Hack (8 page)

I went to my room, and sat with the light off, looking out at the pristine suburb, dimly lit in the autumn darkness. Everything was quiet and peaceful. Here, everything seemed to be in its place.
Maybe I could just stay here for the rest of my
life,
I thought. David Johnson, space cadet from Elmwood High, rides bikes, and excels in computers, math, and science. Thinking about how my life had turned out, it seemed crazy to me. How had I got here?

I closed my eyes, and thought back over my life. I had once lived in a house like this when my parents were married. I had little memory of it, but I recalled a large house in a quiet suburb in Washington State. I also remembered an argument, and waiting for my father to return. I waited, and waited, always trusting that he would come back. But he never did.

After that, I moved with my mother to an apartment. She got a job at a casino.

When her new friends came around, they would party and play music and dance. She worked the late shift, and in the evenings I stayed with a neighbor, Mrs. Robinson, until I was ten, and no longer needed a babysitter.

I made my own breakfast and dinner, and watched television on my own. It was around that time that my unusual fascination started. I remember the first time.

I had been sitting in a bank one day, waiting while my mother smiled through her teeth at a bank clerk.

She was taking care of some grown-up business that she had refused to discuss with me, and I was bored and absent-mindedly gazing at an oversized display check that was hung on the bank wall. In those days, people still used paper checks instead of credit cards, and that big cardboard check reminded me of a TV program on bank fraud that I had seen a few nights before.

In the TV special, a convicted fraudster described how he had made millions of dollars by altering bank checks. All paper checks came with a unique serial number printed on the bottom, written in magnetic ink that both computers and people could read.

This number indicated which branch the check got sent to for processing. By changing one of those numbers, the criminal had prevented the check from being properly routed. The computer would try to read the number, would flag it as unreadable and hence unroutable. A bank teller would have to manually examine it.

He’d see that all the numbers were visible, with no tears or flaws in the check, and would put it back into the automatic processing pile, to circle through the computer once again.

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The fraud was only discovered when the check was so worn out that it wouldn’t go through the machine anymore. By that time, the forger had passed check after check, and had escaped to the Bahamas with the loot. I remember waiting in that bank, looking up at that huge check and being disappointed that I couldn’t come up with my own scam. I was really beaten up about it, because I wasn’t smart enough, even though I was still only eleven.

Months later, I saw a movie about a bank heist. The next day, while I was waiting in the bank once again, and looking at that oversized check in a bored haze once again, I suddenly got an idea for my own scam. I devised a totally new type of check fraud. What if I did it the other way around? What if I changed one of the computer-read magnetic numbers on the check, leaving the visible ink numbers intact?

The teller who manually examined the numbers would still be able to look up the branch code, and send the check to the right branch.

But again, the computer wouldn’t be able to process it, and it might be rerouted or returned once again. That would require maybe two extra journeys, which meant that the bogus check might take longer to discover than the standard number scam. That might mean extra time for the con man to pass his bogus paper, and make his getaway.

I didn’t know for sure whether my ruse would work, and obviously I would have had to get my hands on some magnetic ink. But if it did work, I would potentially have an even better check dodge than the standard routing scam.

I tried to think back to the TV program. Had they already discussed that method for bank robbery? I didn’t know, and I never found out.

But, original or not, workable or not, I was immensely happy that I had persisted until I had come up with my own way of subverting the system.

I was young, and of course I never actually put the idea into action, but I always remembered that happy eureka moment. Best of all, I had, for a few weeks at least, found an outlet for my curiosity and my energies.

Every boy watches movies and thinks how glamorous it would be to be a master criminal. But it wasn’t the profits of crime that I was interested in. I got fired up with the same curiosity and enthusiasm whenever I saw a documentary on the space shuttle or a big engineering project—something that was so difficult that it took years to complete. These engineering achievements required planning and ingenuity. I used to imagine myself standing on the site, looking over plans, arranging the work, organizing the workers, and making a blueprint into a reality. What difference did it make if it was a bank heist or a 200-story bank building organization that I was working on?

More and more, I began looking around for things that I could devote my enthusiasm to. But, of course, living in a crime-ridden neighborhood, there was literally nothing to do except crime.

One boring day, I noticed that baby strollers set off security alarms in stores, and almost without meaning to, I put together a method for shoplifting. I found a way of scamming the library into issuing me with two cards, though I hardly used the one I already had. I’d read stuff, remember it, and then stick the book back on the shelf.

One time, I talked two cops into giving me a lift home from the city, because I wanted to see what it was like in a cop car, and what the cops were really like. Another time, I found out that the local video rental store had policies that could be exploited, such as the one where if they didn’t have a title in, you’d get it free next time. There I was, an eleven-year-old kid, hated by all of the clerks, because I was making a game out of 29

it—trying to figure out when the most in-demand titles would be unavailable, which was the opposite of what everyone else was doing.

It was all kid’s stuff. But looking back, it seems to me that these trivial misdemeanors were a foundation for a more important life—a life that I didn’t yet know about but felt was waiting for me. My mother’s attempts to involve me emotionally in her struggle for existence were obliterated by my constant struggle to find an outlet for my energies, by learning more and more about the world around me.

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

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.