Computers, Hackers, And Phreaks Essay, Research Paper

The Internet is a wondrous place. Practically

anything you could ever want is

available on the Net. It’s like a big

city, it has the highly prestigious areas, and the

sex-ridden slums (Mitchell). It has the

upstanding citizens, and it has the criminals.

On the Net, crime is more abundant than

in a large city, though, mainly because of

the difficulties in tracking and prosecuting

offenders. Even from its beginnings, the

Internet has always been a battlefield

between phreaks and administrators.

The Internet hasn’t always been a

public forum. In fact, the Internet has

been around for years. The Internet is

just a new fad (Larson). The Internet

originally began as DARPANET, a government-created

network, which was

designed for defense communications. The

Net structure is such that it could

survive a nuclear war (Mitchell). The

creation of the Net can not be blamed for the

existence of hackers though, hackers are

older than the Net itself, but the Net is the

largest ‘hacker haven’ today (Spencer).

The growth of the Net since its creation

has been nothing less than astounding.

In the 25-plus years since its creation, the

Net now has over thirty million users

using four million sites world wide.

Estimates rate the growth of the Net anywhere

from ten to fifteen percent per

month (Spencer). The Internet was

first released to major universities in the

United States of America. Since then,

the universities have offered connections to

small business, service providers, and

even to the individual user. Sometimes these

connections cost a fortune, and sometimes

they can be obtained for free (Larson).

Although some of the original universities

have dropped off the Net for various

reasons, every major university in the

United States, and now, most others in the

world, have a connection to the Internet

(Quittner).

Although it isn’t easy for an individual

to get a direct connection to the Net,

many private institutions are getting

direct access. This is mainly due to the fact

that in order to support the very high

speed of the Net, a fast computer is needed

and a fast connection. A fast computer

can cost in the thousands of dollars, at

least, and a quick connection can cost

hundreds dollars or more. Individuals can

still get on the Net through these private

institutions. The private institution

spoon-feeds the Net to the slower computers

over their delayed connection lines

(Jones). The Internet began very

high-class, due to the fact that only super

intelligent college students and professors

could access it. The discussions tended

to stay intellectual, with very little,

if any, disturbance (Larson). However,

relatively recent changes in the availability

of the Net have changed that

atmosphere. Now, almost anyone can access

the Internet. Internet access is offered

by every major online service (Himowitz).

The fact that the major online services

charge for their use keeps many people

away from them. Those people simply

turn to public dial-ups, which are free

connections offered by universities that are

available to the general public (Spencer).

Because accessing the Net is easier,

and a lot more people are doing it,

naturally the amount of information on

the Net is increasing at the same rate, if not

faster. In what is often referred to by

Net users as the Resource Explosion, the

amount of information circulating the

Internet has increased with the number of

users (Jones). Of all the other

factors contributing to the large percent of online

crimes, perhaps the most influential is

the design structure of the Internet. Experts

agree that the underlying structure with

no central hub, where each computer is

equally powerful, gives unchecked power

to the undeserving (Miller). The design

also makes controlling the frequency of

break-ins almost impossible as well. Both

politicians and so-called ‘experts’ believe

the Internet as a whole will be regulated

in the next five years. Hackers disagree,

using the arguments that the Internet was

designed to be uncontrollable, that the

basic structure doesn’t support regulation

(Banja). In a network run by its users,

which is designed to be impervious to

attack, not even the government has much

muscle there. In fact, the Internet is one

of the few places that the government

has little power. Because the Net is

international, any regulations forced

upon domestic computer users can be

circumvented by routing through an overseas

computer(Savage). The government

doesn’t have the power to completely shut

down the Net. In order to do that, every

one of the millions of computers on the

Net must be disconnected. Even if only

two remain, the Net will continue to exist

(Miller).

The ease of adding something to the

Net is also a factor preventing the total

regulation of the Net. A new site can

be added to the Net in a matter of seconds,

and can be removed just as quickly. It

takes authorities considerable time to trace a

connection back to it’s physical address,

and if it disappears, it makes tracking it all

that more difficult. (Johnson) Once a

resource becomes widespread, removing it

from the Internet is almost impossible.

Each site that has the resource must be

found and the resources moved. If even

one site has the resource, it can spread to

cover the Net easily (Himowitz).

Some computer criminals go by the term

?Phreaks?, or ?Hackers.? With all

these things leaving the Internet open to

?phreaking?, is it any wonder that so

many computer law breakers exist? The

United States government has all of its

computer systems on the Internet, yet many

universities have better security than

the government computers containing

confidential information (Spencer). A

majority of break-ins occur in university

computers, mainly because of the stiff

penalties for being caught in a government

computer (Fisher). Over 10,000 break-ins

that have occurred in recent months are

blamed on The Posse, a group of young

phreaks (Quittner). If break-ins are done

on universities, then how secure are the

government’s secrets?

Both hackers and phreakers tend to

stay away from heavy-duty government

hacking, though. Exploring innocently

and generally harmless pranks are done the

most, and many hacks/phreaks don’t limit

themselves to the Internet, or even to a

computer (Spencer). The next step up for

a good computer hack/phreak is to ‘field

phreaking’, which covers many various

activities, but mainly using telephone

company boxes to make free calls and other

various things, but most field

phreaking is somehow technically related

to their computer skills (Jackson). Field

phreaking does happen, and it does happen

quite a lot. For example, when two

bachelors rented a billboard in hopes

of finding a mate, a phreak broke into their

voice mail box and changed the message

to a “‘perverted’ sexually suggestive

message” (Jones) More recently,

a hacker obtained tens of thousands of

passwords using a Trojan horse program,

which records the first 128 keystrokes

when someone connects to the Internet.

These 128 keystrokes normally contain the

user’s name and their password (Himowitz).

Kevin Lee Poulsen was featured on

Unsolved Mysteries in 1991 for charges

including tampering with the telephone

network and stealing government

documents, all via computer. Because of

this appearance, he was captured by two

bag-boys in a Hughes Supermarket who saw

his picture on the show (Fisher).

Tonya Harding’s E-mail in the Olympic

computers was “open to the public since

she never changed her password from it’s

default, 1112, which corresponds to her

birthday, December 11th” (Nevius).

Mark Abene, whom many believe to be the

greatest phreak ever, who is known online

as Phiber Optik, was sentenced to one

year in prison, a stiff punishment for

his charge of breaking into a telephone

network (Johnson). Although the

job is hard, there are groups devoted to stopping

violations committed online. One such

group, the Computer Emergency Response

Team, or CERT, a government-funded team

at Carnegie-Mellon University gives

advisories and support to systems that

have been broken into or are at risk of being

broken into (Mitchell). Another

method of preventing break-ins are new security

measures. Almost every day, another operating

system or communication protocol

comes out which covers holes found in

previous copies of the software. This is

good as a temporary solution, but as soon

as the new software comes out, a new

hole is found and the game continues (Larson).

Stopping computer hacking is probably

impossible, although undoubtedly

stopping hacking altogether is impossible.

Why? Because many professionals

spend millions of dollars to prevent break-ins,

but smaller systems don’t spend

anything. Free security will never be

able to hold everyone out. FtS Productions

said it best in “Avoiding Detection”:

“Free Security?You get what you pay for.”