Masters of Deception: The Gang That Ruled Cyberspace Read Online Free PDF Page B

computer, and here it was calling someone else on a rotary phone.
    Paul couldn't tell who the computer was calling, although all he had to do to figure it out was to count the clicks. But it dialed so fast he couldn't. He thought about this for a while, and then he dug out an old Panasonic cassette deck and recorded the clicks. He played it back, over and over, but still couldn't make out the number.
    The problem was that at normal playback speed, it was still too fast. There must be some way to slow it down. There was no variable-speed switch on the cassette deck, like on a dictating machine. He couldn't put his finger on the capstan while it spun. What could he modify? He pulled out one of the four C batteries that ran the tape recorder, put it in backward to offset the voltage, and that slowed the speed.
    After he figured out the phone number, he had his computer dial it. He was calling another computer in Jamaica, Queens, and he knew he connected because he heard the crash-and-bang of his modem colliding with another one. But his computer screen stayed black; whatever he was connected to refused to acknowledge him. He got no prompt on his screen. Nothing. He couldn't figure out what the computer wanted him to type. No combination of keys disturbed the blackness on his screen.
    That happens. When you're trying to feel your way through the cave, sometimes you just walk into the wall.
    Paul had better luck with 555-9940.
    At least this number responded. The trouble was, the responses were wacky. The modem would connect, but when he'd try to communicate with the computer, any key he hit on his keyboard seemed to be the wrong key. The computer at the other end would send back to his screen this inscrutable message: S. He'd try again, this time dialing the 555-9941
    number, and the computer would tell him: W. And that's what he'd get regardless of what he typed in response.
    SSS
    WWWWW
    WW
    He was trying every key combination.
    WWWW
    SS
    SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS
    One day in frustration he picked up his phone receiver and blew into the mouthpiece. A short airy blast, maybe three hundred milliseconds long. And now, his computer would sputter a string of bizarre characters across the screen. Paul figured it was some arcane timing pattern. Stranger still, now whenever he pressed a key, his own computer would ring a bell in response. Bing!
    He realized that his susurrations had somehow reset the computer at the other end. Now he could get it to respond. He would blow into it again, and then a question mark would appear on the screen. Paul could tell it what he wanted to do:
    ? login
    He was inside the phone system.
    Paul experimented by typing various commands he knew from different operating systems he'd fooled with. No good.
    Then one day he typed "SHOW USERS, " and boom
    a list of authorized users appeared on his screen. He wrote down
    the names. The next time he logged in, he assumed one of their identities. Now he was an authorized user. He learned that if he typed "PRINT, " and then the name of a file, he'd see a very helpful help file, which would explain what the directory was and what he could do with it. Like most computer systems, the phone company's computers were designed, after all, to help people. They were designed long before teenage hackers existed. They weren't built to repel a hacker menace once he had gotten into the system. So Paul got the computer to explain what the commands meant. For instance, by typing "PRINT QDN, " he coaxed the computer to explain that the command QDN meant "query directory number. "
    He knew he was logged in to something powerful because one day when he was noodling around, he found a way to list phone numbers of people who lived in nearby Laurelton. Awesome. He looked for the phone number of a friend of his, a guy who worked at the Village Voice. He found it. But what could he do with it? He had a brilliant idea. He typed:
    > QDN 5551234
    Using QDN was a way to ask the computer to pull up the