Comsec opens its doors in May 1991, and the partners quickly make themselves at home in the airy Houston headquarters. Comsec has a huge vaulted ceiling with skylights and faux gas lights in the two corridors. Some days, Comsec's founders skateboard down the long empty halls of the vast space and roll around in chairs. Chris is living in the back of the building, in an apartment with a big, white-bellied alley cat named Spud.
But there is a problem. Comsec has zero clients.
The officers of Comsec hold weekly staff meetings, which they all attend. They decide to distribute press releases advertising the availability of their security services. But to
whom? As professed ex-hackers, they compile a list of likely clients. They scan the "philes" on underground bulletin boards to find the names of businesses whose computers have been infiltrated, then call the companies to offer their services.
The very next day the office phone starts to ring. And ring. You can't buy advertising better than Time. Comsec has clients! One, a consultant representing the telecommunications industry, orders up some research on recent regional Bell company crashes. The client pays US$5,000 up front.
Of course, the publicity in Time has another effect.
Up north, the MOD boys are reading the stories.
John Lee has an ingenious idea for pranking the Texans. Why didn't he think of it before?
He puts his plan into action during that long, hot summer of 1991. It keeps his mind off the lack of air conditioning in the brownstone apartment on Kosciusko Street. His plan is to spy, and it's fairly simple. John logs in to the Southwestern Bell switch that controls Comsec's phone service in Houston.
Then John types commands to ask the switch if any of Comsec's phone numbers are engaged.
If they are, then John will know that a conversation is underway right now. A phone line is in use. So he issues another command, just like an operator would, to seize control of the line that carries the call. That easily, he splices himself into the ongoing conversation.
There's a quiet click on the line, but it's not the sort of noise you'd notice unless you were waiting for it. And no one at Comsec has any reason to believe that calls are being tapped.
John eavesdrops routinely. That's the way to find out what the enemy is up to, a way to
anticipate the Texans's every move before it is made. So here's John, listening in on
Comsec's lines one afternoon when the security firm gets a call from a world-famous
hacker, Craig Neidorf.
It is safe to say that no hacker is more famous than Neidorf in 1991. That is because Neidorf beat the federal government at its own game a year earlier. In the months since, his legal fight has become legend. (And for years to come, wary prosecutors considering indicting hackers will caution one another to make sure their cases are airtight, so they can avoid "pulling another Neidorf.")
The co-editor of the electronic magazine Phrack, Neidorf had gone on trial in Illinois in the summer of 1990, charged with fraud. The alleged crime: possessing and publishing a supposedly proprietary phone company document in an issue of Phrack. The government argued that the information was worth thousands of dollars, based on estimates from the phone company. But midway through the trial, the defense showed that the document's so-called proprietary information was publicly available; Bellcore sold the information to anyone who had $13 to pay for a technical article. Stung, the federal prosecutors in Chicago dropped the charges before the case reached a jury. Yes, Neidorf was a hero to some hackers. But his notoriety also made him a target for any denizens of the underground determined to make a name for themselves in cyberspace.
Now in the middle of a workday in summer 1991, Chris Goggans has answered the phone at Comsec and Neidorf is on the other end. (John eavesdrops noiselessly.) The phone call is just a friendly chat, but today Neidorf is frankly annoyed. The problem is that anonymous callers have been phoning him at home and harassing him over the line. He thinks he knows who is responsible, but he wants the prank calls to stop.
"Sounds like they're doing stuff along similar lines to what they're doing to us," Chris
responds.
"Someone just called up my dad's house in Virginia," Neidorf says. Chris is not surprised, but he's outraged on behalf of his friend. He even has a theory about who might be behind the calls.
"Sounds like Corrupt," Chris says, recounting his suspicions that John Lee has also been pranking him in Houston. "It sounds like something he would do." At that moment, a second phone line rings in Houston, another incoming call for Comsec. Chris asks Neidorf to hold on a minute, then answers the other line. The voice on the second phone line says to Chris, "Yeah, that does sound like something I would do."
Chris is so mad he can't think straight. John Lee has been eavesdropping! On Comsec's private phone calls! For how long? How often? What has he heard? What has he told his little friends up there in MOD? If this gets out, Comsec will be a laughingstock!
Would you hire a computer security company that can't keep its own phone lines secure?
Chris calls the FBI, unaware that for months the government, relying on evidence of
intrusions gathered by phone company investigators Kaiser and Staples, has been building its case against MOD. Whether Chris's calls affected the timing is not known, but the indictment against MOD is announced in July of 1992.
The indictment has 11 counts and charges Mark, Paul, Eli, John, and another MOD member with illegal computer intrusion. Each count is punishable by at least five years in jail. Each count carries a maximum fine of $250,000.
The case is so big, so sensational, so groundbreaking that the US Attorney himself calls a press conference in the lobby of St. Andrews Plaza, site of his Manhattan headquarters. He wants to announce the indictment to the media. It's a little off-putting, the rows of folding chairs hastily arranged with their backs to the metal detector and the bullet-proof US Marshal's booth. A stream of New York's finest - finest press corps, that is - slouches in and starts bitching for handouts. The indictment is a 23-page document dense with facts, counts, and legalese. The press release that explains what the indictment is trying to say is eight pages long. And then there are charts that Secret Service Agent Rick Harris arranges on an easel. This was before Ross Perot, remember, and the charts are a novel idea.
The basic point the prosecution is trying to get across is the national scope of the computer intrusions.
"This is the crime of the future," says US Attorney Otto Obermaier, a tall, patrician man in a dark suit. He points a finger to underscore his distaste for computer crimes. "The message that ought to be delivered from this indictment is that this kind of conduct will not be tolerated."
The MOD members are being charged with the most widespread intrusions of the nation's largest and most sensitive computer systems ever recorded. The government has decided to make an example of these teen-agers from the outer boroughs. The message, which is what Obermaier calls it, is zero tolerance. If you're a hacker thinking of following in the footsteps of the Masters of Deception, think again.
There is hardly room behind the podium for all the authorities trying to get a piece of this one. There are the prosecutors. Then there are the agents from the FBI and the Secret Service, and there are the investigators from the US Justice Department's Computer Crime Unit.
Obermaier tells the press corps all about the crimes. He tells them the boys' intrusions have cost companies thousands of dollars in security personnel salaries and lost processing time. But he doesn't tell them that the dangerous hackers are, in effect, just a bunch of teenage boys who got to be friends because they shared a hobby.
The story makes the NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw. It's the piece Brokaw ends with - a forward-tilting, something-to-think-about piece. There's a close-up of Mark teaching a computer class at the New School for Social Research in Greenwich Village. The piece closes with Mark talking to the NBC reporter on a dark and rainy street. Mark says that he's definitely the victim of political persecution.
Had there been a trial, well, then the MOD conspiracy case could have set a precedent for the entire country, could have established a benchmark by which the government could track down other so-called computer criminals.
But there wasn't a trial, because all the MOD boys had pleaded guilty over the course of the year. They had all given up. What was left after that? It was up to the prosecutors to recommend a certain sentence and up to the judge to mete it out.
The hackers who arrive at the Citicorp building on the first Friday of February 1994 wear heavy hiking boots, and thick-soled turf crunchers, and kicked-around, black-leather shoes that lace up, up, up their calves. Of course, if it were July, they wouldn't be dressed any differently. This is the uniform.
Tonight's meeting is the first gathering in nearly five years at which no one from MOD is present - Mark, Paul, Eli, and John are all in prison. Dozens of hackers are here, ranging in age from 14 to 40, far more attendees than in the days of early 1989. The world has changed since that heady time when Mark and Eli and John somehow found each other, somehow coalesced.
In fact, it's as if the rest of the world has caught up. What the MOD boys did for fun -
recreationally cruising across continents of wires - has become a national pastime. "Net surfing" is a bigger fad than CB radio ever was, and people everywhere are buying their first computers and hooking up to online services that connect them to the world and one another. My mom. Your mom. Every-body's entranced.
So it's no wonder that the new members of an eager generation are filling the Citicorp
After six months of shock incarceration camp, John comes out thinner, more muscular, in fact in the best shape he's ever been in. In the fall of 1994, he heads back to Brooklyn College, where he's enrolled in the film-studies program. He's got lots of ideas for films he wants to make.
After doing time in federal prisons in Pennsylvania, Paul gets out in the spring of 1994. Mark is scheduled for release around Thanksgiving. For both, their days of hacking turn out to be good job training: Paul works for a company that traces missing persons through public databases. Mark keeps the computer system running at Echo, a Manhattan-based online service. Mark is so beloved among Echo's computer users for his smooth and efficient troubleshooting that the Echoids set up a fund while he is in jail so they can buy him a new laptop after he gets out.
On the back it reads: LOD 1, MOD 0. And there's a quote, attributed to Corrupt, which Chris says he got from a secret MOD database: "It's not just winning that counts, but making sure that everyone else loses."
Identities
Paul Stira (Scorpion). He chose his online name in junior high school after he cracked some software copyright protections. "This game cracked by Scorpion" sounded more glamorous than "This game cracked by adolescent in outer borough."
Mark Abene (Phiber Optik). Perhaps the best-known hacker of the late 1980s, and a true expert in telephone company arcana. He switched handles from Il Duce to Phiber Optik, an homage to that most capacious of information conduits, fiber-optic cable.
John Lee (Corrupt). The nickname was John's when he was in a New York City street gang known as the Decepticons.
Eli Ladopoulos (Acid Phreak). A playful double entendre on the word "freak," a phreak being someone obsessed with hacking the phone system.
Chris Goggans (Erik Bloodaxe). A Legion of Doom leader, based in Texas, he took his online name from a book he read in sixth grade about a race of Viking warriors with magical powers.
Scott Chasin (Doc Holiday). The hero of the Old West was always a favorite of LOD member Chasin.
Michelle Slatalla and Joshua Quittner (quit@newsday.com) are both reporters at Newsday, in New York. They're married, have two daughters and a cat with six toes. This piece is a preview excerpt from Masters of Deception: The Gang That Ruled Cyberspace
