Pranksters disrupt a hospital, and nobody is laughing
The red brick Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center on Manhattan's Upper East Side is an example of advanced medical technology. Every year more than 10,000 patients, ranging from infants with leukemia to statesmen with brain tumors, are admitted to this world-renowned research hospital, where they are analyzed, probed and treated by the most sophisticated high-tech equipment available. There are giant X-ray scanners, imaging devices and accelerators for beaming particles on diseased tissues, many operating under computer control.
One Friday morning last June, Chen Chui, systems manager of the hospital's medical physics computer service, discovered to his great astonishment that a Digital VAX 11/780 computer, which monitors the radiation treatment for 250 patients, had inexplicably failed during the night. Looking into the machine's log, he found that a file of billing records worth about $1,500 was missing and that passwords had been issued to five unauthorized accounts. Chui deleted the new names and took the extra precaution of replacing all the passwords for those authorized to change patient records.
Chui hoped that that would be the last of it. It was not. After the weekend he discovered that someone had made contact with the computer through a telephone hookup and introduced a new program: whenever a legitimate user typed in his password, the code name was immediately sent to the intruder. "It was panic," says Dr. Radhe Mohan, director of the computer service. "Someone was up to big mischief that could have conceivably caused harm."
Sloan-Kettering officials called the New York City police, the FBI and New York Telephone security, which tapped the phone lines connected to the machine. Then Chui tried to reach the intruders by leaving messages in their computer terminals. "You have done some harm to the system," read one plea. "Please call us and help us repair the damage." About an hour after the message went out, someone called back. "He said he was sorry," recalls Chui. "But when we asked how he got into the system he refused to answer."
The intruder appeared chastened, yet over the next two months there were about 20 other calls to the computer; the most recent took place on Aug. 11. In July the hospital received a tip identifying two young men in the Milwaukee area as the source of the trouble. The two were innocent, but the Milwaukee connection turned out to be the break that police needed. For months, FBI agents had been tracking the activities of a loosely organized gang of computer enthusiasts in and around Milwaukee who call themselves "the 414s" after that city's telephone area code. Using home computers connected to ordinary telephone lines, they had been breaking into computers across the U.S. and Canada, including one at a bank in Los Angeles, another at a cement company in Montreal and, ominously, an unclassified computer at a nuclear weapons laboratory in Los Alamos, N. Mex.