L0pht Heavy Industries New Englnad Cable News


The following images and transcript was originally aired by New England Cable News on Friday March 14, 1997. It is presented here without their permision. If we ever get a decent quality tape of the segment and if we have time we'll make a quicktime of it for your enjoyment. My apologies if this looks like crap on your screen. I am just not the HTML whiz everyone thinks I am.


NECN Interview Transcription

People:
WP - Weld Pond
SR - Space Rogue
KP - Kingpin
MG - Mudge
TN - Tan
RP - Reporter - Scott Yount

[Opening scene - Weld Pond, Space Rogue, Tan, and Kingpin sit in the lounge area with a pile of circuit boards and other goodies on the coffee table freshly retrieved from a dumpster diving expedition]

WP: Well it's a 386... someone threw it away, it's like who wants a 386 prototyping board anymore. [referring to a hardware debugging board]

SR: wow.

KP: this thing's awesome. Who wouldn't want one?

SR: No sh- no doubt man.

WP: And it's got the full documentation.

SR: Oh and we got the docs too?!

WP: Docs - and software - copyright 1993.

SR: Killer.

[Scene: Tan giving a quick guided tour through the NOC - several close-up shots of the 16 node MPP]

TN: Uhm, basically this is our network operations center. All this stuff has been pulled out of the garbage and you can see we are gathering up some more. Pretty much... yeah all of it has been pulled out of the garbage.

[Scene: Kingpin sitting at his desk]

KP: Some peoples trash is, you know, what we live for. It's our treasure.

[Close-up shots of Space Rogue in front of an active system]

RP: They are hackers. This mini-industry is called the l0pht. 'L','0','P','H','T'. You might call them Robin-hood's, sort of.

Mudge on NECN, L0phTV04.gif [Scene: Mudge standing in front of one of the electronic project benches]

MG: We like to play around with technology and get it to do things it was never intended to do.

[Scene: Hallway shot and various teasers of the web pages and other rooms in the l0pht]

RP: From a small secret warehouse, somewhere near boston. The l0phter;s are a conglomerate. That essentially pride themselves on cracking security software. The seven individuals, who go by code-names only, then tell the companies they bust.

[Mudge close-up]

MG: I figure we recently made waves with a large massachusettes based company called Security Dynamics. They got very upset about it. We're making waves with Lotus, with Microsoft so for the future I'd hope to see us stay out of jail because I don't think we're doing anything terribly bad. We aren't breaking any laws by debunking things.



Home Page on NECN, L0phTV01.gif [Close-ups of Space Rogue working ]

RP: What they are doing, is upsetting people who claim their security systems are full-proof. The good hackers then approach the company they crack and usually the exec's decide to do nothing.

[Mudge close-up]

MG: They say: "Do we really need to take our top developers off of what they are currently doing, adding new bells and whistles to sell more into this new market niche, and have them do some code clean up and code review. Since none of our customers are calling for us to do this, why should we?"



Space Rogue on NECN, L0phTV05.gif [Web page shots and a woman checking them out at work]

RP: So, the l0pht goes public by contacting customers and posting the flaws on their web page so the big company is forced by the little guys to make their system better.

[SR sitting at his desk]

SR: Debunking big corporations software, when they say something works and we find out it doesn't...

RP: What fun is that? [from background]

SR: It's fun. It's good to go up against the big guys, you know, be the small guy. Especially when they are very arrogant about it and don't care about you and think you are just a little nobody. But you get on the web and you're a big somebody and everyone listens to you.



Advisories page on NECN, L0phTV02.gif [l0pht advisory web pages (advisories.html) - followed by various shots of our equipment]

RP: For instance: in Dec. they found security flaws with Lotus Domino 1.5, and in January with Novell Netware. The amazing thing about all of this is the equipment these good pirates use... junk.


Kingpin on NECN, L0phTV06.gif [Scene: KP sitting at his desk]

KP: When it's nice out we go trashing alot. We used to go around on bicycles before alot of people had cars, now luckilly they have cars and we drive around. We go to alot of flea-markets and pick 'things' out.

[Kingpin soldering]

RP: 'Things' are old computers that used to play games, CB radios, and circuit boards. Everything from old Apple II's to a Vax computer. Kingpin, who has been modifying electronic stuff since he was seven, will soon have a degree in Computer Engineering. He is much more interested in what college _didn't_ tell him.

KP: Alot of stuff you just have to play around with and explore. The same with the software, all the exploits and the bugs, you don't see that in the manuals 'cause people don't know about them. You just have to play around until you find them.

Kingpin soldering on NECN, L0phTV07.gif [Weld Pond demonstrating the Cell-Phone briefcase] [Reporter standing in front of a pocsag decoding station]

RP: And so, you think because you don't use computers you are probably safe. The L0pht finds flaws in _everything_. The bottom line is essentially, no matter what anyone tells you, if it's electronic then it's probably not secure. We all know that you can hear cell-phone conversations by listening to them on a scanner, but what about those intimate pages you might get from your significant other. Let's take a look here [holds up his Alpha-numeric pager] on my pager I just got: "And what about that Apple //e Scott, have you thrown it out yet?". Think that's secure? Probably not. [Holds pager up to pocsag decoding station monitor where his page was captured and logged - points to the same message on the monitor] "And what about that Apple //e Scott, have you thrown it out yet?". I never had an Apple //e. The bottom line is - nothing is sacred. If it's on a line or in the air waves. Someone else can find it.




Scott Yount from NECN at L0phT, L0phTV08.gif [mudge close-up]
MG: If it's proprietary information that you are banking your financial future on, your stock exchanges and everything... yeah, I think you need to be a little more cautious.

[Kingpin close-up]
KP: It's fun. And it's harmless. [giggling and laughter errupt from off screen] Sort of [chuckles].

[Tan close-up and Weld close-ups]
RP: The L0pht. Look for them in the 21st century. Scott Yount, New England Cable News, Boston.

[Not shown on the air - Space Rogue booking back to the NOC saying "I want the world!"]





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