Amiga ISO Collection/AmigaDemoCD2.iso/ASCII/TEXTE/SCENE/HPA/PHREAKING/GV12Hk02.lha/GV12Hk02.txt

Text File | 1980-01-26 | 8.1 KB | 124 lines

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This textfile was leeched from LSD's Grapevine Magazine Issue #12
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   A P P R O A C H I N G   Z E R O      According to Bryan Clough and Paul
                                        Munro's fascinating new book,
                                        Approaching Zero, almost every major
          Typed by Deadbeat             computer system in the world has been
                                        hacked, from Nato to Nasa, and the
                                        cost to US and UK citizens alone has
Today's gangsters tend to look a lot    been estimated at #2bn per year.  But
like yesterday's geeks - late-blooming  the emphasis here is on "estimate".
male adolescents without girlfriends,   As Much as 85 percent of computer
who attend science fiction              crime may go unreported or undetected.
conventions, read too many comic books  According to Clough, contemporary
(oops, make that Graphic Novels), live  "hacking" originated as a form of
with their parents and spend too much   telephone fraud in the mid-1960s
time alone in their rooms.  Hopped-up   called "phreaking".
on everything from Benzedrine to Diet
Coke, they are the western world's new  Among America's notable early
kingpins of crime, hacking their way    phreakers were Steve Jobs and Steve
into top secret information systems at  Wozniak, manufacturers of the infamous
the Pentagon, war dialling into         Blue Box (an electronic gizmo used to
consumer credit services, unleashing    access long-distance telephone lines);
deadly viruses and data-detonators.     known as "The Two Steves", they went
                                        on to found Apple Computers, the
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world's first major producer of low-    social as dealing junk-bonds or
cost PCs.  Then there was Captain       corporate raiding, and just as
Crunch (aka John Draper), who tapped    profitable.  Top-notch hackers have
into Bell Service lines using nothing   committed extortion, fraud, gang
more sophisticated than a plastic       warfare, international terrorism,
whistle that was being distributed in   espionage - and usually without
Captain Crunch Cereal; he was later     leaving the privacy of their bedrooms.
enlisted by Abbie Hoffman and the       Many of their weapons originated as
Yippies, served time in jail (where he  birthday and Christmas toys from their
swapped the secrets of his trade with   parents.
drug pedlars in exchange for personal
protection), and eventually went to     Some hackers are politically
England to help train the first         motivated, like the Galactic Hackers
generation of British hackers.          Party, who declared in the late 1980s:
                                        "The free and unfettered flow of
Hacking is the art of the lonely and    information is an essential part of
the vain, young obsessive men with      our fundamental liberties".  If the
hyperactive imaginations who are brave  information doesn't freely flow, these
enough to journey into the theoretical  New Age Robin Hoods believe it should
spaces of their computer screens and    be forcefully redistributed, like cash
come back with other people's money.    or vegetables.  On the other hand,
Its a profession as abstract and anti-  some hackers want to make a few (or
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even a few million) quick bucks.        High-profile hackers assume nick-names
Still others want nothing more than to  such as Fry Guy (lifted from the old
vandalise and break things, tracking    MacDonald's jingle, "we are the fry
their muddy boots through high-         guys"), Phiber Optik, Captain Zap,
security information networks and       Doctor Diode and Triludan The Warrior.
scrawling their names on the walls.     Sometimes they run in hi-tech "street
                                        gangs" with names like Masters Of
As the Mad Hacker, Nick Whitley, once   Destruction, Chaos or The Legion Of
confessed, the excitement of hacking    Doom.  They are a weird race of lone
"comes from the knowing that a          wolves who rarely meet each other face
computer in the bedroom at home can be  to face.  Instead, they build their
used to get into multi-million pound    reputations through self-
installations.  There's a sense of      congratulatory memos on electronic
exploration, of going around the world  "billboards".  They don't act in the
electronically.  The objective is to    world so much as assert their
try to get the higher status within     fantasies of themselves across the
the system, that of System Manager.     humming Worldnet.  For this reason,
Once there, you start making the rules  when the authorities intercept
instead of following them".  Some       anonymous criminal boasts about thefts
hackers are motivated by the love of    and acts of sabotage, its often
knowledge; others by the love of        impossible to tell which crimes really
destroying it.                          happened, and which were really
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imagined.                               and hard drives, whether they belong
                                        to large multi-nationals or to small
Clough and Munro describe what a weird  PC users like you and me.
world is occurring all around us, even
when we're not looking (or better yet,  "Trojans" (named after the Greek
even when we don't know what we're      horse, not the American condom) infect
looking for).  But the chief pleasure   systems by teasing the computer
of this book is its well-annotated      operator into letting them in.  Then
glimpse into hacking's glossy lingo,    there's "dumpster diving", the
where the meanings of words seem to be  rummaging of garbage cans outside
proliferating as madly as the           telephone and credit companies to
information systems themselves.  First  dredge up discarded manuals and
there are the "viruses", self-          instruction booklets; or "social
replicating mutable programmes          engineering", which simply means you
designed to infect computers.           call up a company pretending to be
                                        somebody important, and convince them
They can be effectively harmless -      to tell you secret codes they're not
beeping out a mechanical version of     supposed to.
Yankee Doodle, say, or wishing
everyone Merry Christmas.  They can     Its a con-game without faces or
also be maliciously destructive,        bodies, just figures on screens,
indiscriminately destroying hard discs  voices on telephones, theoretical
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dimensions on tap, abstract spaces on   Taken from "The Independent", August
the brain.  Its a world in which        1992.
criminals make themselves real by
falling out of material existence       end.
altogether.  And its an invisible
world we may all disappear into
eventually.

There's no way of knowing how many
viruses are out there, or when they're
set to go off.  The zero house - that
moment when every last bit of
information has been eliminated from a
system - could very well be
approaching now.  Clough and Munro
contend contend that when the big data
"bomb" eventually goes off, it could
instantly destroy the world's
emergency communications networks and
the information storage systems.  Its
an end that won't come with a bang,
but with a beep.
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