The Urvile, though, was less sanguine. In a message to Black ICE, he reported having received a phone call from someone named Mike Dawson, who claimed to be a special agent with the Secret Service, telling him that "We'll be visiting you tomorrow." The Urvile thought the voice sounded too young for a Secret Service agent; he was also bothered that Mike didn't know his address or last name.
"Are your parents going to be home tomorrow between two and three?" Mike persisted.
"Gee, I guess so."
His parents probably would be home, he thought--but at their home, not his. The Urvile, at the time, was a university student and lived in his own apartment. When he asked if the agent knew how old he was, Mike answered, "All will be made apparent tomorrow.
The next day the Urvile removed all his notes and files, just in case. But the Secret Service never appeared. "I'm betting five to one odds that it's DPAC, and I don't like it one bit," he said.
Ordinarily the Urvile's concerns could be dismissed as just another bout of hacker paranoia. But by 1989 the LoD had become involved in a "hacker war" with DPAC and MoD--a fight for control of Cyberspace, over phone lines and computer tworks, with threatening messages left on bulletin boards or swering machines. In one case, an LoD member who worked (somewhat incongruously) for a telephone company's security department found taunting messages on his computer terminal at work. On a more serious level, there were attempts to reprogram switches to land opponents with astronomical phone bills; there was one instance of breaking into a credit bureau to destroy a gang member's credit rating. But while the three gangs were squabbling among themselves, the biggest crackdown on hacking in the United States had just begun.
The catalyst was an anonymous phone call to an unlisted residential number in Indianapolis at eight P.M. on June 29, 1989.
As security manager for Indiana Bell, Robert S. was accustomed to anonymous calls: he was a prime target for hackers attempting to impress him with their ability to break into his system and find his home number. And the caller this night didn't seem much different from the others. He sounded like a young man trying to seem older, his voice a mix of swagger and menace. The caller presented his credentials by repeating Robert's credit history to him--which meant only that the anonymous hacker could also break into credit bureau computers.
"Tell you something else, Bob--you don't mind if I call you Bob, do you? I'll tell you, somebody like me who really knows the phone systems could really fuck things up. I mean I could put your 5ESS's into an endless loop. You know what I mean? You know what that would do?"
The 5ESS's were a type of electronic switching system. There were hundreds in Indiana Bell, thousands around the country. An endless loop is caused by changing the coding of the switch so that it no longer puts forward calls. The calls instead just loop around the switch, like a record needle caught in the same groove. The result would be paralysis: no calls from the switch could get out.
"It could cause a lot of problems. Is that what you're threatening?"
"Sort of. But I've made it better than that. I've planted computer bombs in some of the 5ESS's--time bombs--they're going to fuck up your switches. The game is to see if you can find them before they go off. And all I'm going to tell you about them is that they're programmed to blow on a national holiday. They could be anywhere in the country--it's sort of a competition, a security test, it'll give you something interesting to do for a change. You know what I mean?"
The line went dead. Of all the hacker calls Robert had received--most a mix of braggadocio and hubris--this was one of the few he would think of as threatening.
The threat was the bomb--a piece of computer programming, probably only a short program, that would be hidden among the thousands of instructions on any 5ESS switch, anywhere in the country. A computer bomb is a one-shot explosion. It could throw a switch into an endless loop, it could overload the system--or, indeed, it could create havoc by releasing a self-replicating program such as a worm, which would move through the network, knocking out switch after switch.
In a nightmare scenario the country could effectively be closed down for days, leaving its citizens with no means of communication and cut off from emergency fire, police, and ambulance services. The cost in terms of lives would be unthinkable and the revenue losses would be incalculable: crime would soar and businesses could be forced to shut down.
