Cracking the Code of Ethics
   ---------------------------
   Upstart Computer Pranksters Scramble Hacker Unity
   by Edmund Lee
   November 17th, 1998 12:00 AM

   In the spare halls of WBAI's new offices on Wall Street, a few hackers
   loiter around, talking to one another about the newest digital phones,
   the bureaucratic nuances of Bell Atlantic, and what to eat for dinner
   (either upscale diner or Mexican). It's Tuesday night; they're waiting
   for Emmanuel Goldstein (a/k/a Eric Corley), host of the hacker radio
   show Off the Hook and editor of 2600: The Hacker Quarterly. One, a
   middle-aged man wearing glasses and a baggy, ill-fitting suit, sits on
   a bench near the front door listening to the wall-mounted speaker
   project a human voice. The inner cone of the speaker appears to have a
   little tear, turning consonants into a static-sounding lisp. "The
   SH-I-A has many oberatives in that hountry," the voice comes over.
   "What we have here is a hovert strike assault." They're tuned in to
   Expert Witness, a radio show about clandestine military operations and
   spy technology, which airs every Tuesday night just before Off the
   Hook.

   "These guys are the real hackers," says the man sitting on the bench,
   about the CIA operatives and postCold War spies. "We just hack esoteric
   things, like phones and computers."

   But these days, there's much debate about what a "real" hacker is.
   Usenet's alt.2600 and alt.hackers play host to constant flame wars
   about just who is and who isn't. A typical post goes something like
   this: "Can someone tell me how I can get a wardialer [a program that
   dials random numbers until it finds one hooked up to a computer]?" To
   which the typical response is: "Get a life. First try to learn
   something about computers then come back with some real questions. We
   got to get rid of these wannabe hackers."

   Within what was once a cipher of people guided by a single code or
   ethic, clashing philosophies have emerged. The explosion of the
   Internet and the rush to get a computer in every home, classroom, and
   office has made every 15-year-old kid with a modem a potential hacker,
   of sorts. By some accounts, this fragmentation of the hacker community
   has spawned a new breed of more dangerous hackers, leaving the
   traditionalists to slowly die out.

   "There are definitely divisions and now there are all types of
   hackers," says J. P. Vranesevich, who runs AntiOnline.com, which
   publishes information about security holes in programs as well as the
   latest hacker attacks. He breaks it down into "traditional hackers like
   Emmanuel Goldstein"; "hackers for profit" like Vladimir Levin, who
   stole $4 million from Citibank and was rumored to have ties to the
   Russian mob; and hackers whose playgrounds include foreign government
   networks, such as Israeli Ehud Tenebaum, a/k/a Analyzer, who hacked the
   Department of Defense computers and was described by Bibi Netanyahu as
   "damn good" but "very dangerous." "It's all changing now," Vranesevich
   says. "There are split motivations."

   "Bullshit," responds Goldstein, when asked if he thinks the hacker
   community is fragmenting. "All we're seeing are the youths who are
   breaking into systems. We've had that before. It was just smaller
   then."

   Goldstein means the ever growing grade known as "script-kiddies," or
   wannabes who troll around the Net and co-opt the old "scripts" or
   programs of other hackers, which allow them to infiltrate a computer
   system, download credit-card numbers, or logjam a network. (The most
   famous script to date is AOL4Free, which gave free AOL access by
   generating a false credit-card number based on a simple algorithm.
   Later versions of this script enabled wannabes to find real credit-card
   numbers of AOL members.)

   "These kids don't really have any skills," says Deth Veggie of cDc, one
   of the oldest hacker crews around. "Since they didn't learn it for
   themselves they don't respect the system they're infiltrating. And so
   they steal things and download files, which a real hacker would never
   do."

   To find out what a real hacker is, it's useful to consult the Jargon
   File, a compendium of hacker slang started by Raphael Finkel of
   Stanford's Artificial Intelligence Lab back in 1975. The File has been
   updated numerous times and has been handed down to various editors the
   same way hackers share and constantly modify program codes. According
   to Jargon File 4.0.0, a hacker is "a person who enjoys exploring the
   details of programmable systems." Also: "A malicious meddler who tries
   to discover sensitive information by poking around." This last
   definition has a new editor's note, reading: "deprecated."

   According to a study released earlier this year by the Computer
   Security Institute and the FBI, however, malicious hacks are on the
   rise. Sixty-four percent of the companies surveyed reported computer
   security breaches within the past year, a 16 percent increase over the
   year before. And 47 percent of these attacks resulted in theft of data,
   financial fraud, or sabotage. Though there are no statistics on exactly
   how many hackers are surfing the Net, it is clear that there are more
   of these "malicious meddlers" than ever before.

   "I don't see it as an alarming trend," says Route of Phrack, an
   electronic hacker publication founded in 1985, just after 2600. "The
   hacker world is a mirror of society. And we'll have these bad elements
   like any society. It's just that nobody knows what we're really about."

   This public relations trouble is caused in part by the disproportionate
   amount of media attention bestowed on hackers like Tenebaum and Kevin
   Mitnick, who has been in jail since 1995 awaiting trial on charges of
   stealing 20,000 credit-card numbers— and who will be portrayed by Skeet
   Ulrich in a forthcoming Miramax film.

   Many of the traditional cadre of hackers have complained that the media
   like to focus on people like Mitnick and "clump us together with those
   guys," says Hosaka, founder of r00t, another hacker crew. "R00t doesn't
   do things like that. We don't 'hack' in that way. All we're about is
   hanging out, exchanging information, and teaching each other new
   things. If you want to break something, go out and buy it, then break
   it. Don't break other people's work."

   These sentiments, shared by many of the hacking world's sizable old
   guard, have increased the tension over the already contentious Mitnick
   issue, which many hackers point to as evidence of fragmentation.
   Although just about everyone agrees Mitnick has been held in jail for
   too long without a trial, many think he should face the consequences.
   "He did do bad things and break the law," says Tom Jackiewicz, a/k/a
   invalid, of UPT, an old hacker BBS. "He should pay for his crimes." But
   Goldstein disagrees, and has campaigned heavily for a speedy trial.
   "Mitnick is not someone who belongs in prison," he claims.

   The recent hack of the New York Times Web site— where the words "Free
   Kevin" were graffitied by a crew calling itself Hacking For Girlies
   (HFG)— has also become a point of contention.

   "It was wrong," says Hosaka. "On the Internet you have the ability to
   display what you want, so put up your own site."

   Still, some think it was "pulled off pretty well," according to Deth
   Veggie. "My impression is that it was done more to send a message than
   just to say, 'Look, we hacked a Web page!' which is what [these types
   of hacks are] mostly about."

   The Times is considering the incident a criminal act and the FBI is
   investigating. Although Web page hacks are usually within the purview
   of newbie hackers, one hacker source says he knows that "this was done
   by a hacker from the old guard."

   Perhaps it was not simply a statement about the Mitnick case but a call
   for the old guard to reclaim media attention, showing everyone that
   they still exist.

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