Hacker Crackdown, Bruce Sterling [ebook reader with highlight function .txt] 📗

As might be imagined from the complexity of these games, Urvile’s gaming notes were very detailed and extensive. Urvile was a “dungeon-master,” inventing scenarios for his fellow gamers, giant simulated adventure-puzzles for his friends to unravel. Urvile’s game notes covered dozens of pages with all sorts of exotic lunacy, all about ninja raids on Libya and breakins on encrypted Red Chinese supercomputers. His notes were written on scrap-paper and kept in loose-leaf binders.

The handiest scrap paper around Urvile’s college digs were the many pounds of BellSouth printouts and documents that he had snitched out of telco dumpsters. His notes were written on the back of misappropriated telco property. Worse yet, the gaming notes were chaotically interspersed with Urvile’s hand-scrawled records involving ACTUAL COMPUTER INTRUSIONS that he had committed.

Not only was it next to impossible to tell Urvile’s fantasy game-notes from cyberspace “reality,” but Urvile himself barely made this distinction. It’s no exaggeration to say that to Urvile it was ALL a game. Urvile was very bright, highly imaginative, and quite careless of other people’s notions of propriety. His connection to “reality” was not something to which he paid a great deal of attention.

Hacking was a game for Urvile. It was an amusement he was carrying out, it was something he was doing for fun. And Urvile was an obsessive young man. He could no more stop hacking than he could stop in the middle of a jigsaw puzzle, or stop in the middle of reading a Stephen Donaldson fantasy trilogy. (The name “Urvile” came from a bestselling Donaldson novel.)

Urvile’s airy, bulletproof attitude seriously annoyed his interrogators. First of all, he didn’t consider that he’d done anything wrong. There was scarcely a shred of honest remorse in him. On the contrary, he seemed privately convinced that his police interrogators were operating in a demented fantasy-world all their own. Urvile was too polite and well-behaved to say this straight-out, but his reactions were askew and disquieting.

For instance, there was the business about LoD’s ability to monitor phone-calls to the police and Secret Service. Urvile agreed that this was quite possible, and posed no big problem for LoD. In fact, he and his friends had kicked the idea around on the “Black Ice” board, much as they had discussed many other nifty notions, such as building personal flamethrowers and jury-rigging fistfulls of blasting-caps. They had hundreds of dial-up numbers for government agencies that they’d gotten through scanning Atlanta phones, or had pulled from raided VAX/VMS mainframe computers.

Basically, they’d never gotten around to listening in on the cops because the idea wasn’t interesting enough to bother with. Besides, if they’d been monitoring Secret Service phone calls, obviously they’d never have been caught in the first place. Right?

The Secret Service was less than satisfied with this rapier-like hacker logic.

Then there was the issue of crashing the phone system. No problem, Urvile admitted sunnily. Atlanta LoD could have shut down phone service all over Atlanta any time they liked. EVEN THE 911 SERVICE? Nothing special about that, Urvile explained patiently. Bring the switch to its knees, with say the UNIX “makedir” bug, and 911 goes down too as a matter of course. The 911 system wasn’t very interesting, frankly. It might be tremendously interesting to cops (for odd reasons of their own), but as technical challenges went, the 911 service was yawnsville.

So of course the Atlanta Three could crash service. They probably could have crashed service all over BellSouth territory, if they’d worked at it for a while. But Atlanta LoD weren’t crashers. Only losers and rodents were crashers. LoD were ELITE.

Urvile was privately convinced that sheer technical expertise could win him free of any kind of problem. As far as he was concerned, elite status in the digital underground had placed him permanently beyond the intellectual grasp of cops and straights. Urvile had a lot to learn.

Of the three LoD stalwarts, Prophet was in the most direct trouble. Prophet was a UNIX programming expert who burrowed in and out of the Internet as a matter of course. He’d started his hacking career at around age 14, meddling with a UNIX mainframe system at the University of North Carolina.

Prophet himself had written the handy Legion of Doom file “UNIX Use and Security From the Ground Up.” UNIX (pronounced “you-nicks”) is a powerful, flexible computer operating-system, for multi-user, multi-tasking computers. In 1969, when UNIX was created in Bell Labs, such computers were exclusive to large corporations and universities, but today UNIX is run on thousands of powerful home machines. UNIX was particularly well-suited to telecommunications programming, and had become a standard in the field. Naturally, UNIX also became a standard for the elite hacker and phone phreak.

Lately, Prophet had not been so active as Leftist and Urvile, but Prophet was a recidivist. In 1986, when he was eighteen, Prophet had been convicted of “unauthorized access to a computer network” in North Carolina. He’d been discovered breaking into the Southern Bell Data Network, a UNIX-based internal telco network supposedly closed to the public. He’d gotten a typical hacker sentence: six months suspended, 120 hours community service, and three years’ probation.

After that humiliating bust, Prophet had gotten rid of most of his tonnage of illicit phreak and hacker data, and had tried to go straight. He was, after all, still on probation. But by the autumn of 1988, the temptations of cyberspace had proved too much for young Prophet, and he was shoulder-to- shoulder with Urvile and Leftist into some of the hairiest systems around.

In early September 1988, he’d broken into BellSouth’s centralized automation system, AIMSX or “Advanced Information Management System.” AIMSX was an internal business network for BellSouth, where telco employees stored electronic mail, databases, memos, and calendars, and did text processing. Since AIMSX did not have public dialups, it was considered utterly invisible to the public, and was not well-secured—it didn’t even require passwords. Prophet abused an account known as “waa1,” the personal account of an unsuspecting telco employee. Disguised as the owner of waa1, Prophet made about ten visits to AIMSX.

Prophet did not damage or delete anything in the system. His presence in AIMSX was harmless and almost invisible. But he could not rest content with that.

One particular piece of processed text on AIMSX was a telco document known as “Bell South Standard Practice 660-225- 104SV Control Office Administration of Enhanced 911 Services for Special Services and Major Account Centers dated March 1988.”

Prophet had not been looking for this document. It was merely one among hundreds of similar documents with impenetrable titles. However, having blundered over it in the course of his illicit wanderings through AIMSX, he decided to take it with him as a trophy. It might prove very useful in some future boasting, bragging, and strutting session. So, some time in September 1988, Prophet ordered the AIMSX mainframe computer to copy this document (henceforth called simply called “the E911 Document”) and to transfer this copy to his home computer.

No one noticed that Prophet had done this. He had “stolen” the E911 Document in some sense, but notions of property in cyberspace can be tricky. BellSouth noticed nothing wrong, because BellSouth still had their original copy. They had not been “robbed” of the document itself. Many people were supposed to copy this document—specifically, people who worked for the nineteen BellSouth “special services and major account centers,” scattered throughout the Southeastern United States. That was what it was for, why it was present on a computer network in the first place: so that it could be copied and read—by telco employees. But now the data had been copied by someone who wasn’t supposed to look at it.

Prophet now had his trophy. But he further decided to store yet another copy of the E911 Document on another person’s computer. This unwitting person was a computer enthusiast named Richard Andrews who lived near Joliet, Illinois. Richard Andrews was a UNIX programmer by trade, and ran a powerful UNIX board called “Jolnet,” in the basement of his house.

Prophet, using the handle “Robert Johnson,” had obtained an account on Richard Andrews’ computer. And there he stashed the E911 Document, by storing it in his own private section of Andrews’ computer.

Why did Prophet do this? If Prophet had eliminated the E911 Document from his own computer, and kept it hundreds of miles away, on another machine, under an alias, then he might have been fairly safe from discovery and prosecution—although his sneaky action had certainly put the unsuspecting Richard Andrews at risk.

But, like most hackers, Prophet was a pack-rat for illicit data. When it came to the crunch, he could not bear to part from his trophy. When Prophet’s place in Decatur, Georgia was raided in July 1989, there was the E911 Document, a smoking gun. And there was Prophet in the hands of the Secret Service, doing his best to “explain.”

Our story now takes us away from the Atlanta Three and their raids of the Summer of 1989. We must leave Atlanta Three “cooperating fully” with their numerous investigators. And all three of them did cooperate, as their Sentencing Memorandum from the US District Court of the Northern Division of Georgia explained—just before all three of them were sentenced to various federal prisons in November 1990.

We must now catch up on the other aspects of the war on the Legion of Doom. The war on the Legion was a war on a network—in fact, a network of three networks, which intertwined and interrelated in a complex fashion. The Legion itself, with Atlanta LoD, and their hanger-on Fry Guy, were the first network. The second network was PHRACK magazine, with its editors and contributors.

The third network involved the electronic circle around a hacker known as “Terminus.”

The war against these hacker networks was carried out by a law enforcement network. Atlanta LoD and Fry Guy were pursued by USSS agents and federal prosecutors in Atlanta, Indiana, and Chicago. “Terminus” found himself pursued by USSS and federal prosecutors from Baltimore and Chicago. And the war against Phrack was almost entirely a Chicago operation.

The investigation of Terminus involved a great deal of energy, mostly from the Chicago Task Force, but it was to be the least-known and least-publicized of the Crackdown operations. Terminus, who lived in Maryland, was a UNIX programmer and consultant, fairly well-known (under his given name) in the UNIX community, as an acknowledged expert on AT&T minicomputers. Terminus idolized AT&T, especially Bellcore, and longed for public recognition as a UNIX expert; his highest ambition was to work for Bell Labs.

But Terminus had odd friends and a spotted history. Terminus had once been the subject of an admiring interview in PHRACK (Volume II, Issue 14, Phile 2—dated May 1987). In this article, PHRACK co-editor Taran King described “Terminus” as an electronics engineer, 5′9″, brown-haired, born in 1959—at 28 years old, quite mature for a hacker.

Terminus had once been sysop of a phreak/hack underground board called “MetroNet,” which ran on an Apple II. Later he’d replaced “MetroNet” with an underground board called “MegaNet,” specializing in IBMs. In his younger days, Terminus had written one of the very first and most elegant code-scanning programs for the IBM-PC. This program had been widely distributed in the underground. Uncounted legions of PC-owning phreaks and hackers had used Terminus’s scanner program to rip-off telco codes. This feat had not escaped the attention of telco security; it hardly could, since Terminus’s earlier handle, “Terminal Technician,” was proudly written right on the program.

When he became a full-time computer professional (specializing in telecommunications programming), he adopted the handle Terminus, meant to indicate that he had “reached the final point of being a proficient hacker.” He’d moved up to the UNIX-based “Netsys” board on an AT&T computer, with four phone lines and an impressive 240 megs of storage. “Netsys” carried complete issues of PHRACK, and Terminus was quite