1990 Great Hacker War

The “Great War of the Hackers” means the conflict of 1990-1991. between the Masters of Deception (MOD) and the group that breaks away from the Legion of Doom (LOD) grouping, from the old guard of hackers, as well as other lesser known hackers. Allegedly, the two main groups attempted to hack each other’s resources through the Internet, X.25 and telephone networks.

Phiber Optik repeated the 2010 debates at the Next HOPE conference that the “war of factions in cyberspace” between LOD and MOD is just a rumor that it was invented by the US prosecutor’s office and the media that are sensational to it. Moreover, two of the high-ranking LOD members confirmed that there was no “Great War of Hackers”, and if there was one, then nothing more than a competition, a desire to show their superiority.
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However, there was still a conflict between the “new” LOD, headed by Erik Bloodaxe, and MOD. Even if there was a “war”, all this is completely different from what is commonly believed.

About two leaders already wrote on Habré:
» Erik Bloodaxe (Chris Goggans)
» Phiber Optik (Mark Aben)

What was really

The irony is that none of the LOD members have ever tried to take over the management of various PBXs from MOD, have not hammered their chats with labels like “phiber sux”, etc. Netw1z said this in a HOPE talk radio program. And despite this, Goggans (Erik Bloodaxe) proclaimed victory in the “war”, a pure MOD victory on all fronts, even began handing out T-shirts at the “HoHoCon” conference with the words “Great hacker war” and “LOD: 1 MOD: 0” . Other LOD members who did not participate in this, such as Marauder and others, consider this to be simply the propaganda of the new LOD Goggans.

It is noteworthy that the only one who got access to the territory of telecommunication companies and X.25 PSN, recognized as MOD, did this out of a desire to show that he deserves the level of participants of MOD, and never mentioned his involvement in any war. John Lee and Allen Wilson stated that The Phrezh Prince of Bellcore belongs to the inaccessible elite, and this opinion is shared by many hackers who know him. Yes, sometimes he can control IRC, but he has no equal in skills in many areas.

Late in MOD and LOD

Phrezh Prince of Bellcore (aka sw1tchg0d) was 16 when he was allegedly controlled by RBOCs Qwest, Bell Atlantic and ILEC GTE (the last two later became Verizon) and, according to his supporters, all North American telephone companies '99 - '01. Even a long time after the “war” ended between sw1tchg0d and Erik Bloodaxe, who left an impression of MOD and sw1tchg0d as a scammer. The members of the sw1tchg0d group - H4G1S - and the alleged friends of the MOD group said that sw1tchg0d was the best in hacking the internal systems and networks of Bell, moreover, at such a young age, and even at that time, when more security mechanisms were involved (identification SecurID, among others). Nickname sw1tchg0d (in life - Jonathan) used his mentor - the founder of H4G1S Shokwave Rider (sw_r), another hacker of telephone networks. Jonathan assigned this nickname after a while to pay respect to Mohammed (sw_r).

After reading a book on MOD, sw1tchg0d began to treat them with respect. And so he allegedly took control of Phiber Optik’s access to the Manhattan PBX, pulling out the qcm, qinfo and qdn data, just as a souvenir, and not to demonstrate neglect. Phiber Optik reported that the one who did it, knows his business well.

The target for the sw1tchg0d jokes was also Erik Bloodaxe, about whom he spread in the hacker environment excerpts from the lawsuit concerning his shooting from a shotgun at his wife.

Knowledge

In the Masters of Deception group there were three members with special specialization. By general agreement, Phiber Optik had a huge baggage of information about telecommunications. W1ng was usually considered a UNIX specialist, even before most of the tricks were known, and John Lee (Corrupt) was an excellent hacker of systems and was well versed in VMS.

Phiber Optik knew about many internal PBXs, about not documented features of headsets, about SCCS systems, about the possibility to pass authentication, about obtaining privileged rights and about many other things that should not be published here so as not to cause criticism. These were powerful things, he shared them only with a few people, in MOD.

LOD was little interested in telecommunications or X.25, experienced difficulties in penetrating and retaining control over such systems. They did not have an understanding of Datakit, we note, necessary for waging a “war” in telecommunications networks. Moreover, there are BBS archives of a number of hackers, where Erik Bloodaxe asks ridiculous questions about telecommunication systems. They say: “Erikb could get access to telecommunication systems only if he came across a still logged COSMOS terminal”.

According to Phiber Optik and C0rrupt, the so-called “war” started because Erik Bloodaxe begged Phiber Optik for access to the Nynex Packet Switched Network (npsn - available at that time through Nynex Datakit, which Bloodaxe did not have). The balance of skill was so much more biased towards the Masters of Deception that it was almost never and never questioned except for Erik Bloodaxe and his friends.

Development of events

The Great Hacker War lasted only a few days, during which 4 major events can be identified.

Event one
It all started with the closing of the electronic bulletin board (with access by invites) "Fifth Amendment" ("Fifth Amendment"), whose participants were well-known hackers. She was ruled by members of the recently reformed LOD under the leadership of Chris Goggans (Erik Bloodaxe) and Lloyd Blankeship (The Mentor).

The closure blamed John Lee (Corrupt) from MOD. Chris Goggans announced that Lee is disseminating information that is discussed in the chat. In MOD, they found that Chris Goggans and his friends decided to use the information with “Fifth Amendment” to organize a company in the field of information security and leaked the information to other organizations whose activities were discussed on this notice board.

Event two
A few home phone hoaxes upset Goggans and he called on everyone to get MOD personal information on a conference call organized between LOD members.

The members of the MOD have connected to it and overheard how they are being thrown at mud, mocking their race. It all ended with the MOD members “breaking the wires” by calling to the personal numbers of the conference participants with jokes and threats.

Event three
A conversation took place between Chris Goggan and Mark Aben. John Lee covertly for the first was also on the line. Goggans got angry that Aben refused to comply with his numerous demands to provide personal information about MOD members, hacker information allegedly belonging to LOD, etc., and said: “MOD is just Niggaz, Latinos and white trash.”

Event four
The members of the MOD began to listen in on Chris Goggans telephone conversations in order to understand his motivation using a remote headset through the PBX closest to Goggans (DMS-100). And they heard confirmation of the early version: Goggans, Scott Chassin (Doc Holiday) and Jake Kenyon Schulman (Malefactor) decided to establish a company in the field of information security called ComSec.

Epilogue
In 1991, Phiber Optik at the first CFP conference in San Francisco, along with Craig Neudorf, was invited to take part in a telephone conference organized by hacker friends, at which repentant Shulman expressed regret that the situation went beyond that Goggans crossed the line, passing information about other hackers to the authorities to raise the prestige of ComSec.

Then they began to suspect Goggens of passing information to the federal authorities about the Australian hacker grouping The Realm. Other LOD members contacted Aben, wanting to find out if Goggans and his informants had not involved them in Aben's current court case, and assured him of not being involved in such obscene behavior.

In 1993, at the third CFP conference, also in San Francisco, Phiber / Aben met several of his old friends from LOD (with the exception of Goggans) for the first time, although by this time they had been friends for more than 10 years. Few remembered the past.

A few years later, Goggans publicly stated that he regretted that he had drawn Aben into his testimony to the law enforcement authorities.

In general, for sure in all this Phiber and Lex Luthor agree on one thing - there was in fact no “Great hacker war”, and that all these speculations on the topic of “warring hacker gangs” are only the result of a zealous attitude of the authorities and irresponsibility of the media.

Read more

Gang War in Cyberspace | WIRED
The history of computer underground: Legion of Doom vs Masters of Deception

Translation: Sergey Danshin
Publishing support is Edison , which is developing an automatic firmware assembly system for network equipment , as well as translating software into Russian for a transnational industrial corporation .