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system can be penetrated by a 14-year old with $200 worth of equipment," he
complains. "I have found kids as young as nine years old involved in hacking.
If such young children can do it, think of what an adult can do."
Tener estimates that there are as many as 5,000 private computer bulletin
boards in the country, and that as many as 2,000 are hacker boards. The rest
are as for uses as varied as club news, customer relations, or just as a hobby.
Of the 2,000 about two dozen are used by "elite" hackers, and some have
security features as good as anything used by the pentagon, says Maxfield.
The number of hackers themselves defies estimation, if only because the users
of the boards overlap. They also pass along information from board to board.
Maxfield says he has seen access codes posted on an east coast bulletin board
that appeared on a west coast board less than an hour later, having passed
through about ten boards in the meantime. And within hours of the posting of
a new number anywhere, hundreds of hackers will try it.
"Nowadays, every twerp with a Commodore 64 and a modem can do it, all for the
ego trip of being the nexus for forbidden knowledge," sighs a man in New York
City, known either as "Richard Cheshire" or "Chesire Catalyst" -- neither is
his real name. Cheshire was one of the earliest computer hackers, from the
days when the Telex network was the main target, and was the editor of TAP, a
newsletter for hackers and phone "phreaks". Oddly enough, TAP itself was an
early victim of the hacker upsurge. "The hacker kids had their bulletin
boards and didn't need TAP -- we were technologically obsolete," he recalls.
So who are these hackers and what are they doing? Tener says most of the ones
he has encountered have been 14 to 18 year old boys, with good computer
systems, often bright, middle class, and good students. They often have a
reputation for being loners, if only because they spend hours by themselves at
a terminal, but he's found out-going hacker athletes.
But Maxfield is disturbed by the sight of more adults and criminals getting
involved. Most of what the hackers do involves "theft of services" -- free
access to Compuserve, The Source, or other on-line services or corporate
systems. But, increasingly, the hackers are getting more and more into credit
card fraud.
Maxfield and Cheshire describe the same process -- the hackers go through
trash bins outside businesses whose computer they want to break into looking
for manuals or anything that might have access codes on it. They may find it,
but they also often find carbon copies of credit card sales slips, from which
they can read credit card numbers. They use these numbers to order
merchandise -- usually computer hardware -- over the phone and have it
delivered to an empty house in their neighborhood, or to a house where nobody
is home during the day. Then all they have to do is be there when the delivery
truck arrives.
"We've only been seeing this in the last year," Maxfield complains. "But now
we find adults running gangs of kids who steal card numbers for them. The
adults resell the merchandise and give the kids a percentage of the money."
It's best to steal the card number of someone rich and famous, but since
that's usually not possible it's a good idea to be able to check the victim's
credit, because the merchant will check before approving a large credit card
sale. And that's what makes TRW such a big target -- TRW has the credit
files. And the files often contain the number of any other credit cards the
victim owns, Maxfield notes.
The parents of the hackers, meanwhile, usually have no idea what their boy is
up to -- he's in his room playing, so what could be wrong? Tener recalls a
case where the parents complained to the boy about the high phone bill one
month. And the next month the bill was back to normal. And so the parents
were happy. But the boy had been billing the calls to a stolen telephone
company credit card.
"When it happens the boy is caught and taken to jail, you usually see that the
parents are disgruntled at the authorities -- they still think that Johnny was
just playing in his bedroom. Until, of course, they see the cost of Johnny's
play time, which can run $50,000 to $100,000. But outside the cost, I have
never yet seen a parent who was really concerned that somebody's privacy has
been invaded -- they just think Johnny's really smart," Tener says.
TRW will usually move against hackers when they see a TRW file or access
information on a bulletin board. Tener says they usually demand payment for
their investigation costs, which average about $15,000.
Tales of the damage hackers have caused often get exaggerated. Tener tells of
highly publicized cases of hackers who, when caught, bragged about breaking
into TRW, when no break-ins had occurred. But Maxfield tells of two 14-year
old hackers who were both breaking into and using the same corporate system.
They had an argument and set out to erase each other's files, and in the
process erased other files that cost about a million dollars to replace.
Being juveniles, they got off free.
After being caught, Tener says most hackers find some other hobby. Some,
after turning 18, are hired by the firms they previously raided. Tener says
it rare to see repeat offenders, but Maxfield tells of one 14-year-old repeat
offender who was first caught at age 13.
Maxfield and Tener both make efforts to follow the bulletin boards, and
Maxfield even has a network of double agents and spies within the hacker
community. Tener uses artificial intelligence software to examine the day's
traffic to look for suspicious patterns. TRW gets about 40,000 inquiries an
hour and has about 25,000 subscribers. But that does not address the
underlying problem.
"The real problem is that these systems are not well protected, and some can't
be protected at all," Maxfield says.