Since the development of the Internet, there has always been hackers. While a lot of us see them as nothing short of thieves who want to steal our personal information, hackers are a lot more than that.

To give you an idea of a different side of hackers, one event from the 90s comes to mind: The Great Hacker War. While it has a rather dramatic name to it, it was nothing but two groups of hacker communities sending prank calls, breaking into security systems, jamming phone lines, and breaking into computers.

In fact, members of the two warring factions at the time state this was all a hoax, over-dramatized by the government and that this was nothing more than a competition as opposed to a war. Looking at this war further, it only lasted a few days at best and only four big events were worth noting from it.

The first event started when someone posted a message on an invite-only bulletin board. The message was talking about what was known as the “Fifth Amendment” and that those who were invited were some of the world’s successful hackers. This board was formed by two of the leaders of one of the factions: Chris Goggans and Loyd Blankenship. The faction was a newly reformed group called the Legion of Doom or LOD for short.

What caused conflict was when a member from the Masters of Deception (MOD), John Lee, closed the board by sending cryptic messages on the board to the users. Furthermore Lee was accused of distributing this information openly when it clearly meant to be reserved for specific people.

Shortly after the accusation, members of LOD started to receive prank phone calls to home numbers that MOD had picked up. Once Goggans put out a call to get MOD members personal information, peacemakers intervened and asked to set up a conference call and make peace with the situation.

Unfortunately, peace couldn’t be maintained then as MOD members started to hear LOD members using racial slurs to describe some members of MOD. Because of that, the talk turned into threats and further prank calls.

There was another last-minute peace talk later that same night between Goggans and Mark Abene of MOD. That too didn’t go well with Abene not wanting to meet Goggans demands for MOD members personal information. This sparked more anger from Goggans who shouted more racial slurs before hanging up.

That call sparked the war amongst other events as MOD members quickly uncovered that Goggans was plotting to build a security company: ComSec. The idea was for Goggan and his small group to build this security company, send messages to companies urging them to buy their services, while also helping police capture and imprison various hackers.

At the end of the day, both groups admitted that this war was petty. In general it was a scheme Goggans concocted to build a company. A company that he felt ashamed of implicating many of his hacker friends in. These events gained a lot of traction mainly due to overzealous law enforcement as well as the media painting the entire scene in a grim way to boost readership.