Approaching Zero

BOOK REVIEW: Approaching the Truth

by Yves Barbero

[APPROACHING ZERO: The Extraordinary Underworld of Hackers, Phreakers, Virus Writers, and Keyboard Criminals by Paul Mungo and Bryan Clough. Random House, New York, 1992. 243 pages. $22.00]

Ever wonder if it's true that one of the founders of a major computer company started by illegally selling devices to beat the phone company out of long distance fees? Why is Bulgaria the capital of the virus writers? Who is Captain Crunch? What was Operation Sundevil? What is the Legion of Doom? Did a hacker's computer "bomb" shut down AT&T for nine hours? What's the difference between a virus, a bomb, a worm, and a trojan?

The above paragraph is called a teaser. Almost everyone, including myself, has been titillated by stories about this and that, concerning the computer underground. As a professional, I'm reminded every day that it exists. My clients may not know it, but I routinely scan their computers for viruses before working on them. The write-protect tab, originally devised to prevent the accidental erasure of critical files, has become an electronic condom, to prevent bringing a virus to a fresh computer.

The main problem in ferreting out information, until this book, has been that the sources were suspect. Either they were hysterical partisans, leaving incomplete messages on electronic bulletin boards. Or, they were government police agencies, suspected of being the tools of phone or software companies (not an unreasonable suspicion since their experts are usually drawn from those outfits).

Paul Mungo and Bryan Clough have helped fill in the gap with a well-written, non-sensational book on the subject of the computer underground (such as it is). They go back to the birth of the modern computer age and trace the activities of key individuals, their playfulness, and the vicious and psychopathic behavior of a minority of them. They carefully follow the rise of hackers and cyberspace cowboys, and tell of spying and murder by the KGB and the East German Stassi as they raided Western defense computers with the help of asocial hackers.

By tracing key events (The AIDS virus sent to hospitals on floppies, Operation Sundevil, and the so-called Illuminati Conspiracy), the authors follow the tortuous legal efforts to stop hackers, from the careful strategy of Scotland Yard's Computer Crime Unit, to the almost Keystone Kop dragnet of the U.S. Secret Service's Operation Sundevil (Clough, one of the authors, is a member of Scotland Yard's Virus Strategy Group, so his views on American efforts might be slightly colored -- although, from what I've read from other sources, not by much).

The book reminds me, if on a smaller scale, of William Shirer's "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich." It traces a history in rich detail, without hiding behind the cloak of mere facts, or going to the extreme of sensationalism. The authors have a definite view, which they don't attempt to hide. They're all for inventiveness and curiosity (a trademark of those teenage command line cowboys out to explore computer networks). They're against wanton destruction. They're for chasing down criminals, however technically talented, but they're against witch hunts.

Shirer never pretended to be neutral in writing about Nazis. He found them repulsive. Nevertheless, he did not stoop to making them two-dimensional, or to carefully choosing facts to put across only his views. Mungo and Clough follow in this fine tradition by accurately (sometimes acidly) analyzing what is going on, and not worrying too much on whose toes they step. Like Shirer's writing, theirs is crisp and clear.

I've always held to the notion that all the hackers, virus writers, pranksters, and plain nasties, have done less damage to data over the decades, than any of the large software publishing houses, marketing a product before their technical people think it's ready, have done in any given week. I'd love to see Mungo and Clough tackle the software publishers next.

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