“Terminal Delinquents: Once, They Stole Hubcaps And Shot Out Street-Lights. Now They’re Stealing Your Social Security Number And Shooting Out Your Credit Rating. A Layman’s Guide To Computer High Jinks”, 1990-12-01 (; similar):
[Gonzo-style account of hanging out with teenage hackers and phreakers in NYC, Phiber Optik and Acid Phreak, similar to Hackers]
“Sometimes”, says Kool, “it’s so simple. I used to have contests with my friends to see how few words we could use to get a password. Once I called up and said, ’Hi, I’m from the social-engineering center and I need your password’, and they gave it to me! I swear, sometimes I think I could call up and say, ‘Hi, I’m in a diner, eating a banana split. Give me your password.’” Like its mechanical counterpart, social engineering is half business and half pleasure. It is a social game that allows the accomplished hacker to show off his knowledge of systems, his mastery of jargon, and especially his ability to manipulate people. It not only allows the hacker to get information; it also has the comic attractions of the old-fashioned prank phone call—fooling an adult, improvisation, cruelty. In the months we spent with the hackers, the best performance in a social-engineering role was by a hacker named Oddjob. With him and three other guys we pulled a hacking all-nighter in the financial district, visiting pay phones in the hallway of the World Trade Center, outside the bathrooms of the Vista Hotel, and in the lobby of the international headquarters of American Express.
…Where we see only a machine’s function, they see its potential. This is, of course, the noble and essential trait of the inventor. But hackers warp it with teenage anarchic creativity: Edison with attitude. Consider the fax machine. We look at it; we see a document-delivery device. One hacker we met, Kaos, looked at the same machine and immediately saw the Black Loop of Death. Here’s how it works: Photocopy your middle finger displaying the international sign of obscene derision. Make two more copies. Tape these three pages together. Choose a target fax machine. Wait until nighttime, when you know it will be unattended, and dial it up. Begin to feed your long document into your fax machine. When the first page begins to emerge below, tape it to the end of the last page. Ecce. This three-page loop will continuously feed your image all night long. In the morning, your victim will find an empty fax machine, surrounded by two thousand copies of your finger, flipping the bird.
…From a distance, a computer network looks like a fortress—impregnable, heavily guarded. As you get closer, though, the walls of the fortress look a little flimsy. You notice that the fortress has a thousand doors; that some are unguarded, the rest watched by unwary civilians. All the hacker has to do to get in is find an unguarded door, or borrow a key, or punch a hole in the wall. The question of whether he’s allowed in is made moot by the fact that it’s unbelievably simple to enter. Breaking into computer systems will always remain easy because the systems have to accommodate dolts like you and me. If computers were used only by brilliant programmers, no doubt they could maintain a nearly impenetrable security system. But computers aren’t built that way; they are “dumbed down” to allow those who must use them to do their jobs. So hackers will always be able to find a trusting soul to reveal a dialup, an account, and a password. And they will always get in.