Also scavenging, piggybacking and other new electronic capers
The customer, calling from Ottawa, was furious. Someone, he complained to officials of Telenet, a telecommunications network based in Vienna, Va., was using its lines to penetrate his company's computer. As a result, his operations were fouled up. The next week another computer network, named Datapac and tied to Telenet, got a similar call from a firm in Montreal. Its circuits too were being plagued by electronic interlopers.
Operating out of unknown terminals, possibly hundreds of miles away, the intruders had tapped into—or "accessed," in computer jargon—one of the company's computers. Even worse, they had actually "seized control" of the electronic brain, blocking the network's legitimate users from getting on line, and were systematically destroying data. The raids continued for more than a week. During one foray, 10 million "bits" of information, almost one-fifth of the computer's storage capacity, were temporarily lost.
It was an electronic sting with international repercussions: the Royal Canadian Mounted Police joined with the FBI to catch the criminals. By tracing phone calls, they soon got their man. Or rather boys. The culprits, only 13 years old, were four clever students at New York's Dalton School, a posh private institution on Manhattan's Upper East Side.
The bit-size bandits, perhaps the youngest computer con men ever nabbed, had obtained the Telenet phone number, coupled their school terminals to the line, and probably by nothing more than trial and error punched out the right combinations—in this case only five letters and numbers—to link up with the computers. More shrewd guesswork got them the "password" to log onto and operate the machines.
It was a schoolboy lark. None of the Dalton gang, even its eighth-grade leader, was prosecuted. But computer specialists were not amused. Besides costing the firms thousands of dollars in computer time, the incident was one more irritating example of the vulnerability of systems an that can have price tags in the millions and store information of incalculable value. It was also a sign of the growing incidence of computer crime.
No one can say exactly how much such crime costs; often the losses are not even reported by embarrassed companies. But the larceny clearly is far from petty. It may well run to hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Last January, California became the first state to enact a computer-fraud law, allowing fines of up to $5,000 and three years' imprisonment. Still, warns Donn Parker of SRI International, a leading scholar of electronic theft: "By the end of the 1980s, computer crimes could cause economic chaos."