Masters of Deception: The Gang That Ruled Cyberspace by Michele Slatalla Page A

the wall. But if you waited too long, you got bitten.
    They wanted help from law enforcement. They wanted to send a message that hacking the phone system was not the touchy-feely thing it was back in the 1960s when Joe Hacker would get a friendly "wakeup" call from the phone company, a polite warning. Too much was at stake now. You'd hit the wrong key, and oops, there went phone service to Wall Street.
    Kaiser and Staples knew that unless they could show that the intrusions had caused at least a thousand dollars' worth of damage or loss of service, they wouldn't get the U. S. Attorney's office interested. And it was important to prosecute. If the hackers were kids, it was still a good idea to send a message, scare them, come down on them with the full, heavy weight of the law. Kids wouldn't end up in jail for this kind of bravado trespassing, they figured hell, they had kids of their own.
    But the hackers would learn their limits if they got a stern lecture from a judge, coupled with a couple hundred hours of community service.
    Since 1987, the phone company had, in fact, snared other teenagers snooping around in the phone system. Kids with names like Bill from RNOC and Delta Master and Ninja NYC. Those cases, involving juveniles under the age of eighteen, were disposed of quietly. Sometimes with only a phone call to a parent.
    That's what happens if you're dealing with kids. That is, if you know for sure that you're dealing with kids.
    Staples spouts a blue stream of Marlboro smoke, considering the options. With Staples in the office the smoke gets so thick it reaches down to the floor. The room was in a haze. Months from now, Kaiser would move a picture on the wall and see the darkened outline of the frame's original position. Staples smokes so much that it gets into the paint.
    One option is going to the media, going public with the fact that it is nearly impossible to fool around undetected in phone company computers. Announce the intrusions and at the same time show how the system has been secured. Another possibility, assuming the hackers were all kids, is creating an educational program to channel some of this misdirected energy. The phone company, after all, has a hard enough time finding qualified people to train as telecommunications engineers.

    But that's academic. And this is the real world. The facts for Kaiser and Staples are these: We don't know who we are dealing with. And we are witnessing a more dangerous level of infiltration than ever before.
    In the end, they realize there is only one option.
    Kaiser awakens early one morning and thinks, today could be the day that we nab the hackers. He already feels the summer heat through his shirt as he leaves his house on Long Island to make an early train to Manhattan.
    This morning he will have to convince more literal-minded lawmen that crimes committed on computers are as much their concern as the drug buys on Forty-second Street.
    Today, Kaiser has reserved the big conference room, and the meeting is full of phone company people, and investigators from the New York City police department's special frauds unit and the U. S. Secret Service.
    Knowing that the technical aspect of the case might make it difficult for non-technicians to grasp, Kaiser and Staples explain the case in general terms.
    "We may be corning to you with this case we have, and how should we do that?" Kaiser says.
    "What have you got?" asks one of the investigators.
    "We have three hackers, " Kaiser says.
    Staples gives it a shot and talks about how the phone company switches are being targeted. He talks about the dial hubs, and about how it would be relatively easy for New York Telephone to simply close the holes in the system to lock out these particular hackers. But the problem is bigger than that, he says. If the hackers could get into New York Telephone's computers, they might be able to get into the phone system in other regions as well.
    "The problem is national, " Staples says.
    The