20/20 - Electronic Delinquents

[Music] electronic delinquency is a growing and perplexing phenomenon of our time it's brought about by the explosive development of the computers available now to people of all ages in an incredible variety of activity at home school at the office in banks industries everywhere and electronic mischief and computer crime are suddenly appearing all over the country here is geraldo rivera with a report on some of the young people who are doing it geraldo think of this year most of the people living in southern california almost had their telephone service cut off all at once all because some mischievous kids thought it would be fun in games but what may be just a computer prank to an electronic delinquent is usually serious business to the company the bank the university or government agency whose computer has been tampered with and just imagine what the scope of the problem will be in 1985 when they are expected to be 10 million computers in american homes that statistic is at the heart of a developing problem the world is in the midst of a technical revolution and a new age the computer age has begun the ironic thing is that young people some of them very young people understand the ever-increasing potential of the computer far more than most of us adults which accounts for the recent popularity of computer camps like this one there is a problem on the horizon though some of these computer whiz kids now have the ability to commit a brand new kind of delinquency call it electronic delinquency consider these examples item berkeley the university of california a 15 year old erases computer data causing ten thousand dollars worth of damage items lexington kentucky valuable computer files of the blood research institute destroyed by a 15 year old item philadelphia over one hundred thousand dollars worth of equipment ranging from cameras to computers is stolen by a group of students aged 16 to 24 would use secret credit card information they had obtained from another computer item the exclusive dalton school in manhattan using a classroom computer after school hours four enterprising 13 year olds managed to break into a supposedly secure canadian computer network along the way they managed electronically to ransack the files of 22 different companies causing serious harm in two of them did you ever at any time consider the fact that it may have been illegal what you were doing well we really didn't think about it because when you first get into the atmosphere of being in the computer room and all that's all you see i mean people trying to correct other people's system security and it was somewhat natural type thing to do last year at the age of 17 brian catlin who now lives in manhattan beach california used his chicago home computer to electronically break into the computer system used by depaul university in chicago once he had committed the electronic trespass brian who called himself system cruncher sent taunting messages to university authorities here's one of them hello this is system cruncher remember me i brought your system down last week do not feel bad yours is not the first to fall before me before he got caught brian made headlines it was an electronic joyride that ultimately cost the university about twenty thousand dollars in system damages how difficult was it to crack a system not very difficult uh it took only a few days to get through well how did you figure out things like the password i wrote a uh program that would make a microcomputer think it was a computer and a terminal at the same time whereas the computer would try all different combinations of three letters and eventually it hit the right combination and i had the password so you use the computer to break into another computer right well the kids think that they're just playing fun and games don parker of the stanford research institute is considered the country's leading expert on computer crime by mucking around and modifying uh destroying or or exposing this very sensitive data they're causing serious harm to real business and government activities computer crime is possible because virtually all systems share something in common they're linked by telephone lines when a home computer is equipped with a simple and inexpensive device called a modem it's capable then of talking electronically to other computers whether they are located around the corner or on the other side of the country this dial-up capability enables businesses banks even government agencies to link their computers in a network a system that for example enables a bank to transfer money from one branch to another access to these networks is naturally protected by secret codes which are called passwords but if an electronic intruder called a hacker or a phone freak can get a hold of a password well then the hacker can do almost anything from larceny to espionage there is an undercurrent in this city and i think many other cities which says that it is somehow clever smart to be able to break into other computers dr bruce gilchrist is director of computer science at columbia university i am however concerned about the fact that it's not just the young people we have to worry about is a whole attitude of society that tends to regard big business is a legitimate target and of all big businesses the favorite target of the hacker seems to be the telephone company itself and it's not all simple pranks over the years the electronic delinquents have managed to cause serious disruption and millions of dollars worth of damage to the bell system here in los angeles for instance one computer gang ranging in age from 16 to 17 actually got a hold of enough information and know-how to shut down the entire phone system for the greater los angeles area thereby affecting millions of people now they got caught before they managed to pull off that ultimate caper but in the meantime they caused some real problems for marbell the phone company is a monster that should have been killed years ago susan headley whose nom de guerre is susan thunder was part of that los angeles computer gang we talked about her experiences as a hacker what's the motive the motivation i wanted to see what could really be done i was getting off on the power trip too it was neat to think that i could screw up the belt system as we talked susan showed me just how easily this type of thing can be done although she stopped short of actually breaking into a system which would have been illegal she did make her point so what have you just done i dialed up to the to our network okay is what you're in yeah this is a list of other computers on this particular network at this point you might be asking yourself how a group of 16 or 17 year old kids with no formal computer training got a hold of the sophisticated codes needed to give them access to the telephone company's computer system well according to the kids themselves the answer comes from right here the trash bins located behind the phone company building that's right the trash bins it was here that they found some out-of-date manuals that contain the information they needed to get an update they throw away the old ones just toss it in the bin so the phone freaks would go through and clean out the bins there was a lot of knowledge retrieved that way and once a hacker gets his or her hands on vital information like a password then that information gets passed around to other hackers they get the word out by posting information on electronic bulletin boards like this one this printout may look like a jumble of numbers but it's actually a directory holding the key for hackers to trespass on other people's computer systems that's how brian catlin discovered the way into the depaul university system i heard about a view the grapevine and i was given the phone number for the computer and an account on which to get access to the computer there is a tremendous amount of that kind of information where it's picked up by one kid from his father say a phone number and a password that his father may be using he sticks it into a community bulletin board computer makes it available all of a sudden a thousand kids all over the country have exactly the same information once a hacker has vital information like a password then they're hard to stop what if you weren't such a nice guy brian what kind of damage could you do if you wanted to um country being a panic banks are vulnerable government computers are vulnerable because a lot of people have to access him so it makes them easy they have to make them easy to access susan thunder and her teenage cohorts used passwords to intrude on the systems of a major credit reporting company and on the california department of motor vehicles and on a time sharing computer network which included defense department records the electronic delinquents also used their computer savvy to strike out at their own personal enemies we might hassle the guy more disconnect his phone cancel his insurance get his car repossessed you know just little things just little harassment things is it all that simple i asked noted computer expert charles leck most of these computer banks the data banks are databases that contain the data personal or financial or medical records data on people are really totally penetrable by anybody who thinks about it for a while because the stakes are so high business is finally responding sales for computer security devices are expected to approach a half billion dollars this year this device for example was developed by dr hewitt crane of the stanford research institute it uses a person's actual signature in place of the traditional electronic password all right the machine has correctly identified my signature but dr crane why don't you try and forge it and see if the machine can detect the board's range okay now if i didn't know what the system was about i would probably try to just trace it but that's probably the worst thing you could do because this system measures the dynamics of what you're doing let's see if we can figure out the point you've been caught despite the stepped up efforts of businesses to secure their systems and security manufacturers to develop new and better protection it will take years to bridge the security gap there's also concern that as the safeguards improve so too will the method of attack i think we are in a very close race between the developing the safeguards necessary and the advancing sophistication of the means of attacking systems i think that uh there's just no doubt about it that we will win the race is there any system that can't be gotten into god i live by i live by an old saying if there's a will there's a way there is always a way she had no problem admitting what they did geraldo what happens when these young people are caught well miss thunder received immunity in return for her testimony against two of the other young fellows and as a result they were convicted of both conspiracy and computer fraud next week they'll be sentenced to anywhere from six months to five years in prison the district attorney in los angeles evidently didn't think their prank was very funny