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HACKING FOR PROFIT

an informant had passed on the word that a well-known hacker named Kyrie had just moved from the West Coast to the Chicago area. The informant, Schutz said, had overheard the information on a hacker ‘bridge’ (a conference call). In April an MCI security officer, Sue Walsh, received information from another informant that Kyrie had a Chicago telephone number.

On 19 April Moore was able to get court authorization to attach a dialled number recorder (DNR) to Doucette’s phone. A DNR monitors outgoing calls, recording the number accessed and any codes used. From the surveillance, agents were able to detect a large volume of calls to various voice mail systems and PBX networks.

The authorities traced the other compromised VM systems to Long Beach in California and Mobile, Alabama. They discovered that Kyrie was operating code lines on both networks. It’s not unusual for hackers to work more than one system; sometimes hacker A will leave codes for hacker B on a VM computer in Florida, say, while hacker B leaves his message for hacker A on a system in, for instance, New York. By rotating through VM computers in different states, hackers ensure that local law enforcement officials who stumble on their activities see only part of the picture.

The agents also realized that Kyrie was running a gang. From other sources they heard tapes on which she gave tutorials to neophyte hackers on the techniques of credit card fraud. Over the period of the investigation they identified 152 separate contacts from all over the country, all used as sources for stolen codes. Of the gang, the agents noted seven in particular, whom they identified as ‘major hackers’ within the ring: Little Silence in Los Angeles; the ironically named FBI Agent in Michigan; Outsider, also in Michigan; Stingray from Massachusetts; EG in Columbus, Ohio; Navoronne, also from Columbus; and Game Warden in Georgia.&sup4; DNRs were attached to the phones of the most active.

The agents assigned to the case described the group, imaginatively, as ‘a high-tech street gang’. By then the Secret Service had turned the enquiry into a nationwide investigation involving the FBI, the Illinois State Police, the Arizona Attorney General’s Office, the Chicago Police Department, the Columbus Ohio Police Department, the Cobb County (Georgia) Sheriff’s Office, the Royal Canadian Moun-

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