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

presented the phone company with court orders for DNRs and wiretaps on the phones of suspected drug dealers in that neighborhood. Kaiser had no idea who was on the phone at the Abene residence. He had no idea it was a skinny kid with a dog-eared copy of The Hobbit on his bookshelf. For all Kaiser knew, it could have been some narco terrorists from the Cali cartel who had the run of New York Telephone's internal phone system. They could knock out phone service to the entire Northeast if they knew what they were doing. And imagine what they could do if they didn't know what they were doing.
    So now The Technician had gotten into a dial hub. Probably with the help of his friend, Abene.
    A dial hub is supposed to be one of the most secure entry points into the whole New York Telephone computer system. In 1989, it was a brand-new technology that the phone company was installing, so new that its name, at least, was unknown to most of the people who worked for the phone company. The hub was a way to keep intruders out of the system even as authorized employees could connect from home. It was a first line of defense and you could only get in if you knew the right ten-digit password. Every single one of New York Telephone's thousands of employees had a personalized ten-digit number.
    Once you got into the dial hub it became, simply, a subway system that you could ride to any destination within the New York Telephone Company system. Technically, the hub was a pool of modems. The modems were like trains, waiting for passengers to board them. Next stop MIZAR. All aboard for PREMLAC. COSMOS, last stop. If someone without a token tried to board, the dial hub would disconnect the unauthorized user.
    But during the night, The Technician had gotten hold of a token. And for half an hour, who knew where he'd ridden? At each stop, you needed another password to enter a specific system. But the DNR had no way of tracking a rider once he passed through the dial hub's turnstile.
    Kaiser asked Staples what the hacker could have been looking for. Staples didn't want to consider the possibilities, but he had to.
    "I don't think there's any computer worth mentioning that we own that's not accessible through there, " Staples said.
    What were some of the stops on the subway? Computers that were used to provision new services. Computers that were used to maintain phone company buildings and plants. Computers that detailed work schedules for every employee and every job. And that was just the administrative stuff. Beyond that, the hackers could enter every switch in the New York Telephone region.
    Staples hung up the phone in his office two blocks north, where his window faced Kaiser's. They could have waved to each other if they'd thought of it. They never had.
    Staples came right over to Kaiser's office and within an hour he and Kaiser met with Kaiser's boss. They laid out the whole thing: We think we may have something big here. It's something bigger and broader than anything we've encountered before.
    This is the moment when the case transformed itself. The day before it had been a case like others in the past, a case of one intruder, a case where only one switch one isolated point in the network
    was hit. Today, at least two interlopers
    were involved, and they could be anywhere in the system. The number of perpetrators had doubled overnight, causing the case to grow geometrically. Today, the lawmen were fighting a network of intruders. Today, they were facing a conspiracy.
    Kaiser's boss agreed. It was time to broaden the investigation.
    Up went another DNR, this time on Abene's phone.
    Staples told Kaiser how to watch over the hackers' shoulders even after the DNR lost track of them in the system. Staples told Kaiser which administrators were responsible for monitoring the breached computers, and then how to notify the administrators each time the hackers log in. The administrators often could reconstruct, from their audit logs, all the commands