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HACKING FOR PROFIT

Present-day hackers traffic in what the US authorities call, archly, 'access device codes', the collective name for credit card numbers, telephone authorization codes (phone company cards) and computer passwords, among other things. They are defined as any card, code, account number or 'means of account access' that can be used to obtain money, goods or services. In the US the codes are traded using a number of telecom devices; internationally, they are swapped on hacker boards.

The existence of the international traffic has created what one press report referred to colourfully as 'offshore data havens' - pirate boards at the end of telephone lines where hackers from different countries convene to trade Visa numbers for computer passwords, say, or American Express accounts for telephone cards. The passwords and the telephone codes, the common currency of hacking, are traded to enable hackers to maintain their lifeline - the phone - and to break into computers. Credit card numbers are used more conventionally: to acquire goods, cash and services. Fraudulently, of course.

The acquisition of stolen numbers by hacking into credit agency computers or by means as mundane as dumpster diving (scavenging rubbish in search of the carbons from credit card receipts) differs from ordinary theft. When a person is mugged, for example, he knows his cards have been stolen and cancels them. But if the numbers were acquired without the victim knowing about it, the cards will remain 'live' generally until the next bill is sent out, which could be a month away.

Live cards - ones that haven't been cancelled and which still have some credit on them - are a valuable commodity in the computer underworld. Most obviously, they can be used to buy goods over the phone, with the purchases delivered to an accommodation address or to an abandoned house to which the hacker has access. The cards are also used to get cash.

The extent of fraud of this sort is difficult to quantify. In April 1989 the US publication ComputerWorld estimated that computer-related crime cost American companies as much as $555,464,000 each year, not including lost personnel man-hours and computer downtime. The figure is global, in that it takes in everything: fraud, loss of data, theft of software, theft of telephone services and so on.

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