Mark Abene: Phiber Optik and the Price of Hacker Fame
In the early 1990s, if a magazine wanted a hacker to quote, it called a teenager from Queens who went by Phiber Optik.
Mark Abene was the public face of a generation that grew up on bulletin boards and 300-baud modems, exploring the phone company's computers the way other kids explored the woods. He argued with grown-ups in Harper's, held court on The Well and became, in the words of one reporter, the unofficial spokesman for hacker youth.
Then the Secret Service came to his house with a search warrant, and a federal judge decided that somebody needed to be made an example of.
Mark Abene at a Glance
- Born in New York City in 1972, Abene started on a TRS-80 at around nine and by 12 was trading passwords on Long Island bulletin boards.
- Friends from the Legion of Doom taught him the DEC minicomputers and phone company systems that became his specialty, and he later helped form the rival Masters of Deception.
- On January 24, 1990, the Secret Service raided his home, suspecting MOD of causing an AT&T crash that the company later admitted was its own software bug.
- A 1991 New York State case ended with a misdemeanor plea and 35 hours of community service.
- In July 1992 a federal grand jury indicted five MOD members, the first hacker case built on court-authorized wiretaps of data lines.
- Abene pleaded guilty, was sentenced to a year in prison and was released in November 1994. Two months later his friends threw him a welcome-home party, Phiberphest '95, at Irving Plaza.
- The 1995 book Masters of Deception turned the MOD story into hacker legend.
- He's spent the decades since as a security consultant and engineer, speaking at conferences from Kuala Lumpur to Berlin.
The Life of Mark Abene
Abene's Queens Years
Mark Abene was born in New York City in 1972 and grew up in Queens. He got his hands on his first computer in a department store at around age nine, and his own soon after: a Radio Shack TRS-80 with a cassette recorder for storage, a television for a monitor and, eventually, a 300-baud modem.
The modem changed everything. He found CompuServe's chat simulator and, more importantly, the dial-up bulletin boards of Long Island, where private sections traded passwords for minicomputers and calling-card numbers to dodge the era's brutal phone bills.
The first passwords he collected were guest accounts on DEC minicomputers that a school program had put in Long Island high schools. "There was no real notion you were doing something illegal," he told CNET years later. "It really wasn't."
- Steven Levy's history of the MIT, Homebrew and game hackers who wrote the hacker ethic before it had a name. Essential background for the culture the manifesto spoke to.
The Phone Company's Computers
Around 1985 a friend introduced him to members of the Legion of Doom, the most storied hacker group of the era. One, from Connecticut, knew DEC's RSTS operating system inside out. Abene was hooked, and he was hungry.
What fascinated him most was the telephone network. He could hear the electromechanical switches clattering in the background of every call, and he wanted to know what the computers behind them were doing. Bulletin boards were full of "G-files," transcribed phone company manuals and dumpster-dived documents, and he read all of them.
"That kind of exploration was kind of like a game," he told the BBC. "I had no idea what I was going to find at the end of the carrier." Security interested him only as an obstacle: understand the lock, keep your access, don't get noticed.
By the late 1980s Phiber Optik was one of the best-known handles in the underground, and he'd drifted from the Legion of Doom to a tighter, mostly New York crew that called itself the Masters of Deception.
The Secret Service Comes Calling
On January 15, 1990, AT&T's long-distance network crashed. Nine days later, on January 24, Secret Service agents raided the homes of Abene and other MOD members, suspecting them of causing it. AT&T eventually admitted the collapse had been its own software bug, but the raids were the opening shots of a nationwide crackdown.
- Sterling's account of the AT&T crash, the Secret Service raids and the courtroom battles that followed, with Phiber Optik among its cast. The 1990 crackdown, told by the cyberpunk novelist who went to cover it.
Abene was arrested in February 1991 on New York State charges of computer tampering and trespass. Still a minor when the acts occurred, he took a plea to a misdemeanor and was sentenced to 35 hours of community service.
By then he'd also become the hacker the media wanted to talk to. In 1990 he appeared in a Harper's forum on whether computer hacking was a crime, faced off with members of The Well online, and gave interviews to anyone who asked. The fame didn't help with prosecutors.
United States v. Masters of Deception
In December 1991 Abene was arrested again, along with four other MOD members. On July 8, 1992, a federal grand jury in Manhattan indicted the five, Elias Ladopoulos, Paul Stira, John Lee, Julio Fernandez and Abene, on 11 counts. It was the first case in which the government had used court-authorized wiretaps on hackers' data lines to build its evidence.
The charges covered unauthorized access to telephone company computers and other systems, and the sentences on the table were measured in years.
All five pleaded guilty within months. Abene drew a one-year prison sentence from a judge who, as Abene recalled, said he wanted to send a message to the hacking community. His co-defendants received terms ranging from probation to prison.
Phiberphest
Abene served his time at the Federal Prison Camp in Schuylkill, Pennsylvania, and walked out in November 1994.
Two months later, in January 1995, his friends threw "Phiberphest '95" at Irving Plaza in Manhattan to welcome him home. The same year, Michelle Slatalla and Joshua Quittner published Masters of Deception: The Gang That Ruled Cyberspace, the book that fixed the MOD story, its feud with the Legion of Doom included, in hacker folklore.
- Michelle Slatalla and Joshua Quittner's 1995 account of Phiber Optik and his crew: the phone switches, the war with the Legion of Doom, the wiretaps and the sentences. Still the standard telling of the MOD story.
Phiber Optik, Security Guru
The sentence was supposed to end a career. Instead, it started one. Abene went to work in information security, including stints at Ernst & Young and American Lawyer Media, then set up his own consultancy.
He became a regular on conference stages around the world, keynoting Hack in the Box in Kuala Lumpur in 2007 with a talk called "The Rise and Fall of Information Security in the Western World," appearing at HOPE in New York and at GeekFest in Berlin, and taking a turn as an actor in the 2006 indie film Urchin.
To the BBC in 2014 he was a case study in how the image of hackers had shifted, over roughly 15 years, from teenage troublemakers to the security gurus companies now depend on. He had, after all, been both.
Mark Abene: The Example Who Outlasted the Lesson
The judge who sent Abene to prison wanted to deter a generation of kids from poking at systems they didn't own. The kids became the security industry, and Abene became one of its elder statesmen, which isn't quite what the sentence was meant to teach.
Today he's in his fifties, still consulting, still speaking and still the first name people reach for when they want to explain what a hacker was before the word meant criminal.
He got a year in prison for curiosity. The rest of the world got a career path.
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QUOTE:
"Amateurs hack systems, professionals hack people."