L0pht

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L0pht Heavy Industries
LHI Logo
Origin	Boston, Massachusetts
Country	United States
Years active	1992–2000
Category	hacker think tank
Founder(s)	Count Zero White Knight Brian Oblivion Golgo 13
Product(s)	L0phtCrack
Affiliated Group(s)	CULT OF THE DEAD COW
Website(s)	Main Site
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L0pht Heavy Industries (pronounced "loft") was a famous hacker collective located in the Boston, Massachusetts area between 1992 and 2000.

1 Name
2 History
3 Products
4 Members
5 External links
6 References

[edit] Name

The "Ø" in its name represents a zero, recalling the slashed zeroes that were used on old teletypewriters and still in some character mode OSs, so its normal on-line name, including its domain name, is "l0pht" (with a zero), not "lopht" (with an O) or "lØpht" (with a Nordic slashed letter O), which at that time would not have been a valid domain name. The original idea for the name was simple "Lopht" (without a 0), however another member of the Boston hacker scene, Majikthys, suggested a 0 replace the o, and the idea was swiftly adopted.^{[citation needed]}

Along with the significance of the "Ø", the name was not without meaning. Some of the founding members of the L0pht shared a common loft apartment space in Boston, from where they inter-connected and experimented with their own personal computers as well as equipment purchased from the Flea at MIT, and items garnished from dumpster diving local places of interest.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] History

The L0pht was founded in 1992 in the Boston area as a location for its members to store their computer hardware and work on various projects.^[1] In time, the L0pht members quit their day jobs to form a business venture, named L0pht Heavy Industries. This hacker think tank released several security advisories and produced some widely-used software tools, like L0phtCrack (a password cracker for Windows NT).^[2]

On May 19 1998, all seven members of the L0pht (Brian Oblivion, Kingpin, Mudge, Space Rogue, Stefan Von Neumann, John Tan, Weld Pond) famously testified before the Congress of the United States that they could shut down the entire Internet in 30 minutes.^[3]

In January 2000, L0pht Heavy Industries merged with the startup @stake, completing the L0pht's slow transition from an underground organization into an above ground "whitehat" computer security company.^[4]

Symantec announced its acquisition of @stake on September 16, 2004, and completed the transaction on October 8 of that year.^[5]

On March 14, 2008, several members of L0pht sat down at a panel together for a standing room only group of InfoSec professionals at SOURCE:Boston. Present were Weld Pond, John Tan, Mudge, Space Rogue, Silicosis and Dildog. ^[6]

[edit] Products

As the L0pht occupied a physical space it had real expenses such as electricity, phone, Internet access, and rent. Early in the L0pht's history these costs were evenly divided amongst the L0pht members.^{[citation needed]} In fact, originally the L0pht shared a space with a hat-making business run by the spouses of Brian Oblivion and Count Zero, and the rental cost was divided between these.^{[citation needed]} This was soon subsidized by profits made from selling old hardware at the monthly MIT electronic flea market during the summer.^{[citation needed]}

Occasionally shell accounts were offered for low cost on the L0pht.com server to select individuals; while these individuals had access to the L0pht.com server they were not members of the L0pht. One of the first tangible products sold for profit by the L0pht was a POCSAG decoder kit. The kit was sold in both kit and assembled form. The Whacked Mac Archives was transferred to CD-ROM for sale which was soon followed by CD copies of the Black Crawling System Archives. The command line version of L0phtCrack (the password cracker for Windows NT) was given away but the GUI version was sold as a commercial product. This was followed by the creation of the Hacker News Network website to host advertisements. Even with all of these various income sources the L0pht barely broke even. Eventually the L0pht started doing custom security coding for companies like NFR.^[7]

[edit] Members

Brian Oblivion, Count Zero, Dildog, Golgo 13, John Tan, "Kingpin", Mudge, Silicosis, "Space Rogue", Stefan Von Neuman, Weld Pond, White Knight ^[8]

[edit] External links

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