The history of hacking and the computer underground

As is always the case, it is important to understand the history of hacking in order to understand the present and the future. Modern hacker culture came about as the result of the combination of two separate movements. First, the term hacker in its present sense surfaced at MIT in the late 1950’s into the 1960’s in which it originally referred to students who built model train switching and power systems. They invented their own words and a “hack” was a feat that must be imbued with innovation, style, and technical virtuosity. Thus hackers were some of the more productive people on the team. These same students who were interested in the electronics of model railroading, soon turned their attention to programming computers. Not long after, the students were using the term hacker in conjunction with computers. A new subculture soon sprang up with its own Hacker Ethic: “Access to computers and anything which might teach you something about the way the world works should be unlimited and total. Always yield to the hands on imperative”.
The second movement that modern day hackers can trace their origins to is the 1970’s hippie anarchist movement known as Yippies. One of the most famous Yippies was Abbie Hoffman. Yippies liked to get many things for free or “ripping off”, such as electricity, gas, and especially phone service. In 1971, Youth International Party line (or YIPL), a Yippie newsletter, began being published. It was designed to spread these rip off techniques. Al Bell, one of the publishers of YIPL, dropped out of the Yippie movement and changed the name of the newsletter to TAP or technical assistance program. The newsletter soon became filled with articles about telephone switches and computers, even including reproduced Bell System’s manuals. With these manuals, hackers can get an understanding for how systems work and where the exploits are. This still holds true today.
The MIT Hacker movement and the Yippie movement seem to have converged into a new generation of hackers in the early 1980’s. The primarily catalysts were Bulletin Board Systems and a movie. To Internet users who never knew life before instant messaging and the world wide web, Bulletin Board Systems or BBSes, may sound very foreign. A BBS is a computer which serves as an information and messaging center for users dialing-up over the phone lines. These types of BBSes were first designed in 1978 and by 1985, there was an estimated 4000 boards in the U.S. Boards could be accessed from across the country and allowed users to play games and more importantly chat, use message boards, and share files and even email. It is on these boards that many of today’s computer underground norms, customs, and values were forged through the various forms of interaction offered. The use of pseudonyms, hacker groups, zines, misspelling of words, jargon, etc. all owe their growth in popularity to the BBS days. Although there were a decent amount of BBSes catering to the computer underground, the explosive growth can be directly linked to the 1983 release of the movie War Games. In the movie, the main character played by Matthew Broderick, uses a computer with a modem to randomly dial phone numbers to find various computer systems from boards to companies to the military. In fact, the use of an auto dialer program in this fashion became known as a war dialer, after the title of the movie. After the release of the movie, many soon to be computer hackers purchased a modem for their computer and soon either got in touch with an underground board or created their own.
Over the next ten or so years, the use of BBSes by all types of computer users would continue to grow. Also, the number of computer underground boards, groups, and zines would grow as well. Zines such as Phrack became an important method for these groups to compile their knowledge and thoughts and spread it to users across the country. The design of BBSes encouraged these files to spread. Some BBSes were connected to each other through networks such as Fidonet or a user would simply download files from one BBS and upload it to another, to “share the knowledge”. BBS time was usually limited because it could only handle a small amount of users once. Thus, users who max out their daily or weekly allotment on one could go to another. Upload/Download ratios, which only allowed downloads after a certain amount of files or bytes were uploaded, also helped increase the spread of information. This period of time saw some interesting events such as Operation Sundevil and other high profile hacker arrests (which were detailed in Bruce Sterling’s the Hacker Crackdown), the first Internet worm, and the MOD-LOD wars. These times, at least part of them, are seen as the golden era of hacking by many. The underground would truly be underground until the mid 90’s.
America Online started to gain popularity in the mid 90’s especially among people into warez. America Online made it easy, but expensive, for anyone to gain access to the Internet and more importantly with AOL, chatrooms. On these chatrooms, AOL seemed to have freely permitted the exchange of warez and much more illegal activity. The warez scene became very popular especially because little knowledge was needed. You went into a chatroom where someone was running a bot (a program) that mailed out files to everyone that typed in a trigger such as “123” or “give me warez”. Within a few minutes, the bot sent out a mass mailing to everyone who signed up and dozens of free programs were now in your mailbox. However, not just content with downloading warez, users wanted to cause havoc and in late 1994, a person named ‘Da Chronic’ created a program called AO Hell. This allowed people to create fake AOL accounts, use macro’s in chat rooms, and use other features to annoy or even kick off or “punt” users.
Now these warez users were starting to like the feeling of “hacking” other users on AOL, even though most self-respecting hackers disdained such “lame” computer users. Aside from pornography, the Internet was dominated by hacker websites, in which, like BBSes, they shared their libraries of text files, zines, and programs. Some sites catered to H/P/V/A/C or hacking, phreaking, viruses, anarchy, and cracking. These sites also helped to turn some users who were initially seeking keys to unlock software or a textfile on pipebombs to learn about hacking and phreaking. Soon thereafter in 1995, the movie Hackers came out in theaters. The movie glamorized, hyped and over simplified some hacking methods and made hacking look “cool”. While the hacking underground may have had mixed feelings about the movie, if not total hatred, it spawned countless numbers of “zero cool” wannabees, referring to the main character’s pseudonym.
The hacking underground, already dealing with an influx of warez doodz and zero cools, was dealt a major blow in late 1996 when America Online offered unlimited access for $19.95 compared with the previous allotment of only 20 hours for the same price. This allowed warez doodz, zero cool wannabees and many other types to explore everything the Internet had to offer, including hacking and phreaking. In the past, hackers as a whole were intelligent because it generally required a degree of intelligence to even want a computer, understand how to use it, and then find your way onto a bulletin board and be able to hold your own with this new underground society. Now, understanding the complexities of the computer on switch, the mouse and the keyboard was all that was needed to find your way to a search engine which would eventually put you in touch with all the text files and hacker programs you need, without understanding the methods behind any of it.
The last ten years hasn’t been all bad though. The hacker underground has evolved and become more diverse, hence the term computer underground. Children, students, hobbyists and professionals are now interested in various computer underground topics and individual communities have sprung up to support them. Specifically with the hacking community, some of the older hackers who started in the early 80’s and stuck with it, have found lucrative jobs in computer security firms. Wi-Fi and Linux have created new frontiers for the computer underground to explore. While the quality of 2600 magazine has declined, the publishers have become more political and have started a radio show called “Off the Hook”. Hackers have also been increasingly meeting face to face at local 2600 meetings, which have been around for some time but have seen an increase in the number of meetings in the last decade. Conferences or “Cons” such as the annual Defcon’s and the HOPE con’s put on every few years in New York by 2600, have become very popular.
Unlike the mid 90’s, the pendulum may be swinging the other way. The hackers of today and tomorrow may be smarter than the hackers of the early 80’s. Classes in school and camps in the summer are exposing children to computers and even advanced topics such as computer programming as early as five or six years old. Spam, terrorism, the fight against illegal music downloading, child pornography and fraudsters all have pushed hackers aside from their role as enemy number one on the Internet. When a hacker-type crime does occur, it becomes lost in this sea of other crime that dominates the Internet in terms of frequency and importance