- Also known as = LODLOD/H
- Origin = MUHS 9th Hour
- Country = United States
- Years active = 1980–2000
- Founder = Lex Luthor
- Product = LOD Technical Journals
- was a very influential hacker group that was active from the 1980s to the late 1990s and early 2000.
- Their name appears to be a reference to the main antagonists of Challenge of the Superfriends.
- was founded by the hacker Lex Luthor, after a rift with his previous group the Knights of Shadow (much as the Masters of Deception would later be founded after Phiber Optik had a rift with Chris Goggans
- eventually leading to the Great Hacker War and disbanding of both groups.
- was split into LOD and LOD/LOH (Legion of Doom/Legion of Hackers) for the members that were more skilled at hacking than pure phone phreaking.
- Unlike Masters of Deception there were different opinions regarding what the Legion of Doom was.
- published the Legion of Doom Technical Journals and regularly contributed to the overall pool of hacking knowledge and information, while causing no direct harm to the phone systems and computer networks they took over.
- On the other hand, many LOD members were raided, charged and in some cases successfully prosecuted for causing damage to systems and reprogramming phone company computers (Grant, Darden and Riggs, etc).
- While the "Bellsouth" case could be construed as exploration of the phone system, with claims that no real damage was done, there are other former LOD members such as Corey A. Lindsly (a.k.a. Mark Tabas) who were clearly interested in for-profit computer crime, with no goal except personal gain.
- Although the overall expressed beliefs and behavior of LOD and MOD were different, it can be difficult to untangle the individual actions of any given member.
- In many cases there seems to be cross-over between the two groups or collaboration between LOD and MOD members, even in the midst of The Great Hacker War.
- It is claimed that the mockery of the LOD name was a statement to the underground that LOD had lost its direction.
Members of LOD
- As of 2009 what has happened to each individual member of the Legion of Doom is unknown.
- A small handful of the higher-profile LOD members who are accounted for includes:
Chris Goggans "Erik Bloodaxe"- Dave Buchwald "Bill From RNOC"
- Patrick K. Kroupa "Lord Digital"
- Loyd Blankenship "The Mentor"
- Bruce Fancher "Dead Lord"
- Mark Abene "Phiber Optik", who was a member of both LOD and Masters of Deception (MOD).
- Other members included:
- Leonard Rose "Terminus"
- Steven Nygard "The Dragyn"
- Steven G. Steinberg "Frank Drake"
- Corey A. Lindsly "Mark Tabas"
- Peter Jay Salzman "Thomas Covenant"
- Kenton Clark "Monster X"
- Adam Grant "The Urvile"
- Frank Darden "The Leftist"
- Robert Riggs "The Prophet"
- Todd Lawrence "The Marauder"
- Scott Chasin "Doc Holiday"
- Dan Karon "Control-C" aka "Phase Jitter"
- Robert Keyes "Dr. Who" aka "Skinny Puppy"
- Former LOD people whose legal names are unknown include:
- Agrajag The Prolonged
- King Blotto
- Blue Archer
- Unknown Soldier
- Sharp Razor
- Paul Muad'Dib (deceased)
- Phucked Agent 04
- Randy Smith, Steve Dahl
- The Warlock
- Terminal Man
- Silver Spy
- The Videosmith
- Kerrang Khan
- Gary Seven
- Carrier Culprit
- Phantom Phreaker
- Doom Prophet
- Prime Suspect
- Professor Falken
- Compu-Phreak
1. Chris Goggans
- who used the name Erik Bloodaxe in honor of the Viking king Eric I of Norway, is a founding member of the Legion of Doom group, and a former editor of Phrack Magazine.
- Loyd Blankenship, aka The Mentor, described Goggans/Bloodaxe as "the best hacker I ever met".
- Goggans was raided by the US Secret Service on March 1, 1990, but was not charged.
- In a 1994 interview he claimed he had never engaged in malicious hacking, explaining:
“Malicious hacking pretty much stands against everything that I adhere to. You always hear people talking about this so called hacker ethic and I really do believe that. I would never wipe anything out. I would never take a system down and delete anything off of a system. Any time I was ever in a system, I'd look around the system, I'd see how the system was architectured, see how the directory structures differed from different types of other operating systems, make notes about this command being similar to that command on a different type of system, so it made it easier for me to learn that operating system.
"Sure, I was in The Legion of Doom. I have been in everybody's system. But I have never been arrested. I have never broken anything, I have never done anything really, really, criminally bad.” - But in a phone call intercepted by the Australian Federal Police as part of an investigation into Australian hacker Phoenix (Nahshon Even-Chaim) Goggans was heard planning a raid in which the pair would steal source code and developmental software from Execucom, an Austin, Texas, software and technology company, and sell it to the company’s rivals.
In the call, recorded on February 22, 1990 and later presented in the County Court of Victoria, as evidence against Even-Chaim, Goggans and Even-Chaim canvassed how much money they could make from such a venture and how they would split fees from Execucom’s competitors. - During the call Goggans provided Even-Chaim with a number of dial-up access numbers to Execom’s computers, commenting: "There are serious things I want to do at that place", and "There’s stuff that needs to happen to Execucom."
- While there is no evidence that Goggans and Even-Chaim acted on this discussion, Goggans' statement of his intentions calls into question the nobility of his hacking ethics.
- According to Michelle Slatella and Joshua Quittner in their 1995 book Masters of Deception: The Gang That Ruled Cyberspace, Goggans was in 1990 in the process of establishing his own computer security company in Texas.
- They claim he planned to recruit companies as clients by hacking them and showing how vulnerable their systems were to other hackers.
As of 2005 - Goggans is an internationally-recognized expert on information security. He has performed network security assessments for some of the world's largest corporations, including all facets of critical infrastructure, with work spanning 22 countries across four continents. Chris has worked with US Federal law-enforcement agencies on some of America's most notorious computer crime cases. His work has been referenced in publications such as Time, Newsweek and Computerworld, and on networks such as CNN and CNBC.
- He is a frequent lecturer on computer security and has held training seminars in nine countries for clients such as NATO, the United States Department of Defense, and Federal Law Enforcement agencies as well as numerous corporate entities.
- He been asked to present at major conferences as COMDEX, CSI, ISACA, INFOWARCON, and the Black Hat Briefings.
- He has also co-authored numerous books including "Implementing Internet Security," "Internet Security Professional Reference," "Windows NT Security," and "The Complete Internet Business Toolkit."
- During the summer of 2003, Goggans was invited to become an Associate Professor at the University of Tokyo's Center for Collaborative Research.
- During the winter of 2008, Chris Goggans was in India for ClubHack, India's own hackers' convention.
- Goggans is president of SDI, Inc., a Virginia-based corporation providing information security consulting.Patrick Karel Kroupa (also known as Lord Digital, born January 20, 1969, in Los Angeles, California) is an American writer, hacker and activist.
- Kroupa was a member of the legendary Legion of Doom hacker group and co-founded MindVox in 1991, with Bruce Fancher.
- He was a heroin addict from age 14 to 30 and got clean through the use of the hallucinogenic drug ibogaine.
2. Patrick Karel Kroupa (also known as Lord Digital, born January 20, 1969, in Los Angeles, California)
- was a member of the legendary Legion of Doom hacker group and co-founded MindVox in 1991, with Bruce Fancher.
- He was a heroin addict from age 14 to 30 and got clean through the use of the hallucinogenic drug ibogaine
- was born in Los Angeles, California, of Bohemian parents who left Prague, Czechoslovakia, after the Soviet invasion in 1968.
- His parents were divorced when Kroupa was six, and he relocated to New York City, where he was raised by his mother.
- He is the nephew of Czech opera singer Zdeněk Kroupa (b. 1921, d. 1999).
- part of the first generation to grow up with home computers and network access.
- he has repeatedly listed two events which were important in shaping the course of his later years.
- The first was being exposed to one of the first two Cray supercomputers that were ever built, which was located at NCAR (the National Center for Atmospheric Research) where his father was a physicist, who took him through the labs and taught him to program in Fortran and feed the Cray using punched cards.
- This happened during the same year that Woody Allen was filming Sleeper, using NCAR in many of the futuristic background scenes that appeared in the movie.
- Kroupa got an Apple II computer for his own use around the time he was seven or eight years old.
- The second event was being part of the last days of Abbie Hoffman's YIPL/TAP (Youth International Party Lines/Technological Assistance Program) counter-culture/Yippie meetings that were taking place in New York City's Lower East Side, during the early 1980s. Kroupa again lists this event, repeatedly in interviews, as opening many new doors for him and changing his perceptions about technology.
- Patrick K. Kroupa, late 1980s.
TAP was the original hacker and phone phreak publication which predated 2600 by decades (at the time of the last TAP meetings, 2600 magazine was just starting to publish its first issues). - met many people there who would become part of his life in the years to come.
- Three of the main characters would be his future partner and life-long friend, Bruce Fancher; Yippie/Medical Marijuana activist Dana Beal (The Theoretician), who was part of the John Draper (Cap'n Crunch) /Abbie Hoffman, technologically-inclined branch of the counter-culture and perhaps most important: Herbert Huncke, who introduced Kroupa to heroin at age 14.
- With the exception of the counter-cultural and hard-drug elements, the preceding history made Kroupa part of a small group, composed of a few hundred kids who were either wealthy enough to afford home computers in the late 70's, or had technologically-savvy families who understood the potentials of what the machines could do.
- During his time in the computer underground Kroupa was a member of the first Pirate/Cracking crew to ever exist for the Apple II computer: The Apple Mafia as well as various phreaking/hacking groups, the most high-profile being the Knights of Shadow.
- When KOS fell apart after a series of arrests, many of the surviving members were absorbed into Kroupa's final group affiliation: the Legion of Doom (LoD/H).
- he started publishing some of his hacking techniques when he would have been around 12 or 13.
- There is a significant progression through years of text, which captures Kroupa's early evolution and skills, culminating in an extensive, programmable phone phreaking and hacking toolkit for the Apple II computer, called Phantom Access (which is where the name Phantom Access Technologies, the parent corporation behind MindVox, would later come from).
3. Filmmaker David Buchwald, once known as Bill From RNOC (born September 4 1970)
- was a hacker and leader of the Legion of Doom in the mid-1980s.
- was a social engineer, with the ability to manipulate phone system employees anywhere in the United States.
- Some of his original ideas are still in use by social engineers today.In 1995, Dave served as a technical consultant to the movie Hackers.
- In 1997, Buchwald co-founded Crossbar Security with Mark Abene (a.k.a. Phiber Optik) and Andrew Brown. Crossbar provided information security services for a number of large corporations, but became a casualty of the dot-com bubble.
- Crossbar went defunct in 2001, largely due to cuts in corporate security spending and an increase in the cost of corporate computer security advertising.
- he works as a film editor and freelance photographer in New York City. He produces cover art for 2600 Magazine.
- In August 2006, he completed his first feature film, Urchin.
- He is recently produced and edited the independent film Love Simple and is in pre-production on the film Kuru, the second movie by the production company The Enemy.
4. Loyd Blankenship (a.k.a. The Mentor) (born 1965)
- has been a well-known American computer hacker and writer since the 1980s, when he was a member of the hacker groups Extasyy Elite and Legion of Doom.
- the author of The Conscience of a Hacker (Hacker Manifesto), which was written after he was arrested and was published in the underground hacker ezine Phrack.
- gave a reading of The Hacker Manifesto and offered additional insight at H2K2.
- He also wrote the cyberpunk role-playing sourcebook GURPS Cyberpunk, which, due to his involvement, was confiscated by the U.S. Secret Service. This was not part of the Operation Sundevil raids, but rather came months afterward.
5. Bruce Fancher (also known as Timberwolf)
- was a member of the legendary Legion of Doom hacker group and co-founded MindVox in 1991, with Patrick K. Kroupa.
- he was grew up in New York City.
- He is the son of Ed Fancher, who founded the Village Voice with Dan Wolf and Norman Mailer, in 1955.
- Much like Patrick Kroupa and many of his compatriots from the Legion of Doom, Bruce Fancher was part of the first generation to grow up with access to home computers and the networks that pre-dated the wide-scale adaptation of what became known as the internet.
- Unlike most others, Fancher seems to have met most of the people who played major roles in his formative years, in person, at the YIPL/TAP meetings that were taking place on the Lower East Side of New York City.
- Almost from the start, Fancher's peers were some of the smartest and most accomplished hackers and phone phreaks of the day.
- The hacker underground didn't care how many years you had spent online; the only prerequisite for acceptance was to be highly intelligent.
- Fancher fit right in and adapted and refined the cynical and jaded attitude that many of the LOD members had arrived at, and used his newfound skills to wreak havoc and play games with the so-called "Elite" of the time.
- The hacker publication Phrack, is filled with out-of-character rants and indignant anger at the games Fancher was playing, as Timberwolf and a host of other names.
- All of this culminated right around the time MindVox was first launched, with Phrack's first (and only) humor issue (Phrack #36), also called "Diet Phrack", which was filled with LOD members stepping out from behind their usual handles and acting more like what the world had grown to expect from their rival gang, MOD (Masters of Deception).
- Among other articles, such as Chris Goggans' infamous "jive" version of the Book of MOD that set off the Great Hacker War, Phrack 36 included the first and last, official publication of an article co-written by Fancher and Kroupa, called "Elite Access", which was a cynical and funny expose of the "elite" and private hacker underground of the day.
- The article was apparently worked on and edited during a 5 year period, and there are at least 3 different versions of it that still remain online including a much earlier, hardcore technical revision which has most of the commands to control phone company computers, deleted out of it.
- Fancher and Kroupa's games with the "elite" made it into Kroupa's "Agr1ppa", a surreal parody of William Gibson's, Agrippa, which had been leaked to the world from MindVox.
6. Leonard Rose 1959 (age 49–50)
- More specifically the U.S. Attorney's Office in Baltimore stated that he stole Unix source code from AT&T and distributed two Trojan Horse programs designed to allow for unauthorized access to computer systems.
- Incidents occurred between May, 1988 and January, 1990, according to the indictment.
- a 33-year-old computer consultant and father of two, is also a felon.
- He recently completed 81/2 months in a federal prison camp in North Carolina, plus 2 months in a halfway house. His crime? Passing along by computer some software code filched from Bell Labs by an AT&T employee.
- who now lives in California, says he is still dazed by the harsh punishment he received. "The Secret Service," he says, "made an example of me."
Maybe so. But if so, why are the cops suddenly cracking down on the hackers? Answer: because serious computer crime is beginning to reach epidemic proportions. - The authorities are struggling to contain the crimes, or at least slow their rapid growth.
Rose agrees the hacker world is rapidly changing for the worse. "You're getting a different sort of person now," he says of the hacker community. "You're seeing more and more criminals using computers." - One well-known veteran hacker, who goes by the name Cheshire Catalyst, puts it more bluntly: "The playground bullies are coming indoors and learning how to type."
- Rose and the Cheshire Catalyst are talking about a new breed of computer hackers. These aren't just thrill-seeking, boastful kids, but serious (if boastful) cybercrooks.
- They use computers and telecommunications links partly for stunt hacking--itself a potentially dangerous and costly game--but also to steal valuable information, software, phone service, credit card numbers and cash. And they pass along and even sell their services and techniques to others--including organized crime.
- Hacker hoods often exaggerate their escapades, but there is no doubt that their crimes are extensive and becoming more so at an alarming rate. Says Bruce Sterling, a noted cyberpunk novelist and author of the nonfiction The Hacker Crackdown (Bantam Books, 1992, $23): "Computer intrusion, as a nonprofit act of intellectual exploration and mastery, is in slow decline, at least in the United States; but electronic fraud, especially telecommunications crime, is growing by leaps and bounds."
- Take the 19-year-old kid who calls himself Kimble--
- he is a very real person, but for reasons that will become clear, he asks us to mask his identity.
Based in Germany, Kimble is the leader of an international hacker group called Dope. - He is also one of the most celebrated hackers in his country.
- He has appeared on German Tv (in disguise) and is featured in the December issue of the German magazine Capital.
- From his computer terminal, Kimble spends part of each day cracking PBX systems in the U.S., a lucrative form of computer crime. PBXs are the phone systems businesses own or lease. Hackers break into them to steal access numbers, which they then resell to other hackers and, increasingly, to criminals who use the numbers to transact their business.
- These are hardly victimless crimes; businesses that rightfully own the numbers are expected to pay the billions of dollars of bogus phone bills charged on their stolen numbers each year (Forbes, Aug. 3).
- Kimble, using a special program he has written, claims he can swipe six access codes a day. He says he escapes prosecution in Germany because the antihacking laws there are more lax than in the U.S. "Every PBX iS an open door for me," he brags, claiming he now has a total of 500 valid PBX codes. At Kimble's going price of $200 a number, that's quite an inventory, especially since numbers can be sold to more than one customer.
- Kimble works the legal side of the street, too. For example, he sometimes works for German banks, helping them secure their systems against invasions. This might not be such a hot idea for the banks. "Would you hire a former burglar to install your burglar alarm? " asks Robert Kane, president of Intrusion Detection, a New York-based computer security consulting firm.
- Kimble has also devised an encrypted telephone that he says cannot be tapped. In just three months he says he has sold 100.
Other hacker hoods Forbes Spoke to in Europe say they steal access numbers and resell them for up to $500 to the Turkish mafia. A solid market. Like all organized crime groups, they need a constant supply of fresh, untraceable and untappable telephone numbers to conduct drug and other illicit businesses.
- Some crooked hackers will do a lot worse for hire. For example, one is reported to have stolen an East German Stasi secret bomb recipe in 1989 and sold it to the Turkish mafia. Another boasted to Forbes that he broke into a London police computer and, for $50,000 in deutsche marks, delivered its access codes to a young English criminal.
According to one knowledgeable source, another hacker brags that he recently found a way to get into Citibank's computers. For three months he says he quietly skimmed off a penny or so from each account. Once he had $200,000, he quit. Citibank says it has no evidence of this incident and we cannot confirm the hacker's story. But, says computer crime expert Donn Parker of consultants sri International: "Such a 'salami attack' is definitely possible, especially for an insider."
Several LOD members were close friends of MOD who had been raided and indicted by the government, causing the majority of those who remained to drop out of the underground for safety reasons including those people above.
In their absence, LOD largely fell into disarray causing the disagreement and disillusionment that led Phiber Optik to align himself with MOD in an effort to restore the direction of the spirit of underground hacking.
No comments:
Post a Comment