with the first generation of home computers. A whole universe was on display, everything from the Apple II to the Timex Sinclair.

To Mark, each had a personality. The Apple was a rich kid, aloof and inaccessible. The Commodore was scrappy, but limited. But the TRS-80 was just like Mark. It was a smart little machine, elegant and able to do everything the richer ones could. The word that Mark used to describe the TRS-80 was suave.

You couldn't get a TRS-80 at A&S. The computer's initials stood for Tandy Radio Shack, that mecca of capacitors and diodes and crystal chips and breadboard for mapping out circuits. You couldn't get it at A&S, where his mom had a discount. But that's the computer he wanted. So his parents bought it for him for Christmas.

From the beginning, Mark saw himself as a scientist, and his computer was his most important tool. It was his probe, his means of connecting to systems that he wanted to examine. He did the electronic bulletin board scene, even used the ludicrous handle of Il Duce, after being impressed by a television program about the powerful Italian dictator. The best thing about bulletin boards was the clues the philes contained, clues about how to connect to the biggest, most complex system there was, the phone system.

The philes were tantalizing to a nascent hacker, because you knew that some of the mumbo-jumbo in them had to be true. They were written by hackers who had culled kernels of information from dumpster dives. The information, usually no good to them, was evidence of their exploits, and what better way to take credit than to type it up and post it for all to see?

Other philes taught Mark a new phrase: social engineering. Social engineering means tricking people into giving you information over the phone, usually by pretending you're someone they'd want to talk to. Because, as everyone knows, the best information comes from people, not computers.

The people most likely to give out information about how the phone system works are the helpful staffers in the phone company's own business office. The public calls all day with questions, legitimate questions about their bills and their service. The office also handles calls from field workers, the guys stuck up on a telephone pole, the guys who make sure that each customer's phone line works. The business office staff is used to giving out detailed information, politely.

Mark started connecting through the business office. Of course, he couldn't go there physically, because then everyone would see that he was in junior high school and obviously not a lineman at all.

So he went to a pay phone down the block from his house one afternoon and from there dialed the business office. The ambient street sounds only supported his claim that he was up on a pole.

A woman answered. "Business office. "

Mark said, "Hi, I'm calling from the Repair Service Bureau. My name is Joe Linerman, and I don't have a directory handy, and I need a number for line assignment. "

Who wouldn't trust a voice as deep as that?

The woman gave him the phone number for the line assignment office.

So Mark immediately called line assignment, and told the voice at the other end that he needed the cable-and-pair number for his own telephone number. Dutifully, the voice on the other end read off two long, hyphenated numbers that designate the specific wires that lead into and out of the Abene household.

Think of the "pair" as a tributary and the "cable" as the river, all of it flowing into the phone network. The numbers designating a specific cable and pair are simply one unit of information. But if you amass more units, you can start to understand how the system's components fit together. If you can call someone out of the blue, and she helpfully tells you the secret numbers that New York Telephone uses to identify someone's phone service, what won't she tell you?

Mark is patient, and he is a scientist. Nearly everyday, he called back and tried to compile more units of information. He learned that the business office has access to a computer system known as ICRIS, which stands for the Integrated Customer Record Information System. They have to be able to use that to field customers' billing inquiries. From there, he learned about LDMCs and PREMIS and PREMLAC and LMOS, all acronyms for systems that administer and map the sprawling telephone network.

In time, Mark learned how the wire pairs that run into your house are connected to cables and how the cables are connected to trunks, and how all of it is controlled by the switch. Mark the scientist didn't read this in a phile somewhere, he learned it through trial and error, through theory and experimentation. The knowledge he assembled is as rock-solid as anyone outside of New York Telephone could hope to have. When he was in the system, he had this uncanny sense of the architecture, as if he were physically inside, a sightseer in a cathedral.

Mark the teacher needed to share the knowledge that Mark the scientist accumulated. The usual bulletin boards were a bore, it was pointless crowing to wannabe hackers, kids who just follow a recipe for hacking without understanding why you include certain ingredients. Messages posted on bulletin boards are stripped of inflection and facial expressions, and can hit a reader full in the face. The ideas and words are not softened by the physical signals that a speaker uses to convey that he's trying to be funny or silly or just plain honest. If you've read it all before, if you know more than the average kid, then scrolling through screen after screen of adolescent ramblings and posturings can be, well, annoying.

Mark was looking for a more educated audience, and one day, he got a promising phone number and password from a Florida hacker named CompuPhreak.

Catch-22. That was the name of the elite, super-secure bulletin board that belonged to the phone number and password.

The board operated in Massachusetts, and it was rumored to be a hangout for members of the most notorious gang in cyberspace.

Mark had stumbled into the clubhouse of the Legion of Doom.

The Legion's founder, Lex Luthor, was so well known in the underground that his face could appear on dollar bills. Lex expropriated the gang's name from the band of arch criminals that plagued Superman on the Saturday cartoon show. It was a sign of the times that Lex Luthor was a child of the small screen, more familiar with the cartoon show than with the comic book.

Catch 22 was a sneaky board.

It had Lex Luthor's patented Big Business Computer Response. In other words, when you called it, it would appear as if you had dialed into a huge mainframe.

ENTER CLASS:

would appear on the screen. The only acceptable response would be to type VAXB. If you typed anything else, the system would disconnect you. Cool, huh?

The password was changed by word of mouth every few months. Another thing Lex Luthor insisted on was that no one would post codes, which are pilfered calling card numbers. That sort of petty crime was beneath LOD and offended the sensibilities of many members.

Mark logged in, using the password CompuPhreak gave him. He quickly moved to the phreak part of the board, the place where hackers discuss technical intricacies of the phone computers they're trying to crack. Mark took one look and practically laughed. Here was the vaunted Legion of Doom and they had nothing better to post than a few tired telco philes that had already made the rounds.