GANG WAR IN CYBERSPACE
                                       
   An anonymous member of the Legion of Doom calls a member of the
   Masters of Deception a "nigger"- and in the loose-knit hacker
   underground, nothing is the same again.
   
   By Michelle Slatalla and Joshua Quittner
     _________________________________________________________________
   
   
   
   The whole story starts in 1989, months before the Martin Luther King
   Day crash of AT&T, months before Mark Abene and Paul Stira even know
   each other's names. The whole mess, which will grow into a world-class
   electronic gang war fought by hackers from New York City to Texas,
   starts back before Paul even knows what a switch is.
   
   If you want to trace it to one night, to one single instant when you
   can say the whole story really begins, you will see this image: Paul
   in the dark, peering into a garbage dumpster.
   
   The early summer evening is warm on his skin when Paul Stira, 19,
   leans over the edge of the dumpster as far as he can. This is one way
   to become a computer hacker. It's the way Paul has chosen. He tries to
   snare one of the five or six invitingly swollen bags that sit in the
   bottom of the dumpster. It's not enough to be 6 feet tall, because
   Paul still can't reach the bags, not until his stomach becomes the
   fulcrum for his body and his feet actually leave solid earth. He
   dangles, the blood rushes to his head, he gets dizzy. And yet there's
   nowhere he'd rather be than here, climbing around in this dark alley
   in a dumpster full of phone company trash, looking for computer
   printouts.
   
   He came for the documents. But he also came for adventure. Right after
   scarfing down a quick supper earlier in the evening, Paul mumbled
   goodbye to his mom, who was still getting used to the fact that his
   dad had all of a sudden died. Then he hopped a bus to the end of the
   line. He got off in Jamaica, Queens, at Parsons Boulevard and Hillside
   Avenue, an intersection in a neighborhood hot with bodegas, bars, and
   beeper-rental joints. He stood for a while, afloat in the dwindling
   stream of commuters flowing from the subway. And then, a black Supra
   full of teenagers pulled up to the curb, and the dark-eyed guy driving
   checked him out, smiled. Paul got in.
   
   "Let's go trashing," somebody in the back seat said. "There's a C.O.
   in Astoria." Paul finds it cool to be talking in a kind of hackers'
   code. The word "trashing" means climbing around in garbage, where you
   hope to find computer printouts that list secret passwords and logons.
   And C.O., as everybody in the Supra knows, means central office. As in
   New York Telephone's central office, in Astoria, Queens. Somebody
   broke out the Ballantines and the Olde English 800s, and Paul took
   one. He knew only one of the other guys in the car - his best friend,
   who calls himself Hac. Until tonight, Paul had never physically met
   the driver, Eli Ladopoulos. But he had known him by his handle: Acid
   Phreak.
   
   They reach Astoria, and even the building itself thrills Paul: this
   big, filthy, red-brick monster takes up most of the block. Across the
   front, chiseled over the door, it reads "Telephone Building." Like on
   a board game or something. Does the park across the street have a big
   sign that says "Park" over it? No way. This building was built back
   when there was only one telephone company, Ma Bell.
   
   They sidle up to it. There are bars on all the two-story windows and
   through them, a vast, loftlike, fluorescent-washed space. Imagine a
   library, hushed and eerie, but instead of books, all the shelves are
   filled from floor to ceiling with rack after rack of circuit boards.
   That's called the frame. There are even rolling ladders, with signs
   that read, "Caution. Look up before climbing." Like what kind of
   doofus wouldn't look up before climbing?
   
   Upstairs in the building, connected to all those wires, is the switch.
   The switch is the biggest computer you ever saw, and its job is to
   control every phone line in Astoria. When a phone-company customer in
   an apartment over the Tae Kwon Do martial arts studio on 31st Street
   wants to order a pizza from around the corner, the phone call travels
   on copper cables to the switch, which funnels it to the pizza parlor's
   line. Multiply that by a couple-hundred thousand lines in this part of
   Queens, and millions of phone calls a day, and you see what we're
   dealing with.
   
   Now, if you or your friends knew how to program a switch, or even knew
   a password to log on to a switch, you could start exploring. Go deep
   enough, learn your way around, and you could be pretty powerful.
   Because then, you could control everybody's phone service. You could
   create an unbillable number for yourself or your friends. You could
   listen in on phone calls. And best of all, you'd really know how all
   this fabulously complex electronic circuitry works. That kind of
   omnipotence is beyond the ethical reach of the CEO of New York
   Telephone. But maybe not beyond the reach of some teenage hacker
   tenacious enough to scrounge around in the garbage until he finds a
   password.
   
   This alone makes the trip worthwhile. For a carload of teenage
   hackers, the opportunity to gawk through the big plate-glass windows
   at the matrix of electronic circuitry is better than being Dorothy at
   the gates to the Emerald City. These teenagers are not central
   casting's idea of computer nerds. Not a plastic pocket protector in
   the bunch, nobody squinting myopically through thick lenses. In fact,
   no one here wears glasses, and Paul and Hac, at least, are as muscled
   as the first-string running backs who graduated with them from high
   school last year. If they weren't so jumpy, they could toss around the
   30-pound bags like Nerf balls. Look at Paul - he's the pale silent
   one. He's always quiet in a crowd. Because he's a big kid, his silence
   is intimidating, whether he means it to be or not, as he stands
   staring with flat, Slavic eyes. Those eyes take in everything and
   return nothing. Eli is his physical opposite. He's the one the girls
   like, the hip-hop guy, the cool one. Eli has a slow smile that starts
   like a conspiracy and spreads up to his eyes and pulls you in. His
   eyes are black as blueberries. His hair is as black as his eyes.
   
   This is Paul's first time trashing, and frankly, if you knew him,
   you'd be shocked to see him here. He is, after all, the valedictorian
   of Thomas A. Edison High School's class of 1988. Winner of the
   all-city computer-programming competition. A boy with a future.
   
   They start going through the garbage. Paul hoists a bag over his
   shoulder, over his head, and hands it up to Hac. Then Hac hands it
   down to the sidewalk. That's the routine, with Eli playing lookout on
   the street below. But just as Hac's about to hand off the final bag, a
   man comes out of the telephone building and pauses a second longer
   than he should. Then he gets into a car, rolls down the windows, and
   just sits there. The boys freeze.
   
   "What's he doing?" Paul whispers.
   
   "I don't know. He's just sitting in his car."
   
   Paul and Hac stand there, crazed alley cats, backs high, ears cupped,
   tensed on tiptoes. And then the worst happens.
   
   In the distance, they hear a siren. It's not an ambulance, whose aural
   signature Paul would recognize. But it's definitely a siren, and it's
   getting louder. Closer. It's a banshee now, and it's just around the
   corner, and Paul, for one, has had it with the dumpster diving. He
   climbs over the fence, as fast as he can, and follows a retreating Hac
   to the sidewalk. The siren's just about upon them, and they dash madly
   across the street, bags in tow, past the guy who's sitting in the car,
   now wide-eyed, watching the kids come leaping over the fence. Their
   sneakers hit pavement, and with barely a second to spare, they dive
   into a dark, safe spot in the park.
   
   Just as a fire truck blazes past.
   
   They look at one another, their hearts pound. They can see the outline
   of the Triborough Bridge through the leafy trees. The green and white
   lights along its suspension beckon like a distant Ferris wheel, and
   it's an adventure again. They kneel on the handball court and rip the
   sacks open, and paper printouts spill like entrails. The night is hot
   and the streets are hopping and you can probably even see stars. They
   don't look up.
   
   A few days later, Eli and Paul haven't given up; they're in need of an
   expert who can help them really navigate the phone system's computers.
   Eli says, "I know this guy...."
   
   But it turns out that Eli is not talking about just any guy. This is
   the dude. Eli's talking about Phiber Optik, says he's even encountered
   Phiber while roaming through cyberspace. Eli's never met him in person
   (but then, who has?), but Eli knows enough about Phiber Optik to know
   that he's the man with the answers. He's in the Legion of Doom, isn't
   he? He's the gang's phone guy, for god's sake. The Legion's exploits
   are legendary. The Legion is rumored to know how to break into ongoing
   phone calls. The Legion is rumored to have hidden its own private
   bulletin boards inside corporate computer systems. The Legion's
   archives are rumored to be the repository for the best technical
   information in the underground.
   
   Paul doesn't know anybody in the Legion of Doom, doesn't even know
   who's in it - though he's heard of the gang founded by a notorious
   hacker named Lex Luthor. Eli says that if Phiber Optik got into the
   Legion of Doom, then Phiber Optik must be good. You have to be a
   little brave to even suggest calling a guy like that. You have to be
   pretty sure of yourself, not afraid at all that the guy is going to
   hang up on you, or worse, listen to what you say and then ridicule
   you. You have to have a lot of confidence in yourself.
   
   "Let's call him," Eli says.
   
   Paul says OK.
   
   What do you want?" the voice demands. "I'm Phiber Optik of the LOD."
   
   If you heard it, you'd think it was the Wizard of Oz himself, standing
   behind his curtain and making steam hiss and fires roar. Phiber Optik
   of the LOD. Both Paul and Eli hear it, the outrage in the thunderous
   voice that has answered the phone.
   
   Now, Eli once "met" Phiber Optik on a bulletin board. But that's
   little comfort now, not with a real live member of the Legion of Doom
   on the other end of the phone, thundering and aggressive. A guy like
   that doesn't like you, he can turn you into a toad - or at least turn
   your home phone into a pay phone. Every hacker has heard the stories,
   heard of some poor rodent whose mom picks up the phone in the kitchen
   to call Linda next door and instead of a reassuring tone hears the
   recording, "Please deposit 25 cents." Explain that to your mom. Not
   that Phiber's response is totally unexpected. How does he know that
   he's not talking to a couple of lame wannabes on the phone? He gets
   these calls all the time. Ever since word spread that he's in the
   Legion of Doom, his phone number has been disseminated in the
   underground.
   
   What do Eli and Paul want of Phiber? It's obvious. They heard he was
   the dude who was into phone company switches. But that's the simple
   answer. They really want much more, don't they? They want him to teach
   them not only about the phone system, but also about all the
   sophisticated computers he's cracked, about the rare commands he can
   type, about the way his mind works. They want what any two boys with a
   little knowledge and a great curiosity want. They want a leader to
   show them the way.
   
   Phiber loves to teach. "You want to get together?" he asks.
   
   And Paul thinks, Who is this guy?
   
   They soon learn Phiber's real name: Mark Abene.
   
   There are wannabe cyber gangs, and then there are real cyber gangs,
   whose members crow and scrawl their proud graffiti over electronic
   bulletin boards. No gang is more real, more revered, than the Legion
   of Doom. Its founder is the legendary Lex Luthor - a mysterious leader
   who lives somewhere in the Sork really did know as much as people had been
   saying, maybe more. This guy was good.
   
   The actual vote came a few weeks later. Mark was in.
   
   Just like any schoolyard pack of boys born in the shadow of The Dirty
   Dozen, Hogan's Heroes, and Mission Impossible, the LOD members all
   fancy themselves specialists in some dark art. One kid might know how
   to make a wicked blue box, a device cobbled together from top-secret
   Radio Shack parts that simulates the tones of coins dropping into a
   pay phone. Another might be an expert in programming Basic. And Mark?
   He can trace the route of a phone call from New York to Paris,
   detailing in loving techno-babble each photonic hop. He can describe,
   in detail, the different kinds of computers that run different aspects
   of the phone company's business. He knows the meaning of the phone
   system's every English-language-mangling acronym: MIZAR, COSMOS, SAG,
   LMOS. He can explain the phone system to anyone. Indeed, he loves to,
   in eye-glazing, brain-fogging, overdosing detail.
   
   And in 1989, Mark has just turned 17.
   
   To tell the truth, a few members soon get a little sick of the new
   prodigy. He is brash and has what some out-of-state members recognize
   as New York attitude. And he doesn't give a rat's ass who thinks so.
   
   If Phiber Optik graces a bulletin board with comments about this or
   that phone company secret, then other hackers spread the word:
   Phiber's on. This place is hs been thinking.
   
   Maybe the Legion of Doom is ‚lite simply because it exists. If it's
   not the only gang out there in the underground, it's certainly the
   only one that boasts a decade of history and dozens of members
   nationwide who answer to a Texas leader. It's the biggest. It's the
   baddest. (That we know of so far.) But if another group of hackers
   challenges the Legion's superiority - well, who knows what might
   happen?
   
   There's an idea he's had for awhile, it turns out, and one day in the
   summer of 1989 he tells Paul on the phone.
   
   "MOD," Eli says.
   
   "Mod?" Paul asks.
   
   "M-O-D," says Eli, spelling the letters out.
   
   So what is it?
   
   "We should call ourselves MOD," Eli says. It's like a joke. It's a
   finger in the eye of LOD. He explains that it's an allusion to LOD,
   the Legion of Doom. From L to M, the next iteration, the new "kewl
   dewds" of cyberspace. The boys from New York are the opposite of the
   boys from Texas. How better to define themselves?
   
   The boys from New York can aples explain the case in
   general terms.
   
   "We may be coming to you with this case we have, and how should we do
   that?" Kaiser inquires.
   
   "What have you got?" asks one of the federal investigators.
   
   "We have three hackers," Kaiser says.
   
   Mark, Paul, and Eli.
   
   Many months will pass before anyone gets indicted.
   
   There comes a time in any good history where the plot twists
   unexpectedly. Life is moving along, developing its own routine and
   rhythm, when all of a sudden, something - or someone - intervenes, and
   the pace accelerates, faster, and faster still. And the story hurtles
   off in a new direction.
   
   One day, in the fall of 1989, Eli is cruising the familiar territory
   of cyberspace and decides to check out reports about some hot hacker
   in Brooklyn.
   
   The Brooklyn hacker calls himself Corrupt. He's rumored to be a
   specialist. MOD can always use another specialist, and Corrupt
   supposedly knows more about the ubiquitous and powerful corporate
   computers called VAXEN (the plural for VAX) than the founder of the
   Digital Equipment Corporation. Which would be some feat, considering
   that Digital manufactures the damn machines.
   
   An expert who understands the intricacies and nuances of running VAX
   computers could really widen MOD's power base. A VAX master could help
   the other MOD boys navigate through some computers that for now seem
   tantalizingly obscure. Not only is VAX a type of computer prized by
   hackers, who love the versatility and power of the machine, but VAXEN
   also are indispensable to universities, corporations, small companies,
   database archives, and libraries all over the country. Oh yeah, and
   the government owns a lot of them, too. The government keeps a lot of
   its secrkers had materialized out of nowhere at
   around 6 o'clock, just when the office drones fled the Citicorp
   building for the subway. The kids come every few weeks, on the first
   Friday of the month. No matter the season, they wear beat-up fatigue
   coats, baggy jeans, clunky-soled shoes, thick-thick black belts with
   square metal buckles weighing up to 5 pounds. They sport peach-fuzz
   mustaches and slicked-back buzz cuts. You can't miss them. The
   gathering is their "meeting."
   
   John Lee's induction into MOD is only natural, because of his intense
   thirst for computer conquests; all he wants to do is penetrate new
   systems. He's learned so much about hacking and cracking in the one
   year since he got his modem that he's caught up with the rest of the
   MOD pack. He'll do anything to get into a new computer. He breaks into
   a network, then turns over the information to the other MOD members.
   He's the scout; they chart the territory.
   
   On the pay phone, John connects to an operator. "Hey, I'm up on a pole
   here," he says, using his deepest, most authoritative, most adult
   voice. If only the operator could see John, a tall, 20-year-old black
   kid in stubby drealling on your phone, you can invite a friend to join the
   conference call, too. Simply hit the flash button that disconnects a
   call, then call your friend, then flash again. Your friend is
   three-wayed in now. And if he had three-way calling, he could recruit
   yet another caller to the conference.
   
   These daisy-chains last for hours, for days, for marathon amounts of
   time that adults can't even imagine. There is so much to say. Bridges
   are a great way to get acquainted. You can take a tour of the world on
   a bridge, talking to one hacker in Holland at the same time you
   converse with somebody in New York City. In fact, a couple of
   mysterious New York newcomers named Corrupt and Outlaw brushed up
   against Texas kids pretty often during conferences. Chris and Scott
   have never actually met the New York boys, but they've heard of them.
   Vaguely. They've heard that Corrupt and Outlaw come from a place they
   dismiss as the "inner-city ghetto," but the New York boys seem to know
   their stuff.
   
   One night in 1990, on a bridge, about five or six hackers - all kids
   from Texas, you understand - are hanging out on the line. What are
   they talking about? Random stuff. Chris isn't on, or so he later
   claims. Scott is on. SuBut at this point
   in mid-1990 and after the fateful confrontation, John doesn't even
   know his nemesis by the name "Chris." He just knows Erik Bloodaxe.
   
   But John has decided to make his enemy's life miserable. So first John
   must learn Erik Bloodaxe's real name. Chris is so notorious in the
   underground that it doesn't take John long to get the information he
   needs.
   
   And it's a good thing, since you can't exactly call directory
   assistance in Texas and ask for a listing for a resident named
   Bloodaxe, as in "axe" with an "e." So John bypasses directory
   assistance altogether. Instead he calls a Southwestern Bell computer,
   from there logs on to a switch and simply looks up Chris's phone
   number for the three-bedroom, suburban-type house he was renting in
   north Austin.
   
   Then the calls start.
   
   Sometimes John uses his street accent to harass Chris. The phone calls
   are constant. It doesn't help to hang up. The receiver is barely down
   before the phone rings again. And again. And again. Chris has to take
   it off the hook, and leave it off the hook for hours. Sometimes, when
   they prank Chris, the callers say, "Here, talk to your friend," and
   then before Chris can hang up, he hears a click, and then Scott is on
   the line, too, three-wayed into the call against his will, and he's
   saying, "Hello? Hello? Who is this?"
   
   In Chris's mind, this type of harassment definitely falls into the
   category of Behavior That Is Unacceptable. It's the kind of harassment
   he could helpy file into a
   new "language." When he feeds The History of MOD to the program, out
   pops a "jived" version of the document. The translation program simply
   searches for certain words or word forms, and replaces them with
   others.
   
   In goes the original language: "In the early part of 1987, there were
   numerous amounts of busts in the US and in New York in particular...."
   Out comes, "In de early part uh 1987, dere wuz numerous amonts uh
   busts in de US and in New Yo'k in particular...."
   
   Using the jive program is the electronic equivalent of appearing in
   blackface - a crude, minstrel show in cyberspace: "Some nigga' name
   Co'rupt, havin' been real active befo'e, duzn't gots' some so'kin'
   computa' anymo'e and so ... sheeit, duh."
   
   Chris doesn't consider himself a racist. He has black friends at work,
   he says. Ask him why he jived The History of MOD: he says it just
   seemed funny. Hilarious, he says. If you're out to get someone, you're
   going to do anything you can to make him mad, Chris says. Anything. He
   didn't have a translation program to turn the MOD boys' prose into,
   say, a Lithuanian accent or something, he only had a jive program.
   
   So what was he supposed to do?
   
   If you lived in the state of Texas, you'd understand, Chris says
   wryly: "Down here, we all have boots and hats. We all ride on the
   range."
   
   John sees a copy of Chris's handiwork in early 1991.
   
   He's sitting in front of a computer system that looks like it was
   cobbled together from junkyard parts. He has a big old TV console for
   a monitor, a messed-up keyboard and his old Commie 64, bandaged with
   electrical tape. His computer is a street box, a guerrilla machine.
anies to offer their services.
   
   The press releases do the job, because in June 1991, less than a month
   after Comsec's official d‚but, Time runs a story about the hackers.
   
   The very next day the office phone starts to ring. And ring. You can't
   buy advertising better than Time. Comsec has clients! One, a
   consultant representing the telecommunications industry, orders up
   some research on recent regional Bell company crashes. The client pays
   US$5,000 up front.
   
   Of course, the publicity in Time has another effect.
   
   Up north, the MOD boys are reading the stories.
   
   John Lee has an ingenious idea for pranking the Texans. Why didn't he
   think of it before?
   
   He puts his plan into action during that long, hot summer of 1991. It
   keeps his mind off the lack of air conditioning in the brownstone
   apartment on Kosciusko Street. His plan is to spy, and it's fairly
   simple. John logs in to the Southwestern Bell switch that controls
   Comsec's phone service in Houston.
   
   Then John types commands to ask the switch if any of Comsec's phone
   numbers are engaged.
   
   If they are, then John will know that a conversation is underway right
   now. A phone line is in use. So he issues another command, just like
   an operator would, to seize control of the line that carries the call.
   That easily, he splices himself into the ongoing conversation.
   
   There's a quiet click on the line, but it's not the sort of noise
   you'd notice unless you were waiting for it. And no one at Comsec has
   any reason to belielso made him a
   target for any denizens of the underground determined to make a name
   for themselves in cyberspace.
   
   Now in the middle of a workday in summer 1991, Chris Goggans has
   answered the phone at Comsec and Neidorf is on the other end. (John
   eavesdrops noiselessly.) The phone call is just a friendly chat, but
   today Neidorf is frankly annoyed. The problem is that anonymous
   callers have been phoning him at home and harassing him over the line.
   He thinks he knows who is responsible, but he wants the prank calls to
   stop.
   
   "Sounds like they're doing stuff along similar lines to what they're
   doing to us," Chris responds.
   
   "Someone just called up my dad's house in Virginia," Neidorf says.
   Chris is not surprised, but he's outraged on behalf of his friend. He
   even has a theory about who might be behind the calls.
   
   "Sounds like Corrupt," Chris says, recounting his suspicions that John
   Lee has also been pranking him in Houston. "It sounds like something
   he would do." At that moment, a second phone line rings in Houston,
   another incoming call for Comsec. Chris asks Neidorf to hold on a
   minute, then answers the other line. The voice on the second phone
   line says to Chris, "Yeah, that does sound like something I would do."
   
   
   Chris is so mad he can't think straight. John Les what the
   indictment is trying to say is eight pages long. And then there are
   charts that Secret Service Agent Rick Harris arranges on an easel.
   This was before Ross Perot, remember, and the charts are a novel idea.
   
   
   The basic point the prosecution is trying to get across is the
   national scope of the computer intrusions.
   
   "This is the crime of the future," says US Attorney Otto Obermaier, a
   tall, patrician man in a dark suit. He points a finger to underscore
   his distaste for computer crimes. "The message that ought to be
   delivered from this indictment is that this kind of conduct will not
   be tolerated."
   
   The MOD members are being charged with the most widespread intrusions
   of the nation's largest and most sensitive computer systems ever
   recorded. The government has decided to make an example of these
   teen-agers from the outer boroughs. The message, which is what
   Obermaier calls it, is zero tolerance. If you're a hacker thinking of
   following in the footsteps of the Masters of Deception, think again.
   
   There is hardly room behind the podium for all the authorities trying
   to get a piece of this one. There are the prosecutors. Then there are
   the agents from the FBI and the Secret Service, and there are the
   investigators from the US Justice Department's C up their
   calves. Of course, if it were July, they wouldn't be dressed any
   differently. This is the uniform.
   
   Tonight's meeting is the first gathering in nearly five years at which
   no one from MOD is present - Mark, Paul, Eli, and John are all in
   prison. Dozens of hackers are here, ranging in age from 14 to 40, far
   more attendees than in the days of early 1989. The world has changed
   since that heady time when Mark and Eli and John somehow found each
   other, somehow coalesced.
   
   In fact, it's as if the rest of the world has caught up. What the MOD
   boys did for fun - recreationally cruising across continents of wires
   - has become a national pastime. "Net surfing" is a bigger fad than CB
   radio ever was, and people everywhere are buying their first computers
   and hooking up to online services that connect them to the world and
   one another. My mom. Your mom. Every-body's entranced.
   
   So it's no wonder that the new members of an eager generation are
   filling the Citicorp atrium. Tonight, there's a hole where Mark used
   to be, a spot by the pay phones where he liked to stand patiently
   while a group of respectful prot‚g‚s would gather to ask him highly
   technical questions. Tonight you will not see his familiar
   blue-and-white bandanna, you will not hear the boom-and-heave of his
   voice. Tonight, Mark is far away. He arrived at the gates of
   Pennsylvania's Schuylkill County Prison late at night in January 1994,
   right after a snowstorm, and was oards in the 1980s
   and sells the collection through a company called LOD Communications.
   He sells T-shirts, too: at the December 1992 Ho-Ho Con, a hackers
   convention in Houston, the T-shirts are emblazoned with "The Hacker
   War" across the chest, along with a map of the United States depicting
   Chris's version of major battle sites, mostly Houston and Austin and
   New York.
   
   On the back it reads: LOD 1, MOD 0. And there's a quote, attributed to
   Corrupt, which Chris says he got from a secret MOD database: "It's not
   just winning that counts, but making sure that everyone else loses."
   
  Identities
  
   
   
   Paul Stira (Scorpion). He chose his online name in junior high school
   after he cracked some software copyright protections. "This game
   cracked by Scorpion" sounded more glamorous than "This game cracked by
   adolescent in outer borough."
   
   Mark Abene (Phiber Optik). Perhaps the best-known hacker of the late
   1980s, and a true expert in telephone company arcana. He switched
   handles from Il Duce to Phiber Optik, an homage to that most capacious
   of information conduits, fiber-optic cable.
   
   John Lee (Corrupt). The nickname was John's when he was in a New York
   City street gang known as the Decepticons.
   
   Eli Ladopoulos (Acid Phreak). A playful double entendre on the word
   "freak," a phreak being someone obsessed with hacking the phone
   system.
   
   Chris Goggans (Erik Bloodaxe). A Legion of Doom leader, based in
   Texas, he took his online name from a book he read in sixth grade
   about a race of Viking warriors with magical powers.
   
   Scott Chasin (Doc Holiday). The hero of the Old West was always a
   favorite of LOD member Chasin.
   
   
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   Michelle Slatalla and Joshua Quittner (quit@newsday.com) are both
   reporters at Newsday, in New York. They're married, have two daughters
   and a cat with six toes. This piece is a preview excerpt from Masters
   of Deception: The Gang That Ruled Cyberspace (Harper-Collins, 1995). 
   
   
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