Approaching Zero: The Extraordinary Underworld of Hackers, Phreakers, Virus Writers, and Keyboard Criminals
by By Mungo, Paul and Clough, Bryan
Category: Social Science , General

A place has been created that has no physical dimensions. It can only be reached with a computer. You can hear it in the hum of a modem or the whistle of a fax machine, and see it in the lines on a computer screen, but you can never touch it. This place is a network of connections - from microwaves and fiber-optical cables to telephones, computers, and data banks, it is an ethereal web that links every remote corner of the world. It controls the technology that runs our lives, managing the flow of information, communication, and money, and it is now riddled with arcane computer viruses, overrun by adolescent hackers, and disputed in the electronic turf wars of high-tech street gangs.This place is called Cyberspace, a technological frontier where the outlaws are sophisticated computer renegades - hackers, phreakers, and virus writers who know the interconnected electronic networks as well as the engineers and programmers who built them. Using only small personal computers, hackers with names like Captain Zap and Acid Phreak, or hacker gangs like Rabid and the Legion of Doom, can infiltrate the protected and secured computers at the Pentagon, NATO, or NASA at will. They can roam invisibly through the electronic switches and links of our telephone network and tap into the computers that hold the credit records of all Americans, altering data and copying credit card numbers and access codes. They can even hack into the world's largest banking systems, and have learned how to transfer funds into their own accounts.In recent years, Cyberspace has been invaded by viruses with names like Number of the Beast, LoveChild, and Michelangelo, which can erase data and cause computers to crash. The shadowy creators of these viruses, working from obscure places like Bulgaria, Indonesia, or Thailand, have invented scores of pernicious programs that will infect as many as 12 million of the world's 90 million PCs over the next two years.Approaching Zero is the definitive history of the computer underworld, from its obscure origins in the phone phreaking of the late sixties to the extraordinary international phenomenon it has become in the present day. The book captures the exploits of the most accomplished data criminals, like Bulgaria's Dark Avenger, whose viruses have devastated systems across the world, and Fry Guy, in Indiana, who at the age of fifteen tampered with credit records and fund transfers for personal gain. It also charts the development of the other forms of electronic blight - the rabbits, trojans, logic bombs, and worms - as well as the international dimensions of the computer underworld, from America to Britain to Germany, then to Bulgaria, Russia, and the Far East. It is the first book to define the technological subculture of phreaking, hacking, and virus writing, and to put these elements into the context of our increasingly technology-dependent society, for in the future all crime will be data crime.