Nostalgia time... I remember when my grandparents tried to help their misbehaving grandson by buying him a C=128-D at Toys "R" Us along with a 1200 baud modem. I quickly grew bored with Q-Link and found about the network of BBSes which existed in the late 80's. It wasn't long before I had ran up an $800 phone bill, and for the next 20 years my grandpa wouldn't talk to me. I found friendship and mischief, a world of wonder for a 12 year old in the late 80s. "Free" games, porn(4-bit color, but still), and instructions for how to make bombs and hacking devices. After a couple years, I graduated to an Amiga 500 and a 2400 baud modem. Wardialing. Voice mail box hacking. 2600 magazine. Phrack. cDc. Credit-card and calling-card fraud. Tymnet and Telenet. Getting on the internet via a hacked login at UC Davis. Hacking the local phone companies billing system. Playing around with an open flood monitoring system running QNX. Every night was an adventure.
I still remember having my mind blown after accessing a German chat server over one of the PSNs(Lutz?). My late friend Patrick started up a scam where we'd call people and tell them we were with the phone company. Someone had run up thousands on their calling card, but we could remove the charges if they'd verify the last 4 digits. Well, the first ten were the phone number we just dialed. One day a stranger called me(I still don't remember how he got my number or who he was) and we exchanged some notes... interesting finds from wardialing mostly. He called me back in a couple days and let me know one of the numbers was now giving a dialtone. That meant it was probably a PBX and we could use it to divert calls. I gave the number to Pat and after a few minutes he calls me back screaming "The password is 1-2-3-4!" over and over. Sure as shit, the fools didn't bother changing the password to something difficult. My innate paranoia kicked in and I suggested we should use the calling cards through the PBX so the owner didn't notice a surge in billing. That turned out to be a colossal mistake. A few months later, a confused and surprised GMAC, the PBX's owner, received a call from AT&T security. Someone was using stolen calling cards at their organization. We first got wind of it when we saw a highlighted section on the front page of the local newspaper warning people to be wary of giving out calling card information over the phone. I got paranoid and loaded my modem and a can of black powder I kept under my bed in my backpack and started biking to my friend's house. I don't know why, but I changed my mind and turned around half way. As I crested the small hill near my house, I saw the cop car and white evidence van parked out front. My parents had just been served a warrant and the police were seizing my computers(my old Amiga 500 was packed up to be sold, as I just bought a 386SX off my dad. They took both and everything around it... a printer... even a calculator). I don't remember much after that. The cops tried to befriend me with some bullshit stories of how they worked on the first networked computer. In the end I pled guilty and had to give up computers for 3 years, go to some scared straight program, and do a bunch of community service. I was charged with 2 felonies and a misdemeanor, but one of the felonies was dropped. I was a 15 year old felon, which I guess I'm strangely proud of. I managed to go about 18 months before I scrounged up an old green-screen TTY and a 300 baud modem. I was back online, but somewhat scared straight. I stuck to the mainstream BBSes, especially the multiline monsters that began popping up in the early 90s. It wasn't long before I found new friends though. I met the Mike's online and was in awe when I heard how they'd used stolen credit cards to fly to Portland and buy a couple of HAM radios. They figured out how to mod them and showed me how to take over the drive-thrus at local fast food restaurants. Another friend got involved and decided to go big with the credit card fraud. It wasn't long before we were driving through neighborhoods late at night, the backseat covered in a mountain of stolen mail. We'd sort through the pile looking for credit cards or gas cards, tossing the rest off a cliff or into the trash. We'd hit the malls and radio shack, buying radios, cassette tapes, laptops, computer equipment. Before long my friend started taking it to the extreme. He bought a new muffler and a set of tires for his car, leaving a clear paper trail right back to him. The group got concerned and somehow decided the best approach would be to cut ties and turn him in. I got picked to make the call. The next thing I know I'm talking to a postal inspector and the secret service. We thought we could contain the damage but the next thing we knew most of the group was getting charged. The whole thing blew up in our faces and ended our fun. We were adults now, in a world that suddenly took our games seriously. There's not much to say beyond that. The group recovered individually and all got day jobs. It sucked at the time but the story might just have made it all worth it. Sorry if you ever got a strange call in the middle of the night, or had your mail go missing. After all that I managed to get an old 8088 with a 20GB(edit: oops MB) HDD from Boeing surplus and started my first BBS. I don't even remember the name now. I ran Gremcit and had a small collection of users. It was tough to compete with the multiline systems at that point. I ended up taking my 56k modem back to Newegg and used the money to buy my first car. After that I found myself at college with a real connection to the internet. I've searched around since but I've never found anything that compares to the world I knew over a modem. I know the internet has an underbelly and a similar world still exists, so I guess I'm the one that changed. Maybe one day I'll fire up a port scanner and see what's out there, but after having been through the legal system I'm too scared to do anything that seems remotely illegal online. Here's to all the kids who are too young to fear, poking at the soft side of the world wide web.