📸

8
Crackdown

The Soviet hacker gang wasn't the only reason for the subsequent US government crackdown on the computer underworld. But the notion of a communist plot to trawl American computers for military secrets was enough to focus the attention of the previously lethargic investigators.

The federal authority's lack of urgency in dealing with what appeared to be a threat to national security was documented by Clifford Stoll in an academic paper in May 1988 and a year later, more publicly, in The Cuckoo's Egg. The diffidence displayed by the FBI and the Secret Service was lovingly detailed in the book – to the agencies' embarrassment. After Stoll's disclosures, the authorities began monitoring hacker bulletin boards a great deal more closely.

One of the boards staked out by the Secret Service was Black ICE, the Legion of Doom's favoured BBS, located somewhere in Richmond, Virginia. On 4 March 1989, two days after the arrest of the Soviet hacker gang, intrigued Secret Service agents recorded the following exchanges:

'I saw something in today's paper that really burns me,' growled a Legionnaire known as Skinny Puppy,¹ initiating the series of electronic messages. He continued:

Some West German hackers were breaking into systems and selling info to the Russians. It's one thing being a hacker. It's another being a traitor. If I find out that anyone on this board had anything to do with it, I will personally hunt them down and make them wish they had been busted by the FBI. I am considering starting my own investigation into this incident and destroying a few people the BKA [German federal police] didn't get. Does anyone care to

📸