📸

APPROACHING ZERO

of day it is, stands for either Masters of Destruction or Masters of Deception – or sometimes Mom’s on Drugs. The MoD membership was centred in New York; the gang included hackers like Corrupt, Julio, Renegade Hacker and, from Philadelphia, The Wing.

But LoD’s most serious rival was DPAC, a gang with members in both Maryland and New Jersey. The group had taken its name from a Canadian data communication system and was led, off and on, by a hacker called Sharp. Membership in DPAC varied, but included Remob (after the device that allows phones to be tapped remotely), Meat Puppet, The Executioner, Supernigger and GZ. Despite the handle, Supernigger wasn’t black; and GZ, very unusually, was female.

The LoD disparaged the abilities of DPAC members. One of the Black ICE sysops, The Mentor, sneered; ‘Supernigger and GZ are both blatant idiots who like to shoot their mouths off. GZ does stuff like hack MCI [a long-distance telephone company] for days from her house.’

The Urvile, though, was less sanguine. In a message to Black ICE, he reported having received a phone call: ‘This is Mike Dawson, a special agent with the Secret Service. We’ll be visiting you tomorrow.’ The Urvile thought Mike sounded a tad young to be a Secret Service agent; he was also bothered that Mike didn’t know his address or last name.

‘Are your parents going to be home tomorrow between two and three?’ Mike persisted.

‘Gee, I guess so.’

His parents probably would be home, he thought – but at their home, not his. The Urvile, at the time, was a university student and lived in his own apartment. When he asked if the agent knew how old he was, Mike answered enigmatically: ‘All will be made apparent tomorrow.’

The next day, The Urvile removed all his notes and files, just in case. But the Secret Service never appeared. ‘I’m betting five to one odds that it’s DPAC and I don’t like it one bit,’ he messaged to Black ICE.

Ordinarily, The Urvile’s concerns could be dismissed as just another bout of hacker paranoia. But by 1989 the LoD had got itself

192

📸