Great Hacker War

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The Great Hacker War was a 1990–1991 conflict between twenty or so hacker groups, the two most prominent being the Masters of Deception (MOD) and a faction of the older guard hacker group Legion of Doom (LOD). Each side attempted to hack the other's computers across Internet, X.25, and telephone networks around the world.

Contents 1 Timeline 1.1 Prologue 1.2 Event One 1.3 Event Two 1.4 Event Three 1.5 Event Four 1.6 Epilogue 2 Background 2.1 Legion of Doom 2.2 Masters of Deception 3 See also 4 External links 5 References

[edit] Timeline

The Great Hacker War escalated in the space of only a few days with a series of four key events.

[edit] Prologue

It is important to note that the Great Hacker War was not limited to LoD and MoD, but involved twenty or so Hacker Groups, including Extasyy Elite, Fargo 4A, IBM Syndicate, Metal Communications, The Administration, The Nihilist Order, and The P.H.I.R.M. Tensions between these groups had been building as early as 1984, and hundreds of BBS boards were involved as the war played itself out.

[edit] Event One

The Great Hacker War began with the closing of an invite-only bulletin board called "Fifth Amendment", whose participants were some of the most successful hackers the world had ever seen and, curiously, invited members of Federal Enforcement Agencies. It was run by members of the newly reformed LOD under the leadership of Chris Goggans ("Erik Bloodaxe") and Loyd Blankenship ("The Mentor").

The closing of the board had been blamed on John Lee ("Corrupt") of the MOD in a cryptic message left to users. Lee had posted messages on the board prior to its closing warning users that the board was a honeypot, and pointed out that Chris Goggans (LOD) had been raided, but had not been charged or sent to jail--a common occurrence for individuals who become informants in government investigations, in order to continue their illegal activities.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Event Two

A few prank phone calls to the home number of the new LOD upset Goggans and prompted him to put out a call to find the personal information of the members of the MOD. Peacemakers intervened and a conference call was arranged on an unnamed RBOC telephone bridge in the Midwest. As members of the MOD silently joined the conference call, they overheard the members of the LOD using racial slurs to describe the ethnicity of members of the MOD. The peace conference quickly degenerated into threats and prank calls to members of the LOD, whose personal information had already been uncovered by the MOD.

[edit] Event Three

A last-minute, late-night peace talk was held between Chris Goggans (LOD) and Mark Abene ("Phiber Optik") of MOD. Unknown to Goggans, John Lee ("Corrupt") was listening in on three-way. Goggans became angry that Abene would not fulfill his numerous demands for the personal information of MOD members, and for the MOD's hacking information that he considered the property of LOD.

Goggans shouted loudly into the phone that Abene would be sorry for consorting with "niggers", "spics", and "white trash". Abene refused to meet Goggans's demands, and Goggans hung up. That night, prank phone calls began to Abene's house and a call went out to the hacker underworld putting a bounty on the heads of MOD members.

[edit] Event Four

The members of the MOD decided to "listen in" on Chris Goggans's phone calls to determine his true motives. Using the undocumented remote headset feature on a DMS-100 phone switch local to Goggans, the MOD overheard what they had suspected in during Event 1. Goggans, Scott Chasin ("Doc Holiday"), and Jake Kenyon Shulman ("Malefactor") had decided to form a security company called ComSec, feeling that by turning over the Fifth Amendment bulletin board to the FBI and other federal agencies, and by reporting on activities of known hackers (especially their archenemy MOD), they would be able to secure government contracts. They would also contact all the companies that had been mentioned on Fifth Amendment and gain contracts with them by mentioning any exploits or weaknesses that had been discussed or theorized about on the board. The MOD attempted to go public with the information that had been found during this phone call, but it fell on deaf ears as the LOD name was well respected in the hacker community.

These events led the MOD's core members to the conclusion that only a "Great Hacker War" could expose the weakness and true duplicitious intent of Chris Goggans and the LOD, and on that day the war began in earnest. The war saw battles take place across networks around the world, by the MoD, LoD, and their allied groups.

One key factor that led to the attrition of the LOD's resources in the war was that the MOD (and allied groups) had usurped control of all telephone, X.25, and TCP/IP entry points in Texas, where most LOD members were located. Using these monitoring techniques, the MOD slowly took away all access to systems under LOD control and made them their own.

[edit] Epilogue

The war subsided after a swift defeat of the LOD. The MOD continued to operate underground with increased power using the resources usurped from the LOD, but their message of LOD's true intentions went mostly ignored by the general hacking community. The MOD's higher profile after their victory brought notoriety in the press^{[citation needed]}, but their growing fame in turn increased monitoring from federal authorities, which would lead to their eventual downfall.

ComSec was still formed, but folded shortly thereafter from a public scandal involving the social engineering of rival firms for their rates and services, which made it difficult for the fledgling firm to secure contracts. Jake Kenyon Shulman ("Malefactor"), a founding member of ComSec and a member of the faction of LOD involved in the Great Hacker War, later told Mark Abene ("Phiber Optik") that he was uncomfortable with Chris Goggans's habitual practice of informing on active hackers^{[verification needed]}, mostly underage kids, by gaining their trust via the LOD name.

[edit] Background

[edit] Legion of Doom

See Legion of Doom.

[edit] Masters of Deception

See Masters of Deception.

[edit] See also

• Masters of Deception - One side of the Great Hacker War
• Legion of Doom - One side of the Great Hacker War
• Chris Goggans ("Erik Bloodaxe") - of note, his involvement with Nahshon Even-Chaim.
• Mark Abene ("Phiber Optik") - A member of the MOD
• Nahshon Even-Chaim ("Phoenix") - A well respected hacker whose bust may have been directly caused by his association with Chris Goggans^{[verification needed]}

[edit] External links

• modbook4.txt — The Book of MOD: Part Four: End of '90-'1991

[edit] References

• The Masters of Deception: The Gang that Ruled Cyberspace (ISBN 0-06-092694-5)
• "Gang War in Cyberspace." Wired 2.12 [1]
• "Notorious M.O.D." Wired 9.06 [2]