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An exaggeration perhaps. But as computers spread into all facets of life, from controlling the flow of money to manning factories and missile defenses, the potential for troublemaking seems boundless. Already computer thieves, often striking from within, have embezzled millions of dollars. In 1978 a consultant got a Los An geles bank's computer to transfer $10.2 million to his out-of-town account. Only a confederate's tip led to his discovery. To be a computer-age thief, you need nothing more than an inexpensive home computer, a telephone and a few light-fingered skills. As in the Dalton case, computer passwords are often short and simple. Be sides, computer networks like Telenet or Datapac, frequently publicize their numbers to attract customers. Once into the computer system, there are other barriers to crash, and other techniques for purloining information.
Computer crooks have developed a whole bag of electronic tricks. One is the so-called Trojan Horse. Like the famed ruse used by the Greeks to penetrate Troy, it helps an interloper get into forbidden recesses of a computer. The mischiefmaker slyly slips some extra commands into a computer program (the instructions by which the machine performs a given task). Then when another programmer with higher clearance runs the program, he will unwittingly trigger the covert instructions. These unlock the guarded areas, just as the Greek soldiers hidden in the horse unlocked Troy's gates. The culprit might then transfer money to his own account, steal private information or sabotage the system itself. Other colorfully named ploys: superzapping (penetrating a computer by activating its own emergency master program, an act comparable to opening a door with a stolen master key); scavenging (searching through stray data or "garbage" for clues that might unlock still other secrets); and piggybacking (riding into a system behind a legitimate user).
Faced with such ingenuity, some computer owners are resorting to complex coding devices that scramble information before it is transmitted or stored. They are also changing passwords. Some even rely on detectors that identify legitimate individual computer users by fingerprints or voice patterns.
Yet as the safeguards go up, so does the urge to crash the barriers, especially among students. In a celebrated Princeton University case, students snatched grades and housing data from the school's computers and, by their account, briefly shut them down. Last September, two Illinois high school students dialed their way into one of DePaul University's computers and threatened to immobilize it unless they got access to a special program that would have let them communicate with the machine more directly. Said an investigator who helped catch the teenagers: "They did it because everyone said it couldn't be done." Maybe so. But computer owners wonder: Where does the fun end and the crime begin?
—By Frederic Golden. Reported by Philip Faflick/New York, with other U.S. Bureaus