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

investigators are taking all of this in, nodding, jotting down notes. Somebody says Staples and Kaiser should meet soon with the U. S. Attorney's office. A Secret Service agent says he will report this to his supervisors.
    Staples and Kaiser are feeling pretty good, like they got the message across and everyone in the room understands the magnitude of the problem.
    Then one of the investigators raises his hand. All of the New York Telephone Company people look at him.
    "What's a switch?" he asks.
    It was autumn now, and the heat of the city summer seemed to have been absorbed by the people walking the picket line that Kaiser has to cross to reach the revolving glass doors of his skyscraper. Crossing the picket line really doesn't bother Kaiser. Sometimes they threw eggs, but in his teens Kaiser was a Teamster. He could handle a few eggs from the Communication Workers of America.
    One day in October, late in the afternoon, the black box told Kaiser that someone from the Ladopoulos residence had just placed a call to New York Telephone's business office. Right under his very nose. And it was still in progress.
    What were the hackers after now?
    It was a long phone call. Kaiser thought the connection would last forever, the minutes were just ticking by, and he was dying to find out who the hackers were calling at his shop.
    Finally, the DNR told him the connection was broken.
    Immediately, Kaiser punched the digits to connect him to the same number at the business office.
    The employee who answered the phone was an old supervisor of Kaiser's, from the days when he worked in the business office. Normally, she wouldn't be answering the phone at all, not when Kaiser calls and not when a hacker phones. But her strike duty was to take field calls that came to the business office.
    "Who was that on the phone?" Kaiser asked her.

    "Some poor plant guy who's stuck up on the pole, " she said. She was surprised that Kaiser was calling and that there was a problem with what seemed like such a routine request.
    Kaiser winced as she explained that the caller said he was a repair technician named John Gilmore who needed a phone number transferred from New York to New Jersey. Of course she'd put through the work order. The request was perfectly ordinary. Kaiser recognized the name John Gilmore: Gilmore was a former hacker who went on to become a millionaire writing code at Sun Microsystems.
    Kaiser quickly countermanded the work order.
    Every day was an exercise in frustration. It seemed like the case would drag on forever, and all Kaiser and Staples could do was run around putting out fires. By the end of the summer, they thought they had accumulated enough evidence, and they finally met with an assistant U. S. Attorney right after Labor Day. They went downtown to his office, scrupulously prepared for the meeting, organizing all the information they had collected about unauthorized intrusions in notebooks with neat colored tabs. They had charts, too.
    The prosecutor told them his office was definitely interested. Just keep accumulating evidence.
    More meetings followed
    uptown, downtown, in Brooklyn, where the Eastern District of the U. S. Attorney's office is headquartered. Meetings with the Secret Service near Wall Street. Meetings with the police.
    The tarantula was still creeping.
    Just sitting there, forced to watch the hackers logging in to their computers, was starting to drive Kaiser and Staples a little crazy.
    They decided to go undercover in cyberspace. The only disguises they needed were anonymous computer handles. They had some phone numbers for so-called underground bulletin boards, so they called one named Shadoworld. They logged right in, just like hackers would.
    They used the handles Splinter and Rapier. They felt a little silly doing it, being grown men and all, but at the same time, it was useful. They cruised the philes, and got a real sense of the kind of information that your run-of-the-mill wannabe hacker possessed.