An Astronomer's Perspective on Hacking

by Ethernium57

It began in junior high.

Not just the interest in computers and astronomy, but the realization that there were those of us who had a knack for reading between the lines and figuring things out.  Things other people didn't want us figuring out.  Throughout the world, throughout the ages, this has been recognized as an art form and known by many names.  Hippies call it a groove.  Gardeners call it a green thumb.  Athletes call it the zone.  The Chinese call it kung fu.  We call it hacking.

Back in the late-1990s I worked the graveyard shift alone in the accounting department of a large meat-processing plant.

This allotted some quiet time to be curious about things.  Like, what would happen, if as a joke, I typed prgm blackjack ended 08:30:27 on the terminal in the office down the hall.  As it turns out, a plant manager himself will actually make a point to call your home while you're trying to sleep just to inquire about such things, but only after technicians spend several hours attempting to locate and remove the non-existent game from the corporate mainframe.  Fortunately, I was able to point out that the timestamp indicated that it obviously happened a couple hours after I got off work.  Duh!

My curiosity was piqued when a memo was distributed regarding incoming calls.

It simply stated that no calls were to be directed to any extension that employees are not familiar with, especially extensions above the 6000 range.  This is precisely the kind of thing a hacker tunes into.  It is the inborn nature of a hacker to ponder all possible reasons whenever presented with a directive.  By ponder, I don't mean the casual, "Hmm, wonder why..."  I mean it in the consuming sense.  Your mind processes it day and night until the highest probability reason rises way above all other possibilities and wakes you from dead sleep and you can't wait until morning to put the realization to some use.

Why the heck would corporate care if employees transfer an incoming call to a wrong extension - especially a non-existent extension?  Wouldn't the caller simply get nowhere and have to call back?

Then, in dead sleep, it hit me.

Any extension above 6999 was a real problem for corporate.  Why?  Because dialing "7" from our desk gave us an outside line for international calls.  We dialed "8" for long-distance, and "9" for local calls.  If we dialed any "extension" beginning with 7, 8, or 9 for an outside caller, we'd literally be conferencing that caller into an outside line where the caller would be free to complete the dialing sequence with their Touch-Tone phone, to call anywhere in the world, free of charge.

If an outside caller wanted to call someone in Nebraska at 402-253-0437 (my Grand Central number, by the way - feel free to call and leave a message!), they'd simply ask for extension 8140.  As soon as we transfer them to that extension, they'd dial 2-253-0437 and would be connected courtesy of the company's switchboard!  I'd been able to read between the lines to reach a higher level of enlightenment, but it hadn't (yet) come to me how I could take this a step farther.  My guess is that most people would be interested in the part about the free phone calls.  The key element of interest for me was that a call could be made across a conferenced line.  Still, I had to try the theory out by calling another company's switchboard at night to make sure it would work.

Days later, while laughing myself to tears by prank-calling two numbers at a time and then conferencing myself and them together, I stumbled on the final missing piece of knowledge needed for some potentially significant mayhem.

At that time in our rural Missouri town, a phone connection remained open almost indefinitely until the calling party hung up.  So, calling someone from a payphone, then dangling the handset by a piece of tape just above the hook and hanging an "out of order" sign over it easily took foes offline for the entire weekend.  Combine that little jewel of knowledge with the realization that Touch-Tones from a conferenced call can dial out on another conferenced line...  Well, that was something MacGyver would have been proud of.  Suddenly you could tap someone's outgoing calls remotely on almost any phone simply by calling the person.

On a side note, in retrospect, tying up that kid's phone for a weekend from a phone booth was simply uncalled for and childish.  He was flirting with my girl (now my ex-wife), and I'd like to make it up to him by letting him have her.

Finally, putting all of this knowledge together, I attempted my very first remote phone tap.  I dialed that kid's number and, in a poorly-disguised voice, apologized for dialing the wrong number.  I then pretended to hang up by conferencing in another line so he would hear a dial tone.  He bought it!  He hung up and I didn't.  Then I waited.

After only two or three minutes, he picked up the handset to make a phone call of his own.

I was there, listening, and wearing the grin of a genius mastermind watching my evil plan come to fruition.  As soon as I heard him pick up the handset, I conferenced in my second line for him to have a dial tone.  dit-dit-dit-dit-dit-dit-dit-dit...  Crap, he had a rotary dial phone!  Sadly, it didn't work on my first guinea pig.  I dropped both lines and decided to try it on someone else.

About that time I got a long-distance call from an ex-girlfriend.  I let her leave a message and I called her back.  Would this trick work when dialing long distance?  One way to find out.  I called her, we talked for a bit, and then she said she was going to call her sister.  I knew her sister was a long distance call for both of us, so it was a great test...  But only if she had a Touch-Tone phone.  She did, and it worked!

I conferenced in my second line when she picked her phone up, I listened as she dialed the number, and viola, it rang and her sister answered on the other line.  Their conversation turned out to be lengthy and boring and I disconnected them both to spare myself the costly phone bill.

My most memorable two-line call didn't rely on letting someone think they were dialing a number in privacy, but rather, they thought someone else had.

I looked in the phone book for two people with the same last name in hopes they would know each other so I could get a conversation started between them.  I dialed the first number on one line, dialed the second number on the other line, and conferenced them together.  I heard an elderly man answer on one line, and he and I both waited patiently for someone to answer the ringing on the other line.  After a few more rings, a younger man answered the second line.

The conversation that ensued went something like this:

"Hello?"
"Hello?"
"Hello?"
"Oh, Hi Dad."
"Hi Son."
(uncomfortable pause)
"What do you need dad?"
"I'm fine, Son."
(uncomfortable pause)
"You don't need anything Dad?"
"No, I'm fine thank you."
(uncomfortable pause)
"Why did you call me Dad?"
(uncomfortable pause)
"Son, I didn't call you."
Yes, Dad, you called me."
"No, Son, I didn't call you."
"Dad, you called me.  I just answered the phone."
"But Son, I didn't call you.  You called me!"
"Go lie down and take a nap.  We'll talk about it later."
"O.K., Son, but I really didn't call you.  You called me.  You called me!"

In retrospect, this is one call I shouldn't have made.  I hope I don't go to Hell for it.

As I matured beyond such things (or maybe it was just the growing population of people with Caller ID), I became interested in finding loopholes in other things.  It's just my nature.  Yours too, obviously.

I've figured out ways to hack bulletin board systems, websites, Fortune 500 systems, federal systems, Internet cafes, cell phones, email systems, voice mail systems, security systems, and on and on with little if any assistance or training from other hackers.  Always for fun, and almost always without hurting anyone.  It's basically due to three questions that continuously run through my head about everything I encounter; why does it exist, what possible reasons would they have for not wanting me to do that, and how do I take it a step further?

My interest in astronomy was merely a curiosity, but eventually my girlfriend took notice and bought me a pretty nifty Meade telescope.  It was daylight, so I actually bothered to read the instructions that came with it while waiting patiently for the Sun to get a move on.  The instructions were pretty straightforward, as you can imagine.  After all, it's a telescope.  You just need to point it at things.  Before I was done, though, something reminiscent of that phone extension memo caught my attention.  Something between the lines just wouldn't let go of me, and I had to explore the possibilities.

The instructions gave a brief description and use for each lens included with the telescope.  Regarding the highest-power lens, I read it was for deep-space only.  That seemed a reasonable statement.  The "only" could have caught my attention, but for all I knew it was written in a foreign country and it's common for extra words get thrown in that way.  The suggestion didn't end there, though.  It then went so far as to say that looking at nearby objects such as the Moon with a high-power lens would be boring.  Oh boy - the three questions hitting me all at once... that tingling feeling between my ears... must... stop... thinking... about... it...  Nope, it wouldn't let go.  So, of course, the first thing I did with my telescope is pop in the so-called deep-space lens and stare at the Moon.

Contrary to the documentation, of course, I found looking into the craters on the Moon pretty exciting!  It instantly became my favorite lens.  I wondered even more so why a telescope company would dissuade people from taking a close look at the Moon.  Isn't that sort of like suggesting how boring it would be to turn your cell phone on at 39,000 feet?

The feeling wouldn't let go... the question kept running through my mind... why would anyone discourage someone from looking at the Moon with a high-power telescope lens?  It bothered me to the point that, after exhausting all efforts to find anything out of the ordinary with the high-powered lens.  I decided to take it a step further.  If it bothered them for me to use a high-powered lens to look at the Moon, I had to know why.  I took every lens I had, even using some extras I found at a garage sale, combined with a doubler and even a tripler lens and, using duct tape and glue, formed a tube of lenses approximately two feet long.

Just as it is in hacking technology, utilizing such a tool to observe the Moon requires extraordinary patience.  When viewing the Moon with the naked eye, the Earth's rotation is hardly noticeable from one second to the next.  When viewing the Moon up close with this lens, it becomes a continuous battle to keep the Moon within the scope.  And that's after you finally get it into focus!  But, when in focus and keeping a rhythm with the scope's movement on its tripod and the Earth's rotation, you suddenly realize the science teacher back in high school didn't quite teach you everything.  Or maybe you skipped class that day.

When you look at the Moon with the naked eye, you see some bluish colors.  I've been told the dark areas are shadows.  I've read that the dark areas are due to different types of soil deposited by meteors.  To me it looked like water, but what did I know?  After all, when you look at it with a regular telescope, the blue vanishes into a monotone gray.  Where does the blue color go when viewing the Moon through a standard telescope?

With multiple lenses combined, though, I was able to focus the colors back in and found that the Moon has at least three distinct colors.  The darker areas I saw with the naked eye were once again an ocean-blue color when viewed with the "super lens."  The edges of most of the craters (outside of the ocean-blue areas) were bright lava-orange, and the rest were sort of a beige-rust color, with the exception of numerous lava-orange ridges that ran across the surface.  The ocean-blue areas have craters, but they were clearly seen to be set in oceans of solid ice.  Also, I observed formations that didn't look like something that would occur naturally.  They appeared to be piles of rectangular beams.  The piles were in small groups, with maybe fifteen beams in each pile.  I observed only a few groups of these formations.

Not even fully recovered from the surprise of seeing colors and shapes on the Moon, the first thing I wanted to do is take a look at the NASA website.  They've been there - surely they'll have photos of some of the things I've just seen.  I browsed through thousands of NASA moon photos and saw nothing even close to what I'd just seen through my telescope.  Not only did NASA's photos not reveal any of the odd structures, they also showed no trace of color (other than gray).  What's the deal?!  I spent the next few weeks researching the Moon landing, satellite photos of the Moon, and watching the discovery channel for answers.  Am I the only one, at least, the only civilian, to have seen what the surface of the Moon really looks like up close?!

I wake sometimes, staring through dark air with the hairs on the back of my neck on end.  I almost had it, what was it?  Surely that telescope instruction wasn't just to keep me from aiming the high-power lens across town at the girls' dorm windows.

One of these days you'll see one of the endless possibilities will rise majestically to the top.  And I'll know.

In the meantime, I've just Googled that guy still living in that same small town in Missouri.  Facebook and MySpace are wonderful things.  And she doesn't know it yet, but all of his incoming email is about to get forwarded to the girl he listed as his girlfriend.