Phrack Flaunts Rogue Web ‘Zine for the Hacker Scene

The lines of text scrolled off the screen quickly, but the bleached-blond hacker snatched quick glances at the visitors’ log on his Web page. Lots of visitors using military and government computers. The hacker, who calls himself Route, said he always gets a kick out of the feds’ visits. He smiled.

The FBI, the CIA and the others “wouldn’t be doing their job if they weren’t tracking computer information, both legitimate and illegitimate,” Route said. “I guess Phrack falls somewhere in between.”

Phrack is an online publication called a ‘zine. It’s a digital chimera: written for hackers but read by law enforcement too. It’s been the subject of federal prosecution, but it still operates in the open. Its name combines “hack” and “phreak,” which refers to phone hacking.

It’s got attitude and technical know-how. In many ways, it defines today’s hacker scene. It first hit the electronic bulletin boards Nov. 17, 1985, ages ago in hacker years.

To put its longevity in perspective, Phrack came out two years after the movie “WarGames” in which actor Matthew Broderick established the cliched image of the hacker as the lonely kid who altered his grades with a computer. Phrack predates the World Wide Web by almost a decade. And Phrack is older than many of its readers, who number about 8,000, said Route, who refuses to give his real name.

Route, 24, doesn’t look like the scrawny computer nerd with the cathode-ray pallor so many think of when the word hacker is mentioned. Silver earrings dangle from each ear and a bar pierces his tongue. Spidery tattoos creep down his shoulders and over biceps grown solid with hours of iron work.

Behind his glower lies a keen mind that cuts through computer network problems like a digital knife, an invaluable skill for his day job at a computer security firm with Fortune 500 companies for clients. Route refused to name his company.

Phrack’s improbable history begins in 1985 when a hacker with the handle Taran King cobbled together various subversive texts that had been circulating like Soviet-era samizdat on the archipelago of underground electronic bulletin boards. It included all sorts of mischief-making: “How to Pick Master Locks,” “How to Make an Acetylene Bomb” and “School/College Computer Dial-Ups.”

But Phrack found itself the focus of federal prosecution in 1990, when editor Craig Neidorf, a.k.a. Knight Lightning, was prosecuted by the Chicago Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force. His alleged crime? He published a document in Phrack with certain details of the emergency 911 systems in use around the country. It had been given to him by another hacker who had copied it from computers owned by BellSouth, which valued it at almost $80,000.

But the task force wanted to prove the document was more than valuable. Assistant U.S. Attorney William J. Cook said it put dangerous information in the hands of hackers.

The case fell apart when Neidorf’s lawyer proved that more detailed information about the system had appeared in other publications. You could order them from phone company technical catalogs for $13. The charges were dropped.

If today’s Phrack is a bit less confrontational, that’s understandable. Like many of the older hackers, Route is shifting his focus away from anarchy texts and phone hacking to computer security. Its “how-to” days are pretty much over.

“Phrack is not meant to be a manual of vulnerabilities,” he said.

As the editor, Route knows that Phrack can still be used for illegal purposes. “But you can’t hold people completely liable for just putting information out there.”

He said he has had “blatantly illegal stuff” sent to him. Once, he said, he received the technical specifications for most pager systems used in the country, complete with how to hack those systems. He didn’t publish.

“It’s a judgment call,” he said. “I have no intention of running up against the law or [upsetting] the military.”

But it’s almost guaranteed that something gleaned from Phrack will be used against the computer system of a big and powerful organization or business.

“The scene is going to do what the scene is going to do,” he said. “It’s like any clique in society. You have good people and you have bad people.”