Invasion of computers proved child's play

Press, 21 October 1983, Page 20

Invasion of computers proved child's play

From ‘Tbe Economist,’ London

Most Americans over the age of 30 fondly remember the days when gangs of teenagers called themselves names like the Sharks or the Jets and engaged in tribal confrontations called rumbles. The information age conquers all. The adolescent gang in the headlines this month is named the 414 s — after the telephone code for the area round Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where the members of the gang live. Instead of comfortable old switchblade knives, the ,414 s deploy the object that grown-ups loathe and fear most: a computer keyboard. For a few months in the northern spring and summer, the 414 s used their home computers and telephones to tap into big computers belonging, to a variety of organisations. Among those raided were the machines of a Canadian cement company, Security Pacific Bank in Los Angeles, the Sloan-Kettering

cancer centre in New York, and the Los Alamos national laboratory in New Mexico (where research on nuclear weapons is carried out). Browsing in other people’s data banks was no sweat; The invaded computers were all connected to a network called Telenet run by the G.T.E. Corporation. Their owners wanted to make the information they contained available by telephone to others who had the right to use it The trouble was that scamps like the 414 s had an easy time (through random samples of codes) getting in touch with Telenetlinked computers and figuring out the user codes and often predictable passwords (like “system”) that would let them into computers they came across. The invasipn that caught the public eye was of the Los Alamos computer. One of the top 10 films of the summer, after all, has been

“War Games in which a high school student plays “global thermonuclear war” on his computer only to discover (too late?) that he has tapped into the American air defence system and it is the real thing. In fact, the violated Los Alamos computer has only unclassified information in its memory. More damage might have been done to the Sloan-Kettering computer, which contains radiation therapy records and treatment instructions for cancer patients. Nothing of consequence happened even there.

One of the 414 gang appeared on national television, lawyer, naturally in tow, to express contrition. There seemed, to be no object in the break-ins but mischief. Charges against the 4145, if any can be found to stick, will probably be light; a lot of computer crimes escape old-fashioned legal nets. Copyright “The Economist.”