This is Part 2 in the Into to Hacking series. Check out Part 1 for additional hacker stories and come back soon for a more technical look at common hacking methods.
Phone Phreaks
Some of the earliest hackers were phone phreaks, dating all the way back to the 1950’s – they took advantage of their knowledge of how phone systems work to do some pretty cool things.
Switch-hooking: making outgoing phone calls by rapidly picking up and hanging up the phone (5-10 times a second) to mimic a rotary dial. If you were good enough you could impress your friends by dialing without pressing any numbers!
Tone dialing: certain tones were used by the phone company which had a specific meaning to the call routing system, such as 2600 Hz to designate that a call was over. This knowledge could be exploited to provide free long-distance and international calls. It was first discovered in 1957 by a seven-year old blind kid with perfect pitch – he whistled the fourth E above middle C (2600 Hz) while on the phone and the call abruptly ended. The legendary John Draper also discovered that the free whistles in Cap’n Crunch cereal boxes also made the same tone (hence his nickname Captain Crunch), while still others used exotic birds or learned the distinct whistle themselves.
Blue boxes: as the systems became more complex, so did the hackers’ techniques. Blue boxes were fairly simple contraptions built to take advantage of some of the phreak knowledge and caught the attention of the young Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs. As you might expect, Woz was the main engineer and Stevie wanted to sell them and dominate the world. One famous demo of their device involved Woz calling the Pope pretending to be Harry Kissinger …
Free Porsche!
Radio stations love giving things away – in the early 90’s the radio station I grew up listening to, KIIS-FM in Los Angeles, ran a “Win a Porsche by Friday” where they gave away a new Porsche to the 102nd caller. Kevin Poulsen wasn’t about to leave it up to chance though – he used his incredibly deep knowledge of the switch networks of Pacific Bell to his advantage. He simply blocked the radio station’s 25 phone lines from everyone but himself. I would love to hear a recording of his fake excitement when he found out he won!
Half Life 2
The original Half Life computer game was an unbelievably huge success. So naturally the development company, Valve Corporation, immediately started working on a second version. But it wasn’t going smoothly – almost 5 years later they still weren’t even close to releasing the game, and it was about to get much worse. An 18 year-old fan of the game was so curious about the upcoming sequel, he hacked into the company to find out as much as he could. Curious as a cat, he made the mistake of downloading all the source code … and then he shared it with some friends, who then shared it with a few more, and before he knew what happened, anyone in the world could download the source code on the internet or popular file share programs. Oops!
Stuxnet
Stuxnet was a computer worm that ran wild last year. But that isn’t quite enough to get a mention in this article. This worm was unlike any before it – it specifically attacked industrial equipment and the target was Iran. The belief is that its actual target was a little more specific than the country: Iranian uranium enrichment facilities!
The worm was incredibly sophisticated. So sophisticated that it is believed it could only come from a group of hackers with explicit government support (Israel is the number one suspect). What made it so sophisticated? It used an unprecedented 4 zero-day attacks on Windows! A zero-day attack takes advantage of an unknown software bug – these can often be exploited by viruses and the exploit can sell on the black market for up to a hundred thousand dollars. Thus, the hackers could take advantage of the vulnerability before even Microsoft knew about it (day 0) which gave them a large head start. Then multiply that times 4.
It also used two other methods that were brand new: sticking an infected flash drive into the computer would automatically install the rootkit with actual signatures stolen from separate companies (rather than creating their own fake signature). The ultimate goal? To vary the frequency on specific centrifuges used to produce enriched uranium for nuclear bombs and do it in an undetected fashion.
In the past year numerous security experts have examined Stuxnet and the more they find out, the more impressive it is. As many as 30 programmers are believed to have written it due to the multiple programming styles. And its also suspected that the payload and the delivery mechanism were created by different countries due to their different approaches. Was this is the first documented example of cyber warfare? Was it created by the United States? Check out this Vanity Fair article for an excellent synopsis.