Contents
About this project
Page 1
Page 2
Page 3
Page 4
Page 5
Page 6
Page 7
Page 8
Page 9
Page 10
Page 11
Postscript, March 1997
Postscript, January 2000

Thursday, January 23, 1997: Interview with Avirex

To have a conversation with Avirex is to do so with two people simultaneously. One is the talented young computer technician who works as a system administrator for a Brooklyn-based business he will not name. He makes enough money to pay his bills, and lives a seemingly quiet life.

The other is the man who in 1991 eluded arrest by the U.S. Secret Service for four months following a raid on his home, and who later served 18 months in a federal prison after pleading guilty to several crimes, including credit fraud, and conspiracy to commit cellular phone fraud.

He leads a double life, one day telling his parole officer how hard it is to find work with a criminal record, and working for an employer who knows nothing of his criminal past the next. On the side he works as a freelance hacker for hire gathering information of almost any kind for a price.

Avirex claims to knows more about me that I do myself. He says has seen my phone records, and has cross-referenced the numbers I call frequently. He has seen my credit report, my bank records and my World Wide Web home page. He knows where I live and some of my previous addresses. He knows where I went to college, and checked to see if I have a criminal record. But mainly, he has looked for any connection I might have to a law enforcement agency. He and a colleague, a hacker known as The Saint, did the check at my suggestion before agreeing to the interview.

A Manhattan native, Avirex, now 25, is the son of middle class parents. His father is the owner of a successful small business. He says he first became a hacker in 1984 after receiving a Commodore VIC-20 computer with a cassette tape drive as a gift. A forerunner of the more powerful and popular Commodore 64, the VIC-20 was reliable workhorse. He was into hacking computer games — cracking the codes that protected the games from being copied for people who had not paid for them.

It wasn't long before he had convinced his mother to buy him a 300-baud modem. He had heard about bulletin board systems, dialup online services created by individuals or organizations which predated the Internet. They offered members email-like message services, access to computer file archives and other services.

"I called this board called Force Hackers BBS, and the guys who ran it had this meeting by the World Trade Center. We were just little kids running around and learning about computers then. That was when TAP was still around," he said.

The first issue of YIPL, the forerunner of TAP and 2600

By TAP, Avirex is referring to the Technological Assistance Program newsletter, the grandfather of publications like 2600. First known as the Youth International Party Line newsletter, it was established in 1971 by a phone phreaker who called himself Al Bell, a colleague of counterculture leader Abbie Hoffman, TAP published information taken from AT&T technical journals, the kinds of information that Ma Bell would have liked to keep to itself. In the late 70s TAP was taken over by two phreakers calling themselves Tom Edison and Chesire Catalyst. By then the four-page leaflet boasted an estimated 4,000 subscribers around the world. But in 1983 a burglary and attempted arson at Edison's suburban New Jersey apartment brought it to an end. By 1984, 2600, though not connected to TAP, had begun to fill the void the older publication left behind. A complete collection of TAP newsletters is available for sale in 2600's classified ads.

"I met everyone at those meetings," Avirex said. "We would pass around copies of TAP and we'd go hack around Greenwich Village. That was when everyone could exchange information through the underground. It wasn't like it is now at the 2600 meetings where there's a bunch of people who really don't know what they're doing," he says.

Eventually, Avirex was admitted into the inner circle of Force Hackers Association, whose members included Acid Phreak, one of the five members of MoD, the Masters of Destruction, to serve time in prison.

He and his friends used programs called "war dialers" to use the modem to dial phone numbers in a sequence and record which numbers are answered by computers. He would leave his computer running the war dialer for days at a time, dialing over and over. "We weren't even sure what we were doing. We'd pick a computer system and dial into it, and they'd have default passwords all the time. We'd log in with names like test or guest or demo, and the password would be the same as the name," he said.

His explorations of computers and the phone system continued unabated until 1985, when his parents were paid a visit by officials from the telephone company.

"I was blue boxing from my home, which was stupid."

Now obsolete, the blue box was the first phone phreaking device of its kind. Like its successor, the red box, the now-obsolete blue box emitted tones that controlled access to long distance phone lines: the 2600-hertz tone to be exact. Older phone phreaks remember the blue box about as fondly as stereo equipment enthusiasts remember eight-track tapes. But by the time Avirex had taken up blue boxing, the phone company had built more sophisticated scanning equipment, which made it a simple matter to track the source of his calls. It wasn't long until a pair of phone company employees paid a visit to his parents.

He was never charged with a crime; his family settled out of court with the phone company. His parents decided to send him away to a boarding school in Virginia. It was better that he go away for awhile, they thought. He would be gone for two and-a-half years.

When he returned to New York in 1987, he fell right back into the scene, as if he had never left. "I really can't tell you how I fell back in. I just did," he says.

This time his computer was a borrowed Compaq 286. He decided it would be best to simply hold back and quietly collect information for a few years. By 1990, he was ready to make his mark on the computer underground scene again. He founded The New York Hack Exchange, a hacker computer bulletin board service and joined a group which called itself High Tech Hoods, a group which stressed hacking on the right side of the law.

"The board was really successful. I had good information and a couple of friends helped me hook it up with an 800 number so that made a lot of people could call," he said. The board stayed up until 1993, but was interrupted for a few months in 1991. A hacking friend in the group that helped operate the board got into some kind of trouble with the U.S. Secret Service.

"I'm still not sure what he got into trouble for. But he ended up giving the Secret Service my information and they ended up coming over to my apartment," he says.