Approaching Zero - Paul Mungo (books to read to increase intelligence .txt) 📗
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Commodore and hack into the switch, the computer that controls all the phones
in the area. He discovered that each phone is represented by a long code, the
LEN (Line Equipment Number), which assigns functions and services to the phone,
such as the chosen long-distance carrier, call forwarding, and so on. He knew
how to manipulate the code to reroute calls, reassign numbers, and do dozens of
other tricks, but best of all, he could manipulate the code so that all his
calls would be free.
After a while Indiana Bell began to seem tame. It was a convenient launching
pad, but technologically speaking it was a wasteland. So he moved on to
BellSouth in Atlanta, which had all of the latest communications technology.
There he became so familiar with the system that the other hackers recognized
it as his SoI—sphere of influence—just as a New York hacker called Phiber
Optik became the king of NYNEX (the New York-New England telephone system), and
another hacker called Control C claimed the Michigan network. It didn’t mean
that BellSouth was his alone, only that the other members of the computer
underworld identified him as its best hacker.
At the age of fifteen he started using chemicals as a way of staying awake.
Working at his computer terminal up to twenty hours a day, sleeping only two or
three hours a night, and sometimes not at all, the chemicals—uppers, speed—
kept him alert, punching away at his keyboard, exploring his new world.
But outside this private world, life was getting more confusing. Problems with
school and family were beginning to accumulate, and out of pure frustration, he
thought of a plan to make some money.
In 1989 Fry Guy gathered all of the elements for his first hack of CSA. He had
spent two years exploring computer systems and the phone company, and each new
trick he learned added one more
layer to his knowledge. He had become familiar with important computer
operating systems, and he knew how the phone company worked. Since his plan
involved hacking into CSA and then the phone system, it was essential to be
expert in both.
The hack of CSA took longer than he thought it would. The account number and
password he extracted from Tom only got him through the credit bureau’s front
door. But the codes gave him legitimacy; to CSA he looked like any one of
thousands of subscribers. Still, he needed to get into the sector that listed
individuals and their accounts—he couldn’t just type in a person’s name, like
a real CSA subscriber; he would have to go into the sector through the back
door, as CSA itself would do when it needed to update its own files.
Fry Guy had spent countless hours doing just this sort of thing: every time he
accessed a new computer, wherever it was, he had to learn his way around, to
make the machine yield privileges ordinarily reserved for the company that
owned it. He was proficient at following the menus to new sectors and breaking
through the security barriers that were placed in his way. This system would
yield like all the others.
It took most of the afternoon, but by the end of the day he, chanced on an area
restricted to CSA staff that led the way to the account sector. He scrolled
through name after name, reading personal credit histories, looking for an
Indiana resident with a valid credit card.
He settled on a Visa card belonging to a Michael B. from Indianapolis; he took
down his full name, account and telephone number. Exiting from the account
sector, he accessed the main menu again. Now he had a name: he typed in Michael
B. for a standard credit check.
Michael B., Fry Guy was pleased to see, was a financially responsible
individual with a solid credit line.
Next came the easy part. Disengaging from CSA, Fry Guy directed his attention
to the phone company. Hacking into a local switch in Indianapolis, he located
the line equipment number for
Michael B. and rerouted his incoming calls to a phone booth in Paducah,
Kentucky, about 250 miles from Elmwood. Then he manipulated the phone booth’s
setup to make it look like a residential number, and finally rerouted the calls
to the phone box to one of the three numbers on his desk. That was a bit of
extra security: if anything was ever traced, he wanted the authorities to think
that the whole operation had been run from Paducah.
And that itself was a private joke. Fry Guy had picked Paducah precisely
because it was not the sort of town that would be home to many hackers:
technology in Paducah, he snickered, was still in the Stone Age.
Now he had to move quickly. He had rerouted all of Michael B.‘s incoming calls
to his own phone, but didn’t want to have to deal with his personal messages.
He called Western Union and instructed the company to wire $687 to its office
in Paducah, to be picked up by—and here he gave the alias of a friend who
happened to live there. The transfer would be charged to a certain Visa card
belonging to Michael B.
Then he waited. A minute or so later Western Union called Michael B.‘s number
to confirm the transaction. But the call had been intercepted by the
reprogrammed switch, rerouted to Paducah, and from there to a phone on Fry
Guy’s desk.
Fry Guy answered, his voice deeper and, he hoped, the sort that would belong to
a man with a decent credit line. Yes, he was Michael B., and yes, he could
confirm the transaction. But seconds later, he went back into the switches and
quickly reprogrammed them. The pay phone in Paducah became a pay phone again,
and Michael B., though he was unaware that anything had ever been amiss, could
once again receive incoming calls. The whole transaction had taken less than
ten minutes.
The next day, after his friend in Kentucky had picked up the $687, Fry Guy
carried out a second successful transaction, this time worth $432. He would
perform the trick again and again that summer, as often as he needed to buy
more computer equipment and chemicals. He didn’t steal huge amounts of money—
indeed,
the sums he took were almost insignificant, just enough for his own needs. But
Fry Guy is only one of many, just one of a legion of adolescent computer
wizards worldwide, whose ability to crash through high-tech security systems,
to circumvent access controls, and to penetrate files holding sensitive
information, is endangering our computer-dependent societies. These
technology-obsessed electronic renegades form a distinct subculture. Some
steal—though most don’t; some look for information; some just like to play
with computer systems. Together they probably represent the future of our
computer-dependent society. Welcome to the computer underworld—a metaphysical
place that exists only in the web of international data communications
networks, peopled by electronics wizards who have made it their recreation
center, meeting ground, and home. The members of the underworld are mostly
adolescents like Fry Guy who prowl through computer systems looking for
information, data, links to other webs, and credit card numbers. They are often
extraordinarily clever, with an intuitive feel for electronics and
telecommunications, and a shared antipathy for ordinary rules and regulations.
The electronics networks were designed to speed communications around the
world, to link companies and research centers, and to transfer data from
computer to computer. Because they must be accessible to a large number of
users, they have been targeted by computer addicts like Fry Guy—sometimes for
exploration, sometimes for theft.
Almost every computer system of note has been hacked: the Pentagon, NATO, NASA,
universities, military and industrial research laboratories. The cost of the
depradations attributed to computer fraud has been estimated at $4 billion each
year in the United States alone. And an estimated 85 percent of computer crime
is not even reported.
The computer underworld can also be vindictive. In the past five years the
number of malicious programs—popularly known as viruses—has increased
exponentially. Viruses usually serve no useful purpose: they simply cripple
computer systems and destroy data. And yet the underworld that produces them
continues to flourish. In a very short time it has become a major threat to the
technology-dependent societies of the Western industrial world.
Computer viruses began to spread in 1987, though most of the early bugs were
jokes with playful messages, or relatively harmless programs that caused
computers to play tunes. They were essentially schoolboyish tricks. But
eventually some of the jokes became malicious: later viruses could delete or
modify information held on computers, simulate hardware faults, or even wipe
data off machines completely.
The most publicized virus of all appeared in 1992. Its arrival was heralded by
the FBI, by Britain’s New Scotland Yard and by Japan’s International Trade
Ministry, all of which issued warnings about the bug’s potential for damage. It
had been programmed to wipe out all data on infected computers on March 6th—
the anniversary of Michelangelo’s birth. The virus became known, naturally, as
Michelangelo.
It was thought that the bug may have infected as many as 5 million computers
worldwide, and that data worth billions of dollars was at risk. This may have
been true, but the warnings from police and government agencies, and the
subsequent press coverage, caused most companies to take precautions. Computer
systems were cleaned out; back-up copies of data were made; the cleverer (or
perhaps lazier) users simply reprogrammed their machines so that their internal
calendars jumped from March 5th to March 7th, missing the dreaded 6th
completely. (It was a perfectly reasonable precaution: Michelangelo will
normally only strike when the computer’s own calendar registers March 6.)
Still, Michelangelo hasn’t been eradicated. There are certainly copies of the
virus still at large, probably being passed on innocently from computer user to
computer user. And of course March 6th still comes once a year.
The rise of the computer underworld to the point at which a single malicious
program like Michelangelo can cause law enforcement agencies, government
ministries, and corporations to take special precautions, when credit bureau
information can be stolen and individuals’ credit card accounts can be easily
plundered, began thirty years ago. Its impetus, curiously enough, was a simple
decision by Bell Telephone to replace its human operators with computers.
The culture of the technological underworld was - formed in the early
sixties, at a time when computers were vast pieces of complex machinery used
only by big corporations and big government. It grew out of the social revolution that the term the sixties has come to represent, and it remains an
antiestablishment, anarchic, and sometimes “New Age” technological movement
organized against a background of music, drugs, and the remains of the
counterculture.
The goal of the underground was to liberate technology from the controls of
state and industry, a feat that was accomplished more by accident than by
design. The process began not with computers but with a fad that later became
known as phreaking—a play on the wordsfreak, phone, andfree. In the beginning
phreaking was a simple pastime: its purpose was nothing more than the
manipulation of the Bell Telephone system in the United States, where most
phreakers lived, for free long-distance phone calls.
Most of the earliest phreakers happened to be blind children, in part because
it was a natural hobby for unsighted lonely youngsters. Phreaking was something
they could excel at: you didn’t need sight to phreak, just hearing and a talent
for electronics.
Phreaking exploited the holes in Bell’s long-distance, directdial system. “Ma
Bell” was the company the counterculture both
loved and loathed: it allowed communication, but at a price. Thus,
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