So when one day a classmate asked me to join a conference call that he was arranging over the public phone system, I took him up on the offer immediately. He assured me that the phone call would be free, since he had found a way to cheat the phone company out of paying for calls. I agreed, and that night I was introduced to the pastime of phone hacking, known as “phreaking.”
Here was a new world—a network of phones and exchanges, of blue boxes and black boxes, of phreaks (as my new friends called themselves) and hackers, and it was massively more complex than the other trivial systems I had been toying with.
It was an endless connection of phone systems and subsystems. It went all around the world. It stretched from the White House to the Kremlin. Immediately, I wanted to know everything possible about it.
Some nights I went dumpster diving for trash at the local phone company offices, looking for documents that I thought might hold valuable information. Some nights I phoned faraway telephone exchanges, and pretended to be a phone company employee, extracting clues about the phone system.
Soon, I was making free phone calls to Iceland, Holland, and Australia.
“What’s the weather like there?” I would ask a puzzled Icelander, who asked in broken English who I was, and why exactly I was calling him.
Then one night, about three months after I had started phreaking, I had a close call when a tough-looking phone company engineer, complete with utility belt, knocked on the door of the apartment, and started asking awkward questions.
But it didn't matter. By that time, my new friends had already introduced me to the world of computer hacking.
I met up with Knight and his crew of hackers at a computer convention. They were high school kids, but they seemed to know everything about computers. I didn’t really know or care what their real names were. They all went by fake names, known as “handles,” which they had given themselves: Knight, Blizzard, Darkness, and several others. They thought that they were agents working against an unfair system.
But I didn’t mind that, because they showed me Unix and C. These were the tools that engineers used to create software systems. These operating systems, languages, and programs seemed utterly inaccessible at first. But what looked like rawness, I soon realized meant flexibility. It was like having a pick-up truck instead of a Mercedes.
Once I had learned how to hack systems, I learned how to hack into them—
war dialing, pretexting, brute forcing. I spent days, weeks, and months learning how to use hacker tools to gain access to, and complete control of, remote computer systems. School didn’t matter anymore. The whole of the year was taken up in hacking and cracking.
There was an unspoken competition to find out who among us could do the best hack. But after just a year, I saw no serious competition, except maybe Knight. I knew then that I was going to be the fastest draw in the new frontier.
Soon, I had outgrown my classmates. My hacking ‘kung-fu’ went beyond anything they possessed. I came to realize that they were nothing more than ‘script kiddies,’ downloading and altering other people’s work.
30
They weren’t like me. They didn’t have my enthusiasm or skills. They had all the gear, but no original ideas. I was the opposite: I couldn’t afford any hardware. I scavenged stuff from dumpsters, and spent hours in the public library learning how to put it all together. I also learned how to get free and open source software to run on it.
I had the names of the authors of those loaned books burned into my brain, because I found myself reaching for those books a hundred times a day, and renewing them as often as possible.
When I finally had a system that I could use, I began to look for things to do with it. It was then that I read about all the great hackers, and those people became my role models: I wanted to be just like them.
There was Kevin Mitnick, who beat the world’s largest communications companies at their own game. There was Gary McKinnon, who hacked into the Pentagon. I read about Vladimir Levin, who robbed Citibank of $10 million. I laughed over stories of Kevin Poulsen, who won a Porsche from a radio phone-in by commandeering the entire Los Angeles telephone network. I kept all these people in my mind. With every keystroke, I knew that I was coming closer to my goal. I knew that I wouldn’t get caught; I was too careful for that.
I would get out of my miserable existence; I would get somewhere worth living in. I would have all the best equipment, and have lots of fun. I would travel abroad to whichever country was currently holding a hacker convention. I would stay in the best hotels. I wanted to teach people—to inspire the next generation. Kids in their bedrooms, wanting to escape their miserable lives, would look to me as their own role model: Karl Ripley, who had made a fortune selling banks their own security holes.
I began to hack websites, and leave my electronic calling card. I cracked email servers, and left the owners a little surprise. I found network print devices in remote offices, and left a fortune cookie for the next person at the printer. I began accruing user accounts all around the world. I started installing backdoors into every computer system I could find, from local businesses to national institutions. I got an account at NASA. I got root privileges at the world’s second largest bank. I even got my foot in the door of the Pentagon . . .
But now I was back in high school, in some ways starting over.
31
Chapter 8
At 7:30 a.m., the next day, I followed the smell of breakfast down the stairs.
Richard was quietly reading a newspaper, and Hannah was watching something on the stove.
“See you later,” I said, heading for the door.
“David, don’t you want breakfast?” Hannah asked.
“No, I’m okay.”
“You should eat something.”
You’ve got to be kidding me, I thought. I knew that my new parents had taken to their roles, but nutrition advice seemed a step too far. On the other hand, in jail I had got used to breakfast every morning.
“What have we got?”
“I can make you some scrambled eggs, if you want?”
“I’ll get some fruit.” I wasn’t very hungry, and didn’t want to wait. I took two red apples from the bowl on the table. Hannah put a plate in front of Richard. He put the paper down, and turned to his scrambled eggs. Hannah sat down, and poured some cereal into a bowl, and added low-fat milk. Fed-O’s, I thought, the new cereal for undercover police. Full of fiber, so you don’t get constipated from sitting in a stake-out car. A single bowl has just half the calories of coffee and donuts.
“I gotta go to school,” I said.
“Goodbye,” Hannah said.
I stopped at the door, and then looked back over my shoulder. Apart from their jaw muscles, both Hannah and Richard sat still, calmly eating breakfast, a tableau of the normal married couple in the morning. I freewheeled down the hill most of the way on my new bike. I seemed to be the only person cycling.
My first class was history, and I attended with the single goal of making myself look like an authentic student. I went in, and Zaqarwi was already sitting in the middle of the class, talking quietly with someone.
The history teacher was Mr. Conroy, and I was pleasantly surprised to find, given my habits of old, that I stayed awake during his class. After that was English class. English was another of those classes where I had somehow always been simultaneously behind and ahead. My teachers were as puzzled as me whenever I got zero percent one day and a hundred percent the next. But that morning, all I had to do was to listen to a lecture about dramatic irony. I pretended to take notes, all the time avoiding looking at Zaqarwi.
At lunch, I decided to go computer hacking. I locked up my bike in the on-campus bike shed, and took a taxi into town. I used my new bank card to withdraw a hundred dollars, and then asked some kid on a skateboard where the nearest cybercafé was. I went in and rented a terminal for half an hour.
I had a dozen email accounts I had not checked for over half a year,
which I had used mainly for keeping in contact with other hackers. But I wasn’t interested in them. I pointed “Internet Exploiter” at eBay, typed Elmwood High’s ZIP code, and a list of notebook computers for sale appeared. I spent five minutes going through dozens of listings, but one ad stood out as being suitable, especially because it was only a mile from the school.
“NeoTek GZA-1990 notebook computer. Like new. Very fast. Carry case included.” It was on buy-it-now for $299. It looked to me like the seller had copied the picture and the specs from the manufacturer’s website, and a quick surf to NeoTek.com showed I was right.
32
Some of the computer equipment that appears on the electronic auction sites is stolen, and you develop a sort of intuition about it. The way the picture had been lifted, the price (which was ridiculously low for the machine’s specs), and the fact that it was ‘like new’ (why buy it just to sell it?), along with a couple of other minor details, all came together to give me the idea that the notebook was probably filched goods.
That was why it interested me. I knew that petty criminals can be trusted to deny ever having sold anybody anything, at any time. I messaged the buyer asking if I could pick it up this evening, not expecting them to be in during the day.
While I waited, I checked out the best price for the model of bike I had just got, and also looked for local mountain bike routes. Fifteen minutes later, I got a reply from the notebook seller's girlfriend, saying that he was out, but if I paid by eCheck or cash, I could pick it up after school.
Before my arrest, I had stuck $1,000 in an eCheck account, hidden under a cryptic name and long password. Looking back, it was dumb of me to think that an emergency fund of one thousand dollars would be adequate. But it was enough to buy what I needed for the moment. I had to rummage around in my memory for the eCheck username and password. The money was still there. Somehow, the feds hadn’t got to it.
I quickly set up two new accounts, transferred all the money from my old account to the first new one, closed the old one, transferred the money from the first new account to the second new account, and then closed the first new account.
Paranoid? Maybe. But you never can tell.
I paid for the computer by eCheck, and messaged the seller once again, explaining that I would be around that evening to collect my new computer. I waited long enough to get the full address from the reply and print off a map of the seller’s location. At last, I had got myself something to hack on.
I headed back to school, and for the next few hours, endured more classes until the final bell rang. After unlocking my bike, and checking that it had survived its first day in the shed without damage, I set off.
I made my way down some side roads, into the neighborhood indicated on the map. This was the flip side of my new neighborhood. It was rundown, and some houses even looked abandoned. I pedaled slowly down the road until I came to the address I had memorized. It was a shabby, once-white, single-story house.
I made my way up the modest driveway, and pushed the doorbell. When that didn’t bring any reply, I knocked hard, and saw a shadow move behind the glass. A teenage girl opened the door, just enough to look out, and then stood, staring at me, without saying anything.
“I’ve come about the computer,” I said.
The girl gave me a gloomy once-over with her dark eyes, and then opened the door. I leaned my bike on the wall, wondering whether it would be safe in that neighborhood, and then went in. Without waiting to shut the door behind me, the girl walked off down the hallway, and stuck her head in a doorway. I heard her say,
“eBay.”
Then she came back toward me, and I got a better look at her. She was dressed strangely, and was wearing heavy black eye makeup. She looked okay, but odd. Her hair looked like she was in the middle of dying it, and hadn’t quite finished. I thought she was going to say something to me, but she turned suddenly, went into a room, and closed the door. I stood waiting in the hall.
33
For a minute, everything was quiet. Then a woman in her early forties came out into the hallway, and gave me the same gloomy once-over as the girl. She was dressed in what looked like overalls—the sort of thing I had seen the women from the paint factory in my old neighborhood wearing.
“Hi,” I said.
“He’ll be here in a minute,” said the woman bluntly, without smiling. I nodded, and the woman turned and went back into the room. For a minute, I stood there in the silence, looking around. Everything was old, but clean. The place looked like it had last been decorated at least two presidents ago, but steam-cleaned an hour ago. There wasn’t anything out of place—not a shoe or a paper clip.
I looked at the ornaments hanging on the wall. They had moons, stars, and astronomical patterns. I wondered again about my bike. I was just about to look out through the window in the door when a man walked into the hallway. He was tall, and had a long graying ponytail. He was dressed like a lot of truck drivers I had seen, and he was carrying a computer case.
“Hi,” I said.
“You’ve come for the notebook?” he asked. His voice sounded like gravel being trod on. I answered yes. He looked me over, and apparently came to the same conclusion as the girl and the woman, whatever that was. He handed me the case, still closed.
“Do you mind if I take a look?” I asked.
He seemed to mind, but I went ahead anyway. There wasn’t any place else I was free from prying eyes to switch the thing on, and no computer geek can resist a peek at a new gadget. I unzipped the bag, and slid the machine out. It was barely touched, not the sort that a guy from that neighborhood would have, but the sort that the boss on the top floor gets, just because the bigwigs always seem to want the best gadgets, and always seem to get them.
It was so hot that it nearly burned my fingers. The ad had said ‘like new,’ but looking at it, I guessed that it really was new, and seemed to be completely unused. A bit of the thin transparent plastic cover clung to the edge of the keyboard.
I can’t see the marks where it fell off the back of the truck, I thought, but didn’t say.
“I like NeoTeks,” I said out loud, just to be saying something. I hit the power button, and the machine booted surprisingly quickly into Windows. There was no logon screen. I pushed the pointer around the screen to see what was installed.
Nothing. This was an untouched factory build, with no applications—not even freeware. No wonder it was so fast to boot up.
It always shocks me to think back to the equipment I used to hack on. When the feds busted me, they spent a lot of time trying to get me to tell them where the real hardware was hidden. They just couldn’t believe that some museum piece and a bit of free software were all I needed. They just couldn’t accept that I had done most of my best hacking on my little old Frankenstein, whose hardware was so old that it would not even run Windows properly.
“Great, I said, “just what I needed. Thanks for letting me pick it up.”
“No problem,” said the man, emotionlessly. I tried to stick the case into my backpack, but it wouldn’t go.
“Do you want to keep this?” I asked, putting the case on the floor. “I don’t need it.”
I turned and headed for the door.
“Goodbye,” I said as I left. The man didn’t reply.
34
I shut the door behind me. I got on my bike and pedaled down the road. A group of young men were standing on a street corner, apparently with nothing better to do than watch another young man with an expensive computer in his backpack riding an expensive new mountain bike through a crime-ridden and possibly violent part of town. I headed back to school, dumped my new computer in my rented locker, and then went back to the safety of my own suburb.
I got home, went to my room, and lay on my bed for a while, thinking things over. I had made a start on Zaqarwi, but it wasn’t enough to report about. I had also made a start on Knight, or at least I had a computer of my own. Tomorrow I would have a phone. I already knew roug
hly where Knight’s security business was, so that wasn’t the problem. What I needed to do was to find out the location of one or more of his regular clients. They were my way in, because I would never get in through the front-line security.
Whenever an ex-cracker sets himself up as a security consultant, he has to expect that he’s a hunted man. There’s nothing in the world that other crackers would love to do more than to break his security. It’s like conkers: If you win the game, you don’t just win one point; you get all the other guy’s points, too. He was at the top of the tree, and whoever toppled him got to be top of the tree. So there was no way Knight was going to let down his guard. But one of his clients might. That would be my way in—the one thing Knight couldn’t control: his own employers.
I smelled food, and went downstairs. Hannah had cooked dinner again. I got the idea, as we sat and quietly ate our food, that her life married to Richard was not exactly a bag of fun, and she had decided to put her concentration into domestic chores.
Hannah asked if anything interesting had happened at school. I shrugged and replied that it was going okay, that school was boring, and that I didn’t even know anybody there. We ate more or less in silence after that, and the rest of the night was a more sedate repeat of the first night, though Richard drank less beer.
After watching TV, I went upstairs and listened to the silence for a few hours.
Can I do it? I thought, as I stared at the ceiling. I now had a computer, but I also had a constant audience. Can I get Knight, with everybody watching me? I kept thinking.
I knew the answer was probably no, but I had to give it a try anyway.
35
Chapter 9
The next day, I had computer studies again. In the previous class, I had set up two hacks. The first idea had been to get Logan’s password, and the other had been to hack into the electronic whiteboard at the front of the class, and get my skills noticed by Zaqarwi.
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