Computers, Hackers, And Phreaks
Computers,
Hackers, And Phreaks
The Internet is a wondrous place. Practically
anything you could ever want is
available on the Net. It’s like a big
city, it has the highly prestigious areas, and the
sex-ridden slums (Mitchell). It has the
upstanding citizens, and it has the criminals.
On the Net, crime is more abundant than
in a large city, though, mainly because of
the difficulties in tracking and prosecuting
offenders. Even from its beginnings, the
Internet has always been a battlefield
between phreaks and administrators.
The Internet hasn’t always been a
public forum. In fact, the Internet has
been around for years. The Internet is
just a new fad (Larson). The Internet
originally began as DARPANET, a government-created
network, which was
designed for defense communications. The
Net structure is such that it could
survive a nuclear war (Mitchell). The
creation of the Net can not be blamed for the
existence of hackers though, hackers are
older than the Net itself, but the Net is the
largest ‘hacker haven’ today (Spencer).
The growth of the Net since its creation
has been nothing less than astounding.
In the 25-plus years since its creation, the
Net now has over thirty million users
using four million sites world wide.
Estimates rate the growth of the Net anywhere
from ten to fifteen percent per
month (Spencer). The Internet was
first released to major universities in the
United States of America. Since then,
the universities have offered connections to
small business, service providers, and
even to the individual user. Sometimes these
connections cost a fortune, and sometimes
they can be obtained for free (Larson).
Although some of the original universities
have dropped off the Net for various
reasons, every major university in the
United States, and now, most others in the
world, have a connection to the Internet
(Quittner).
Although it isn’t easy for an individual
to get a direct connection to the Net,
many private institutions are getting
direct access. This is mainly due to the fact
that in order to support the very high
speed of the Net, a fast computer is needed
and a fast connection. A fast computer
can cost in the thousands of dollars, at
least, and a quick connection can cost
hundreds dollars or more. Individuals can
still get on the Net through these private
institutions. The private institution
spoon-feeds the Net to the slower computers
over their delayed connection lines
(Jones). The Internet began very
high-class, due to the fact that only super
intelligent college students and professors
could access it. The discussions tended
to stay intellectual, with very little,
if any, disturbance (Larson). However,
relatively recent changes in the availability
of the Net have changed that
atmosphere. Now, almost anyone can access
the Internet. Internet access is offered
by every major online service (Himowitz).
The fact that the major online services
charge for their use keeps many people
away from them. Those people simply
turn to public dial-ups, which are free
connections offered by universities that are
available to the general public (Spencer).
Because accessing the Net is easier,
and a lot more people are doing it,
naturally the amount of information on
the Net is increasing at the same rate, if not
faster. In what is often referred to by
Net users as the Resource Explosion, the
amount of information circulating the
Internet has increased with the number of
users (Jones). Of all the other
factors contributing to the large percent of online
crimes, perhaps the most influential is
the design structure of the Internet. Experts
agree that the underlying structure with
no central hub, where each computer is
equally powerful, gives unchecked power
to the undeserving (Miller). The design
also makes controlling the frequency of
break-ins almost impossible as well. Both
politicians and so-called ‘experts’ believe
the Internet as a whole will be regulated
in the next five years. Hackers disagree,
using the arguments that the Internet was
designed to be uncontrollable, that the
basic structure doesn’t support regulation
(Banja). In a network run by its users,
which is designed to be impervious to
attack, not even the government has much
muscle there. In fact, the Internet is one
of the few places that the government
has little power. Because the Net is
international, any regulations forced
upon domestic computer users can be
circumvented by routing through an overseas
computer(Savage). The government
doesn’t have the power to completely shut
down the Net. In order to do that, every
one of the millions of computers on the
Net must be disconnected. Even if only
two remain, the Net will continue to exist
(Miller).
The ease of adding something to the
Net is also a factor preventing the total
regulation of the Net. A new site can
be added to the Net in a matter of seconds,
and can be removed just as quickly. It
takes authorities considerable time to trace a
connection back to it’s physical address,
and if it disappears, it makes tracking it all
that more difficult. (Johnson) Once a
resource becomes widespread, removing it
from the Internet is almost impossible.
Each site that has the resource must be
found and the resources moved. If even
one site has the resource, it can spread to
cover the Net easily (Himowitz).
Some computer criminals go by the term
“Phreaks”, or “Hackers.” With all
these things leaving the Internet open to”phreaking”, is it any wonder that so
many computer law breakers exist? The
United States government has all of its
computer systems on the Internet, yet many
universities have better security than
the government computers containing
confidential information (Spencer). A
majority of break-ins occur in university
computers, mainly because of the stiff
penalties for being caught in a government
computer (Fisher). Over 10,000 break-ins
that have occurred in recent months are
blamed on The Posse, a group of young
phreaks (Quittner). If break-ins are done
on universities, then how secure are the
government’s secrets?
Both hackers and phreakers tend to
stay away from heavy-duty government
hacking, though. Exploring innocently
and generally harmless pranks are done the
most, and many hacks/phreaks don’t limit
themselves to the Internet, or even to a
computer (Spencer). The next step up for
a good computer hack/phreak is to ‘field
phreaking’, which covers many various
activities, but mainly using telephone
company boxes to make free calls and other
various things, but most field
phreaking is somehow technically related
to their computer skills (Jackson). Field
phreaking does happen, and it does happen
quite a lot. For example, when two
bachelors rented a billboard in hopes
of finding a mate, a phreak broke into their
voice mail box and changed the message
to a “‘perverted’ sexually suggestive
message” (Jones) More recently,
a hacker obtained tens of thousands of
passwords using a Trojan horse program,
which records the first 128 keystrokes
when someone connects to the Internet.
These 128 keystrokes normally contain the
user’s name and their password (Himowitz).
Kevin Lee Poulsen was featured on
Unsolved Mysteries in 1991 for charges
including tampering with the telephone
network and stealing government
documents, all via computer. Because of
this appearance, he was captured by two
bag-boys in a Hughes Supermarket who saw
his picture on the show (Fisher).
Tonya Harding’s E-mail in the Olympic
computers was “open to the public since
she never changed her password from it’s
default, 1112, which corresponds to her
birthday, December 11th” (Nevius).
Mark Abene, whom many believe to be the
greatest phreak ever, who is known online
as Phiber Optik, was sentenced to one
year in prison, a stiff punishment for
his charge of breaking into a telephone
network (Johnson). Although the
job is hard, there are groups devoted to stopping
violations committed online. One such
group, the Computer Emergency Response
Team, or CERT, a government-funded team
at Carnegie-Mellon University gives
advisories and support to systems that
have been broken into or are at risk of being
broken into (Mitchell). Another
method of preventing break-ins are new security
measures. Almost every day, another operating
system or communication protocol
comes out which covers holes found in
previous copies of the software. This is
good as a temporary solution, but as soon
as the new software comes out, a new
hole is found and the game continues (Larson).
Stopping computer hacking is probably
impossible, although undoubtedly
stopping hacking altogether is impossible.
Why? Because many professionals
spend millions of dollars to prevent break-ins,
but smaller systems don’t spend
anything. Free security will never be
able to hold everyone out. FtS Productions
said it best in “Avoiding Detection”:
“Free Security?You get what you pay for.”
