Mark Abene
Encyclopedia
Mark Abene better known by his pseudonym
Phiber Optik, is a computer security hacker
from New York City
. Phiber Optik was once a member of the hacker groups
Legion of Doom
and Masters of Deception
.
Phiber Optik was a high-profile hacker in the early 1990s, appearing in The New York Times
, Harper's, Esquire, in debates and on television
. He is an important figure in the 1995 non-fiction book Masters of Deception — The Gang that Ruled Cyberspace.
MC-10 with 4K of RAM, a 32-column screen, no lower case, and a cassette tape recorder to load and save programs. As was customary at the time, the computer connected to a television set for use as a monitor. After receiving the gifts of a RAM upgrade (to 20K) and a 300 baud modem from his parents, he used his computer to access CompuServe
and shortly after discovered the world of dialup BBSes
via people he met on CompuServe's "CB simulator", the first nation-wide online chat. On some of these BBSes, Abene discovered dialups and guest accounts to DEC
minicomputers running the RSTS/E
and TOPS-10
operating systems as part of the BOCES
educational program in Long Island, New York. Accessing those DEC minicomputers he realized there was a programming environment that was much more powerful than that of his own home computer, and so he began taking books out of the library in order to learn the programming languages that were now available to him. This and the ability to remotely save and load back programs that would still be there the next time he logged in had a profound effect on Abene, who came to view his rather simple computer as a window into a much larger world.
Having learned about programming and fundamental security concepts during those early years, Abene further honed his skill in understanding the intricacies of the nation-wide telephone network.
In the mid-1980s he was first introduced to members of the Legion of Doom (LOD)
, a loosely knit group of highly respected teenage hackers who shared Abene's uncompromising desire to understand technology. Their main focus was to explore telecommunications systems, minicomputer and mainframe
operating systems and large-scale packet data networks. The eventual decline of the LOD toward the late 1980s largely due to fragmentation and dissention within the group, coupled with the legal prosecution of a handful of its members, caused Abene to increasingly align himself with a local group of up-and-coming hackers, who came to be known as the Masters of Deception (MOD)
.
’s network crash just over a week earlier on January 15 (Abene was personally accused by the Secret Service of having done as much, during the search and seizure). Some weeks later, AT&T themselves admitted that the crash was the result of a flawed software update to the switching systems on their long distance network, thus, human error on their part. In February 1991, Abene was arrested and charged with computer tampering and computer trespass in the first degree, New York state offenses. Laws at the time were considered a “gray area” concerning information security. Abene, who was a minor at the time, pleaded "not guilty" to the first two offenses and ultimately accepted a plea agreement to a lesser misdemeanor charge, and was sentenced to 35 hours of community service.
Abene and four other members of the Masters of Deception were also arrested in December 1991 and indicted by a Manhattan federal grand jury on July 8, 1992 on an 11-count charge. The indictment relied heavily on evidence collected by court-approved wire tapping of telephone conversations between MOD members. According to U.S. Attorney Otto Obermaier, it was the "first investigative use of court-authorized wiretaps to obtain conversations and data transmissions of computer hackers" in the United States.
According to a July 9, 1992 newsletter from the Electronic Frontier Foundation
, the defendants faced a maximum term of 50 years in prison and fines of $2.5 million if found guilty on all counts. Despite the fact that Abene was a minor at the time the crimes were allegedly committed, was only involved in a small fraction of the sub-charges, and often in a passive way, a plea arrangement resulted in by far the harshest sentence: 12 months imprisonment, three years probation and 600 hours of community service.
After serving the one-year sentence at the Federal Prison "Camp" in Schuylkill, Pennsylvania, Abene was released in November 1994. In January 1995, a huge celebration called "Phiberphest '95" was held in his honor at Manhattan's Irving Plaza
ballroom/nightclub. In Time, Joshua Quittner called him "the first underground hero of the Information Age, the Robin Hood of cyberspace."
, an early BBS/ISP founded by two New York LOD members, and subsequently at ECHO
, also a multi-user BBS and early ISP.
ECHO users, ECHO management themselves and hackers around the nation expected Abene to get off with probation or at most a few months of jail time. Co-defendants and previous offenders charged with "hacking" offenses had received rather lenient punishments, and given his new-found enthusiasm for using his knowledge to constructive ends, the general feeling was optimistic prior to sentencing.
A statement made by U.S. Attorney Otto Obermeier in conjunction with the indication, "The message that ought to be delivered with this indictment is that such conduct will not be tolerated, irrespective of the age of the particular accused or their ostensible purpose," was interpreted by Abene's supporters to mean that MOD was made an example of, to show that the authorities could handle the perceived "hacker threat". During sentencing, Judge Stanton said that "the defendant stands as a symbol here today," and that "hacking crimes constitute a real threat to the expanding information highway", reinforcing the view that a relatively harmless "teacher" was judged as a symbol for all hackers.
After some years as a security consultant, he joined former Legion of Doom member Dave Buchwald and a third colleague, Andrew Brown, to create the security consulting firm Crossbar Security. As a result of the "dot com" bust Crossbar ultimately went defunct in 2001. Living in New York City today, Abene is an independent consultant for various organizations.
Abene made his acting début as "The Inside Man" in the fiction film Urchin
, completed in 2006 and released in the US in February 2007, in which other hacker notables such as Dave Buchwald
and Emmanuel Goldstein
can also be seen.
Pseudonym
A pseudonym is a name that a person assumes for a particular purpose and that differs from his or her original orthonym...
Phiber Optik, is a computer security hacker
Hacker (computer security)
In computer security and everyday language, a hacker is someone who breaks into computers and computer networks. Hackers may be motivated by a multitude of reasons, including profit, protest, or because of the challenge...
from New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
. Phiber Optik was once a member of the hacker groups
Hacker groups
Hacker groups began to flourish in the early 1980s, with the advent of the home computer. Prior to that, the term hacker was simply a referral to any computer hobbyist. The hacker groups were out to make names for themselves, and were often spurred on by their own press...
Legion of Doom
Legion of Doom (hacking)
The Legion of Doom was a hacker group active from the 1980s to the late 1990s and early 2000. Their name appears to be a reference to the antagonists of Challenge of the Superfriends...
and Masters of Deception
Masters of Deception
Masters of Deception was a New York-based hacker group. MOD reportedly controlled all the major telephone RBOC's and X.25 networks as well as controlling large parts of the backbone of the rapidly emerging Internet....
.
Phiber Optik was a high-profile hacker in the early 1990s, appearing in The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
, Harper's, Esquire, in debates and on television
Television
Television is a telecommunication medium for transmitting and receiving moving images that can be monochrome or colored, with accompanying sound...
. He is an important figure in the 1995 non-fiction book Masters of Deception — The Gang that Ruled Cyberspace.
Early life
Mark Abene's first contact with computers was at around 9 years of age at a local department store, where he would often pass the time while his parents shopped. His first computer was a TRS-80TRS-80
TRS-80 was Tandy Corporation's desktop microcomputer model line, sold through Tandy's Radio Shack stores in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The first units, ordered unseen, were delivered in November 1977, and rolled out to the stores the third week of December. The line won popularity with...
MC-10 with 4K of RAM, a 32-column screen, no lower case, and a cassette tape recorder to load and save programs. As was customary at the time, the computer connected to a television set for use as a monitor. After receiving the gifts of a RAM upgrade (to 20K) and a 300 baud modem from his parents, he used his computer to access CompuServe
CompuServe
CompuServe was the first major commercial online service in the United States. It dominated the field during the 1980s and remained a major player through the mid-1990s, when it was sidelined by the rise of services such as AOL with monthly subscriptions rather than hourly rates...
and shortly after discovered the world of dialup BBSes
Bulletin board system
A Bulletin Board System, or BBS, is a computer system running software that allows users to connect and log in to the system using a terminal program. Once logged in, a user can perform functions such as uploading and downloading software and data, reading news and bulletins, and exchanging...
via people he met on CompuServe's "CB simulator", the first nation-wide online chat. On some of these BBSes, Abene discovered dialups and guest accounts to DEC
Digital Equipment Corporation
Digital Equipment Corporation was a major American company in the computer industry and a leading vendor of computer systems, software and peripherals from the 1960s to the 1990s...
minicomputers running the RSTS/E
RSTS/E
RSTS is a multi-user time-sharing operating system, developed by Digital Equipment Corporation , for the PDP-11 series of 16-bit minicomputers. The first version of RSTS was implemented in 1970 by DEC software engineers that developed the TSS-8 time-sharing operating system for the PDP-8...
and TOPS-10
TOPS-10
The TOPS-10 System was a computer operating system from Digital Equipment Corporation for the PDP-10 mainframe computer launched in 1967...
operating systems as part of the BOCES
Boces
Boces is the second album by Mercury Rev, released in 1993. The band has explained the title as being inspired by the name of the Boards of Cooperative Educational Services in New York State, a vocational school system in the band's home state....
educational program in Long Island, New York. Accessing those DEC minicomputers he realized there was a programming environment that was much more powerful than that of his own home computer, and so he began taking books out of the library in order to learn the programming languages that were now available to him. This and the ability to remotely save and load back programs that would still be there the next time he logged in had a profound effect on Abene, who came to view his rather simple computer as a window into a much larger world.
Having learned about programming and fundamental security concepts during those early years, Abene further honed his skill in understanding the intricacies of the nation-wide telephone network.
In the mid-1980s he was first introduced to members of the Legion of Doom (LOD)
Legion of Doom (hacking)
The Legion of Doom was a hacker group active from the 1980s to the late 1990s and early 2000. Their name appears to be a reference to the antagonists of Challenge of the Superfriends...
, a loosely knit group of highly respected teenage hackers who shared Abene's uncompromising desire to understand technology. Their main focus was to explore telecommunications systems, minicomputer and mainframe
Mainframe computer
Mainframes are powerful computers used primarily by corporate and governmental organizations for critical applications, bulk data processing such as census, industry and consumer statistics, enterprise resource planning, and financial transaction processing.The term originally referred to the...
operating systems and large-scale packet data networks. The eventual decline of the LOD toward the late 1980s largely due to fragmentation and dissention within the group, coupled with the legal prosecution of a handful of its members, caused Abene to increasingly align himself with a local group of up-and-coming hackers, who came to be known as the Masters of Deception (MOD)
Masters of Deception
Masters of Deception was a New York-based hacker group. MOD reportedly controlled all the major telephone RBOC's and X.25 networks as well as controlling large parts of the backbone of the rapidly emerging Internet....
.
Legal tribulations
On January 24, 1990, Abene and other MOD members had their homes searched and property seized by the U.S. Secret Service largely based on government suspicions of having caused AT&TAT&T
AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications corporation headquartered in Whitacre Tower, Dallas, Texas, United States. It is the largest provider of mobile telephony and fixed telephony in the United States, and is also a provider of broadband and subscription television services...
’s network crash just over a week earlier on January 15 (Abene was personally accused by the Secret Service of having done as much, during the search and seizure). Some weeks later, AT&T themselves admitted that the crash was the result of a flawed software update to the switching systems on their long distance network, thus, human error on their part. In February 1991, Abene was arrested and charged with computer tampering and computer trespass in the first degree, New York state offenses. Laws at the time were considered a “gray area” concerning information security. Abene, who was a minor at the time, pleaded "not guilty" to the first two offenses and ultimately accepted a plea agreement to a lesser misdemeanor charge, and was sentenced to 35 hours of community service.
Abene and four other members of the Masters of Deception were also arrested in December 1991 and indicted by a Manhattan federal grand jury on July 8, 1992 on an 11-count charge. The indictment relied heavily on evidence collected by court-approved wire tapping of telephone conversations between MOD members. According to U.S. Attorney Otto Obermaier, it was the "first investigative use of court-authorized wiretaps to obtain conversations and data transmissions of computer hackers" in the United States.
According to a July 9, 1992 newsletter from the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Electronic Frontier Foundation
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is an international non-profit digital rights advocacy and legal organization based in the United States...
, the defendants faced a maximum term of 50 years in prison and fines of $2.5 million if found guilty on all counts. Despite the fact that Abene was a minor at the time the crimes were allegedly committed, was only involved in a small fraction of the sub-charges, and often in a passive way, a plea arrangement resulted in by far the harshest sentence: 12 months imprisonment, three years probation and 600 hours of community service.
After serving the one-year sentence at the Federal Prison "Camp" in Schuylkill, Pennsylvania, Abene was released in November 1994. In January 1995, a huge celebration called "Phiberphest '95" was held in his honor at Manhattan's Irving Plaza
Irving Plaza
Irving Plaza is a 1,200-person ballroom-style music venue at 17 Irving Place and East 15th Street in the Union Square neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City...
ballroom/nightclub. In Time, Joshua Quittner called him "the first underground hero of the Information Age, the Robin Hood of cyberspace."
Social protests
Many people inside and outside of the hacker world felt that Abene was made an example of, and was not judged according to earlier court standards. Abene had built up a significant reputation in the hacker sub-culture, for example regularly appearing on the radio show Off the Hook, hosted by Eric Corley (a.k.a. Emmanuel Goldstein), debating and defending the morals and motivations of hackers in public forums and in interviews, and lecturing on the history of telecommunications technology at the night courses of several New York City universities. At the time of the indictment he was working at MindVoxMindVox
MindVox was a famed early Internet Service Provider in New York City. A controversial sometime media darling — the service was referred to as "the Hells Angels of Cyberspace" — it was founded in 1991 by Bruce Fancher and Patrick Kroupa , two former members of the legendary Legion of Doom hacker...
, an early BBS/ISP founded by two New York LOD members, and subsequently at ECHO
ECHO
Echo is a German music award granted every year by the Deutsche Phono-Akademie . Each year's winner is determined by the previous year's sales...
, also a multi-user BBS and early ISP.
ECHO users, ECHO management themselves and hackers around the nation expected Abene to get off with probation or at most a few months of jail time. Co-defendants and previous offenders charged with "hacking" offenses had received rather lenient punishments, and given his new-found enthusiasm for using his knowledge to constructive ends, the general feeling was optimistic prior to sentencing.
A statement made by U.S. Attorney Otto Obermeier in conjunction with the indication, "The message that ought to be delivered with this indictment is that such conduct will not be tolerated, irrespective of the age of the particular accused or their ostensible purpose," was interpreted by Abene's supporters to mean that MOD was made an example of, to show that the authorities could handle the perceived "hacker threat". During sentencing, Judge Stanton said that "the defendant stands as a symbol here today," and that "hacking crimes constitute a real threat to the expanding information highway", reinforcing the view that a relatively harmless "teacher" was judged as a symbol for all hackers.
Professional life
Abene has spoken on the subject of security in many publications such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and Time Magazine. He is a speaker at security industry conferences and visits universities to speak to students concerning information security.After some years as a security consultant, he joined former Legion of Doom member Dave Buchwald and a third colleague, Andrew Brown, to create the security consulting firm Crossbar Security. As a result of the "dot com" bust Crossbar ultimately went defunct in 2001. Living in New York City today, Abene is an independent consultant for various organizations.
Abene made his acting début as "The Inside Man" in the fiction film Urchin
Urchin (film)
Urchin is a 2007 film about a homeless boy living in a New York City underground mole people community called Scum-City.-Plot:This is the story of a child who lives in Scum City. When the Old Man came to Scum City, a homeless camp in the Manhattan tunnels, his story seemed wild...
, completed in 2006 and released in the US in February 2007, in which other hacker notables such as Dave Buchwald
Dave Buchwald
Filmmaker Dave Buchwald, once known as Bill From RNOC was a phone phreak, hacker, and leader of the Legion of Doom in the mid-1980s.-Hacker:...
and Emmanuel Goldstein
Eric Corley
Eric Gordon Corley, Born December 16, 1959, also frequently referred to by his pen name of Emmanuel Goldstein, is a figure in the hacker community...
can also be seen.
External links
- The History of MOD
- modbook1.txt — "The History of MOD: Book One: The Originals"
- modbook2.txt — "The History of MOD: Book Two: Creative Mindz"
- modbook3.txt — "The Book of MOD: Part Three: A Kick in the Groin"
- modbook4.txt — "The Book of MOD: Part Four: End of '90-'1991"
- modbook5.txt — "The Book of MOD: Part 5: Who are They And Where Did They Come From? (Summer 1991)"
- No Time For Goodbyes — Phiber Optik's Journey to Prison — Emmanuel Goldstein's story of Abene's last day before the prison sentence.
- Phiber Optik Goes to Prison — Article in Wired Magazine by Julian Dibbell
- Crossbar Security web site — The former web site of defunct Crossbar Security. Domain still controlled by Abene although it appears he has nothing to do with the content 2005.
- Off the Hook shows (available as MP3MP3MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III, more commonly referred to as MP3, is a patented digital audio encoding format using a form of lossy data compression...
files)- 1991-03-13, "Phiber Optik's" first appearance on the show. http://www.2600.com/offthehook/1991/0391.html.
- 1993-11-03, announcement of Mark Abene's sentence. No recording exists. http://www.2600.com/offthehook/1993/1193.html.
- 1993-11-10, the first show following the sentencing, Phiber Optik in the studio. http://www.2600.com/offthehook/1993/1193.html.
- 1994-01-05, last show before Phiber Optik's going to prison. http://www.2600.com/offthehook/1994/0194.html.