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Earlier this month federal authorities were investigating seven members of the group, ages 15 to 22, for illegally penetrating dozens of computer systems, including the one at Los Alamos. Last week papers filed in Federal District Court in Milwaukee identified Gerald Wondra of West Allis, Wis., a 21-year-old member of the 414s, as one of the people who broke into the medical center's computer.
The Sloan-Kettering caper and this summer's hit movie WarGames—the story of a young computer buff who nearly sets off a nuclear war when he accidentally gets into one of the Defense Department's most sensitive machines—have focused attention on a serious question: How to safeguard information stored inside computers? The potential for fraud is awesome. The American banking system alone moves more than $400 billion between computers every day. Corporate data banks hold consumer records and business plans worth untold billions. Military computers contain secrets that, if stolen, could threaten U.S. security. Many of these machines are hooked into the telephone system, which enables them to communicate with other computers and with users in remote locations. But as the 414s have demonstrated, anyone with one of the popular new microcomputers has the potential, however remote, to unlock the secrets contained in machines operated by banks, hospitals, corporations and even military installations.
In the wake of the Milwaukee investigation, hundreds of companies and individual computer owners were scrambling to see whether their information was safe from computer tampering. "Our phone has literally been ringing off the hook," said Robert Campbell, president of Advanced Information Management in Woodbridge, Va., a consulting firm that advises banks and credit-card services on how to protect their computer information. Campbell and others in the computer security field, whose fees range up to $1,000 a day, say that since January there have been at least a dozen major cases of tampering or theft of computer data in the U.S. "There is a whole epidemic of malicious system hacking going on," says Donn Parker, computer crime specialist at SRI International in Menlo Park, Calif. Concurs Ron Zeitz, a spokesman for GTE Telenet, the computer network used to get into the Sloan-Kettering system: "It's like the skyjacking phenomenon. People are going to try what other people are getting away with."
The consultants advise clients that the surest way to protect their information is to put their computers under lock and key. But as networks of computers connected by phone lines grow, that kind of isolation becomes irrelevant. More elaborate precautions like passwords, dedicated telephone lines and voice analyzers offer some degree of security. Encryption, which scrambles messages, is perhaps the best way to protect data sent over the wires. It is expensive (up to $5,000 per terminal) and difficult to use. Nonetheless, for those willing to pay the price, the technology for protection exists.
— By Philip Elmer-DeWitt
Reported by Magda Krance/Chicago and Jamie Murphy/New York