Contents
About this project
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Postscript, March 1997
Postscript, January 2000

He also apparently didn't get along with teachers and administrators at the school. "Let's just say I measured far beyond what they were equipped for, and they didn't really know what to do with me."

Feeling like a prisoner, he made arrangements to transfer out of the school, but not before making a statement — one that left several desktop computers in a school computer lab a useless, smoking heap. He was at war, and with the help of a handful of other students, used a weapon in his arsenal to strike back at the enemy. That weapon was a disk bomb, a typical 3.5-inch floppy diskette modified in such a way that when inserted into a computer it causes a small internal fire that melts the mother board — the essential internal brain — of any personal computer.

He places a small black diskette on the table, saying, "That's got all the information you'll need on it." It's not disk bomb, but a normal computer disk containing three huge text files, including one called The Anarchist's Cookbook. In a section of that cookbook are the instructions for making a disk bomb: Pry a common diskette apart, remove the cotton lining. Scrape the heads of several strike-anywhere matches into a bowl. Paint a small stripe of clear nail polish onto the inside of the disk, then take the match scrapings and spread them over the still-wet nail polish. Allow it to dry, then put the disk back together. When inserted into any computer the internal disk drive will spin the disk, which ignites the match scrapings and starts the fire.

"To this day I don't think anyone knows what really happened," Vandal says. "I think they attributed it to some kind of power surge or something. They never really acknowledged that it happened. That lab was suddenly closed with no explanation. I'm sure they replaced all the computers though. At places like that money flows like water. But it sure made me and a lot of other kids who felt like I did feel better."

The other two files on the disk are "Boxes," a primer on the form and function of boxes, home-brewed electronic devices used to manipulate the phone system in a myriad of ways, a practice known as phone phreaking, and "PhreakFAQ" a file of Frequently Asked Questions about phreaking. Both files include instructions for building and using a red box, the most common and easiest to build of all the boxes. Listen carefully when you drop a quarter into pay phone, and you'll hear five high-pitched tones, spaced very precisely apart. A red box reproduces the tones which when played into the phone's mouthpiece can fool a public pay phone into acting as if has been paid for a call. Then again, sometimes a telephone operator can tell when real coins have not been used, and may block the call. Many pay phones have had security measures installed to resist red boxing, but some have not.

Ed Cummings, aka Bernie S.

While genuinely illegal, no one has ever been prosecuted for red boxing. But one hacker known as Bernie S. went to prison for having the parts to build a red box — parts which are readily available in electronics stores. (He was later freed.)

On one occasion, Vandal and a friend took their Red boxes directly into what they considered belly of the beast itself. They had dared each other to make a Red box phone call from the pay phones in the lobby of a NYNEX central office. "That was like going right into the enemy camp and waving a flag. But we didn't get caught," he said.

We walk around the mall, pausing at Radio Shack. Here he asks for a tone-dialer, a device that emits the sounds of telephone dialing buttons. Take it apart and switch an internal computer chip with another chip available at another store, and the dialer can become a red box.

But Vandal says he considers himself only about one-third phone phreaker. The rest is all hacker.

A tone dialer

A typical night of hacking for Vandal might take place in his bedroom at home, where he uses a Macintosh computer. He will have a six-pack of Jolt Cola — a soft drink containing twice the sugar and twice the caffeine of a normal cola — in the refrigerator.

The computer program he uses most often is Telnet, a tool that dates back to the earliest days of the Internet. While the World Wide Web may be the shiny new car of the Information Superhighway, Telnet might be described as an all-terrain vehicle. It allows a user to login to a computer across town, across the country or on the other side of the globe. Once connected to one site by Telnet, it is easy to connect to another, and another, as many times as is necessary. Every time the connection crosses a state line or international border, it complicates the procedure that a system administrator would have to follow in order to trace the connection.

"If I'm going to do something serious I might Telnet to 10 or 15 sites before I try connecting to my target," he said.

Most of those targets are commercial computer systems or those owned by universities or research institutions.

They key to hacking in to these systems in a technique known as "gaining root." Root is the user name generally assigned to the most powerful person in charge of a network. It is accomplished by exploiting known bugs and errors in the Unix operating system on the host computers themselves, and by breaking passwords.

"Once I have root, I rule all on that system. I can read people's e-mail, I can look at any file stored anywhere on the system, and if I want to I can destroy those files, but I never do. Generally I just go in a check out what they've got. It's like visiting a foreign country."

After gaining root to a computer at the University of Kansas, Vandal used the university president's email account to request a catalog from an adult bookstore in California.

"I'm not given to doing anything really bad. If someone has a system they've worked on for years, I'm not going to do anything to destroy it....What I'm after is knowledge. Hacking is not about just getting into computers. It's about what you gain in knowledge by getting in."

The ultimate goal of hacking, Vandal said, is to set information free, to slowly erode the profit-driven philosophy that governs the phone system and is quickly overtaking the Internet where profit motivations had once been taboo.

"People like us shouldn't have to suffer because other people are stupid. Think of this conversation we're having right now. If we were talking on the phone we'd have to pay for the right to talk to each other. How absurd would it be if someone were to charge us 25 cents for every five minutes we wanted to talk in person? Basic human contact shouldn't have a price. Basic human needs shouldn't have a price."