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

hooked into what seems like one of the mightiest computers in the world. For someone else, it might have all sorts of catastrophic appeal. You could do anything, even cut off phone service to the whole Laurelton neighborhood. But that's anathema to them; they'd no sooner crash a computer system than they would cut off a finger. That's what they tell each other. They believe in the hacker ethic: Thou shalt not destroy.
    It's OK to look around, but don't hurt anything. It's good enough just to be here.
    It's late now, the mission has turned into an all-nighter, and it's the bold hour when all the authority figures they've ever known are already asleep, oblivious to the escalation of the shared kinetic energy in this room.
    They log in to one of New York Telephone's COSMOS computers, whose intricacies Mark is happy to explain. COSMOS
    is a grand-sounding acronym that turns up on any self-respecting hacker BBS. Phile after phile is written about it, as if the system with the fancy name was somehow the very key to the Bell System. It's all nonsense, explains Mark: COSMOS, he says, stands for Computer System for Mainframe Operations, and is nothing more than a giant database of work orders. It's an operations system that phone company employees use when they have to change something on a phone line. COSMOS has a directory of customers' phone numbers, archives that list the number of the cable and pair that run down from the big silver box on the telephone pole outside and into your house. You can look up anybody's phone service on COSMOS. Just read the code line for somebody's service, and you suddenly know such intimate details as whether the customer has three-way calling, or call waiting, or call forwarding. That's what it is, Mark explains. Nothing to it.
    Mark shows them how to call up actual service orders for the phone lines that lead into each of their own houses. It's so exciting seeing it there on the screen. They're doing this with a laughably slow modem, a modem that pumps data at the rate of 1200 bits of data per second. It takes forever for the screen to refresh itself at that rate, but it's oh so sweet when it happens. They see Eli's own phone number. They see the features he has on his phone. The boys have an uncontrollable urge to crow, to scrawl graffiti across this privileged line of computer code as it blinks on the screen. If any one of the boys were hacking alone, in his bedroom, he wouldn't feel the same way. But here they are, together, and they need to mark their shared journey. Thou shalt not destroy, no, of course not. But they traveled here, this is their turf, and they want to plant a flag. That wouldn't be destroying anything, would it? And COSMOS is inviting them to do just that, with its tantalizing prompt:
    JA%
    They decide to write Eli's hacker handle on his phone line! Right there, right on the computer! Just write it in. They know the commands to type. Mark was the first to figure them out. They tell the computer to execute a service order: JA% SOE
    Then they tell the computer that the service order will modify service on Eli's phone number (let's say his number is 555-9365):
    _I TN=555-9365
    Then they tell the computer to execute the order on the next day:
    _H ORD = C1AP1234, OT = CH, DD = 07-13-89, FDD = 07-13-89

    Then they tell the computer to add remarks to Eli's phone number:
    _I RMKT = ACIDPHREAK
    That's the end of the service order, they tell the computer:
    _E
    It's dizzying, the risk, because what if some phone company employee calls it up the next day and sees "ACID PHREAK"
    written into the code? On the other hand, why would anyone call it up ever, unless the Ladopoulos family requests a change in service? The boys leave it. They aren't hurting anything.
    They write "PHIBER OPTIK" on Mark's phone line. They leave it that way.
    By the time Eli drives them home, in the late-late part of a night that's ready to become morning, they are talking about what they'll do when they log in again