Hackers Underworld 2: Forbidden Knowledge/Hackers Underworld 2: Forbidden Knowledge.iso/HACKING/CABLE.TXT

Text File | 1994-07-17 | 17KB | 264 lines

To Catch A Hacker. The true story of John Maxfield, electronic private eye.
Appeared in August 1990 issue of PC Computing Magazine, by Rick Manning.


    The computer crackers and phone phreaks who visited Cable Pair's cluttered
office one August evening in 1983 must have thought they were in heaven.
    Cable Pair was a sysop for a hacker forum on the Twilight Phone, a Detroit
area computer bulletin board. The forum had become a meeting place for
members of the Inner Circle, a nationwide hacker group that used words and
swap tips on phone phreaking--getting free use of long-distance phone systems.
    Cable Pair's visitors that evening were some of the Inner Circle's most
active members, highly placed in the hacker pecking order.  They had come in
response to messages that Cable Pair had posted on the board, inviting them to
take a guided tour of his headquarters, and they were suitably impressed.
Computer equipment was everywhere.  The sysop's console consisted of several
terminals connected to a remote Hewlett-Packard minicomputer.
    In a back room was a bank of electromechanical telephone switches--old
stuff, but enough to run a phone system for a small town. Cable Pair even had
an official Bell version of the infamous "Blue Box," a device that sends out
the precisely calibrated tones that unlock long distance telephone circuits.
To
demonstrate the magic box, he keyed in a 2600 cycle per second tone and was
rewarded with the clear whisper of AT&T's long distance circuit.
    Then like jazz players in a jam session, group members took turns showing
what they could do. One tapped into AT&T's teleconfrencing system. Another
bragged about how he once nearly had Ron Reagan, Queen Elizabeth, and the pope
on the same conference call.
    One hacker's specialty was getting into Arpanet, the advanced research
network that links universities and government agencies, including defense
research centers. "The Wizard of Arpanet sat right there at that keyboard and
hacked into the system," says Cable Pair smiling at the memory. "And we
captured every keystroke."
    It was probable Cable Pair's finest hour. He was not, after all just
another hacker. The gathering that evening was the culmination of an elaborate
sting operation.
    Outside the office, FBI agents watched everyone who entered and left the
building. A few months after the jam session, police raided homes across the
country. The confiscated computers and disks and charged about a dozen adults
and teenagers with various counts of computer abuse and wire fraud.
    Cable Pair was John Maxfield, whose career as an FBI informant had started
a year earlier. Now approaching the age of 50, he is still chasing hackers,
phone phreaks, and computer pirates. When his cover was blown in a hacker
newsletter soon after the office party, he attracted a network of double
agents, people who found it more convenient and safer to work with him than
against him. Some continue to maintain their status in the hacker underground
and pass information to Maxfield.



    The nature of Maxfield's calling depends on your frame of reference. If
you've read enough cheap fiction, you might see him as a private dick in a
digital overcoat. Or a stagecoach guard sitting on the strongbox, eyes
scanning the horizon, electron gun across his knees. He refers to the hacker
phenomenon in the nebulous language of Cold War espionage, casting himself in
a spy novel role as a warrior fighting battles that both sides will deny ever
happened.
    "He's very good at getting hackers together on one thing," says Eric
Corley, editor of 2600, the hacker publication that fingered Maxfield more
than six years ago. "I can think of nothing that hackers agree on except that
John Maxfield is evil!"
    Maxfield responds in kind "Hackers are like electronic cockroaches," he
says. "You can't see them, but they're there, and at night they raid the
refrigerator." Although a lot of hackers are what Maxfield calls "tourists"--
young people who go into a system to simply look around--more sinister
influences often lurk behind them.
    "The tourist may go into a system and look around, but when he leaves,
he's got a password and he'll share it with others because he's got an ego and
wants to show how good he is," says Maxfield.
     "It's my experience that ever hacker gang has one or more adult members
who direct activities and manipulate the younger ones. What could be better
than to have the naifs doing your dirty work for you? They can open all the
doors and unlock the systems and then you go in and steal space shuttle
plans."
     The hackers are one step away from the shadowy world of spies." says
Maxfield. "Some have deliberately sought out and made contact with the KGB."
Maxfield wasn't suprised at all when West German police announced in March
1988 that they had arrested a group of computer hackers who used overseas
links to U.S. computer networks to steal sensitive data. And he thinks
computer companies and corporations haven't learned much about securing their
systems. "There are more interconnections," he says "and that leads to more
vulnerability."
    A good example was the worm that Robert T. Morris Jr., unleashed in Nov
1988 through the Unix based Internet research and defense network that shut
down more than 6000 computers.
    "The hackers will tell you that this kind of thing is just a practical
joke, a harmless prank. But in can do some very serious damage," says
Maxfield. Computer systems experts who testified at Morris's trial last Jan.
estimated that the cost of cleaning up after the chaos wreaked by the Unix
worm was $15 million!.
    The information that Maxfield collects about these computer pranksters and
criminals goes into a database that  he maintains to help him identify
hackers and monitor their activities. Maxfield tracks the phone phreaks'
identities and aliases to help his clients, who are managers at large
corporations, credit card companies, and telephone companies--business people
who feel the need to protect their electronic goods and services.
    What can Maxfield do for them? If a corporation's phone system is abused
by unauthorized users or if its computer system is invaded by hackers, he can
conduct an investigation and advise the company on how to contain the problem.
He can also tell them where their system is vulnerable and what to do about
it.
    Most of the hackers whose names and aliases are in Maxfield's database
probably are pranksters, teenagers attracted by the danger and excitement of
electronic lock-picking. Their activities would remain mostly benign, Maxfield
says, if it weren't for the organized online groups and the criminally-minded
adults that urge them on.
    "That's the real threat," he says.  "It's not the pranksters so much as
the
people they're associated with. The people who don't run bulletin boards, who
don't brag openly about what they can do.



    Maxfield could easily have become one of the hackers he now fights against
.
As a teenager growing up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in the late 1950's he had a
comsuming passion for telephones and computers. During the summer he worked
for an independent phone equipment manufacturer and spent time hanging around
the offices of Michigan Bell. He also made some friends within Bell.
    Naturally curious, Maxfield experimented with his telephone at home and
learned how to blow fuses at distant switching stations and even how to shut
down whole portions of an exchange. By studying AT&T technical journals used
on his job and by picking up technical information from his contacts at Bell,
he learned how to make his own blue box. In 1961, when dirrect dial service
reached Ann Arbor, Maxfield was finally able to test his discovery.
    Maxfield was shocked when he realized he could make long-distance phone
calls for free. He called a friend at the phone company, and he mentioned his
triumph to other friends. Maxfield's discovery attracted the attention of some
people who offered to pay him $350 each for 1000 blue bo