In the United States in 1983 there were two big hacker group busts. The first was in July, a group of Milwaukee high-schoolers known as the 414s, the resulting FBI investigation and the identification of the youths involved generated intense media attention.
Three months after the 414s were raided there was a second huge ongoing FBI hack investigation and impending nationwide raids of hacking groups named the Inner Circle and the Phalsers. This second FBI inquiry was in many ways more significant than that of the 414s in terms of hacker history but it doesn't even appear on many timelines on the topic. This video will focus mainly on the Inner Circle but we'll of course discuss the Phalsers and other random hackers caught up in the fed's dragnet along the way.
In this first video we're going to look at what was hacked and how, then in the second video we'll examine the ways in which the hackers involved were caught and what happened next.
00:00 - introduction
00:30 - extended introduction
01:31 - who were the Inner Circle?
04:20 - hacking in 1983
06:02 - other hacking events around 1983
09:03 - what was Telenet?
12:29 - who got hacked?
13:23 - hacking techniques
In both videos I'll be pulling in information from media reports from the time and hundreds of pages of FBI documents relating to the Inner Circle released to me under the freedom of information act.
Before we discuss the Inner Circle I should clarify that we are talking about the Inner Circle as the US hacker group that existed in 1983. There was a first, smaller iteration of the group that had some membership overlap with the version we are discussing here, members included Wizard of Arpanet, Shockwave Rider and Satan Knight aka Redrum.
Wizard of Arpanet lists the membership in the group circa 1983 in a Phrack zine pro-phile he did in 1987 as having been himself, "The Cracker, Mr. America, Napoleon Bonapart, Stainless Steal Rat, Big Brother, Mr. Xerox, Bootleg, Maxwell Wilke, Mandrake The Magician, and Zaphod Beeblebrox". If you are interested in US hacker history especially, you want to look to Phrack.
We know from details of the FBI raids that members were spread out across the country, in California, Michigan, New Jersey, Arizona, Oklahoma and Virginia, although hackers who were unaffiliated and members of other groups were also swept up in the investigation.
Meanwhile in California around the time that the Inner Circle were active there were a few separate significant hacker related incidents. On September 22nd of 1983 the FBI swooped in on Kevin Poulsen and Ron Austin's homes for various computer intrusions in the US and Norway at Universities, businesses and military bases. Poulsen was never charged, although his computer was seized, Austin was hit with 14 counts of "malicious access".
By this time Roscoe of the Roscoe Gang had already been sentenced to 150 days in jail in June of 1982, for phone phreaking and computer intrusions related to the phone company Pacific Telephone.
Susan Thunder, a California based phone phreak and member of the Roscoe Gang testified to a House subcommittee in October of 1983 and described hacker wars and internal strife caused by the drive fellow hackers had to outdo each other in terms of hacking prowess and conquests of systems.
I pulled together a list that is by no means exhaustive of companies, colleges, universities and government agencies that were compromised in some way by hackers swept up in the operation codenamed "Mainframe" by the feds. This is according to the media of the time and the FBI's own records.
Various Arpanet hosts, Massachusettes Institute of Technology, NASA, Michigan National Bank, McClellan Air Force Base, Hartford College, Arizona State University, the Mitre Corporation which if you work in computer security will definitely ring some bells, the National Institutes of Health, CompuServ, Timenet, JC Pennys, everyone's favourite bomb manufacturer Raytheon, Credit Link, Sears Credit Line, Union Oil and the credit bureau TRW, which I believe is now known as Experian.
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=ppbx2POxxZU
