📸

There was yet another hacker swept up in the Secret Service busts. Unlike the others, he was unquestionably hacking for profit. In mid-June 1989 BellSouth had begun investigating two relatively minor incidents on one of its switches in Florida. In the first incident, on 16 June, an intruder had hacked into the switch and rerouted calls for the city offices of Miramar, Florida, to a long-distance information number. On the next day, the same hacker (or so it was assumed) had also rerouted calls intended for the Delray Beach probation office. This time the hacker demonstrated an impish sense of humour: callers to the probation office instead found themselves connected to a Dial-a-Porn service in New York State.

It was hard not to smile at that one, although the probation office wasn't particularly amused.

As a result of the two incidents, BellSouth had stepped up the monitoring of its switches. On 21 June security agents were told that the monitors had detected a hacker loose in one of its computers.

The carrier put a trace on the call, following it back through a series of loops around the country. The hacker had tried to disguise his entry point into the system by first dialling into his local exchange, jumping to a connected switch on another network, then skipping from there to yet another network, and so on. Each time a loop was made through a network, it had to be traced to the entry switch. But the precautions must have given the hacker a false sense of security, because he stayed on too long, allowing the trace to be followed all the way through, from network to network, right back to a number in Elwood, Indiana.

BellSouth passed on the number they had traced to Bellcore, which began monitoring all outgoing and incoming calls. The telephone company agents had discovered a hard-core hacker: they watched as their target looped calls around the country, from system to system; they recorded him breaking into a credit agency computer in Delaware belonging to CSA; they listened as he had money wired to Paducah, Kentucky, on a credit card number.

Their target, of course, was Fry Guy. The fifteen-year-old Indiana hacker had spent that summer perfecting his credit card scam.

With evidence that the young hacker was committing fraud, the telco agents turned the details over to the Secret Service, which

📸