I've been feeling a bit nostalgic lately. When I was growing up in the 90's, hacking was pretty big. The movie Hackers was released in 1996, and it was like the War Games of my time. Everyone wanted to be a hacker.
I've been around computers since I was 4 years old. My family had a PC that was built by a friend of theirs so they could do the books for our family business. It was a dos computer. When Windows 3.1 came out, we got that and my obsession with computer games was born (I played the DOOM games, mostly DOOM 2, over a modem for death matches as DOOM2 was never meant to run over the internet it self, only LANs).
The internet wasn't much back then. AOL 2.0 was the standard and we as little pre teen kids would go into the private chat rooms (mainly the GIF and JPG) and download porno pictures etc. When I was in 6th grade, we got into having programs for our computers that could do things like DOS peoples AOL accounts, ping programs, macro programs for chat rooms (I loved doing that the most) and of course, the most fun thing to do, password phishing.
I read the anarchist cook book religiously (not for the explosives part although I did make napalm once, different story) and I was captivated by the Jolly Roger, who was an old school hacker known for making Blue Boxes and other types of tone generators. I never made one though. I read about all the famous Phreakers of the 80s (Captain Crunch, who was a blind guy who would use this whistle he got from a cereal box to generate tones that could break into phone companies systems). I watched the movie War Games so many fucking times, I could've been David Lightman.
Telephony was a subject i studied as a kid growing up. What the fuck was my obsession with phones? I don't know. I used to record the tones coming from payphones when you put money in and play them back to see if they worked, and they did. It was awesome.
But the biggest hack ever, occurred right here in Chicago (I'm originally from the suburbs north of here). It was the MAX HEAD ROOM INCIDENT.
a bit of background here: The Max Head Room Incident wasn't the first. Captain Midnight who broke into HBO's signal in the mid 80's to protest the ongoing rising rates of cable television happened a year earlier (the year i was born). He was caught though (he was a florida satellite dish salesman) because back then, there were only a few places you could harness the energy needed to over take a broadcast satellite. His pirated broadcast only lasted a few minutes.
captain midnight pirate:
a year later, in Chicago, as legend has it in the suburb of LaGrange (just west of the city limits) where there was a huge group of people on the BBS scene. Out of that group, emerged a subculture of teenagers bent on messing with the system. Seeing what they could do, and what they couldn't. Then, on a november evening in 1987, what is still considered the greatest hack of all time happend. First, he tried to break into the WGN broadcast, which lasted only a few seconds because WGN switched their signal. Then a few hours later, the same hackers broke into the WTTW signal and this time, they were able to get the audio to work. The audio on the second signal was deranged. The hackers berated WGN, and talked about the 50's tv show Clutch Cargo. The broadcast ended with Max spanking someone with a fly swatter. The case was never solved (the pirates gave the signal back to WTTW after 90 seconds for fear of being located by the FCC) and to this day, it's the last ever signal hijacking that ever happened. There were roumers abound in the hacking community that the singal came from La Grange. But to this day, no one has ever come forward, and probably no one ever will.
Wgn:
Wttw:
fucking epic. The Trolls of the Trolls. The best hack ever.
here's some reddit threads about it:
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/commen..._max_headroom/
https://www.reddit.com/r/UnsolvedMys...room_incident/
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