Yes, this is a wonderful thing when it happens. Some of the stories I am going to tell are of friends, others are of strangers. Friends stories I generally believe, but the computer underground is a glorious orgy of gossip and rumor. I give no promises of truth. For obvious reasons names will be left out
They took an amazing amount of seemingly worthless stuff. Not worthless perhaps, but definitely not relating to a ‘hacking’ investigation. Metallica tapes were confiscated, a copy of necromancer ("goes to show state of mind, your honor"), and a high school diploma.
What makes this bust interesting however is a pile of two backpacks on a shelf. In the top backpack is a highly hot, completely stolen Telco cell phone. The bottom backpack is filled with worthless papers. The law enforcement agent carefully picks up the top, highly illegal backpack and pulls out the backpack underneath. The insightful law enforcement agents then thoroughly search the bottom backpack.
Instead of making it interesting, and giving you the full details, I’ll only recount what I remember.
The search was ready to start. The law enforcement thugs slapped down their fully legal search warrant. They set it down on a large stack of papers. After taking nearly everything in sight, they left the bust scene.
The warrant was still sitting on that large stack of papers. There must have been a thousand CBI printouts.
"Yes officer, how can I help you?"
"Um, Fred, we have a search warrant here for your young son Don."
"Can you come back in 15 minutes?" blurted the hopeful parent.
Now, usually the cop would just laugh at such a request. Surely a lot of "cleaning house", or frantic evidence purging can be accomplished in 15 minutes. It was a good thing Fred (fictitious, of course) was a retired cop. It was also a good thing they had worked together on the force. A good thing.
"Sure thing Fred, we’ll beat up some ethnic kid to kill time."
Well, this is a lovely story, and true even. Unfortunately the kid was still destroyed. That day changed his life forever.
About ten minutes earlier two rather sharp dressed, bored looking cops knocked on the door of the apartment. The apartment which had just moments earlier held a large Jolly-Rogers flag.
The police officers looked around the room. There were a dozen state of the art computers in the room. At least one of them was stolen. There was a keg in the kitchen, and hardly a person present who looked of age.
"Yes, we got a complaint from the neighbors about the noise. What’s going on here?"
"Oh, just me and a couple of my friends having a get-together"
As the silence waited, megs upon megs of warez zipped from computer to computer. About a million dollars worth of ‘stolen’ software was sitting on tape, hard drive, and various sized media.
"Just keep it down, will you? We don’t want to have to come back."
"Yes sir," came a reply that was as polite as polite can be.
Later someone came to the party who had been at a Circle K. He saw two cops buying donuts and overheard them laughing about having to ‘bust’ up our ‘party’. They didn’t laugh near as hard as we did.
There was a code that I still almost remember. This was many years ago, before I was 18. There was a very strange code going around. It had been up for longer than any code I could remember. It was merely a PBX whose usage apparently no one monitored. For months and months and months this code remained alive.
It was the Sheriff’s Department PBX. This in a county with an internationally known anti-hacker activity. This county was loosing thousands upon thousands a month to hackers.
Not even hackers so much, but this code had circulated into the warez scene. People were using this code to transfer massive amounts of warez all over the world.
One digit off from this number was the Sheriff Dept. unix box. I knew of many foolish, idiotic, brute force attempts to break into this machine, but no success stories.
Needless to say I never used this code, being the law-abiding citizen that I am. This makes it even more peculiar that I had it memorized. Go figure.
Someone I knew used this code from a pay phone to Tokyo for about four hours. After doing this he received an unsettling call from the sheriff’s department. My friend decided the code needed to die. He didn’t want every local with the code to go down, and relized that further use would probably be stupid.
So, how to take down a code that’s starting to get too hot. He decided to call them up. He did so from a pay phone and tried to explain what was going on. He first spoke to their operator, then her boss. Her boss seemed to believe my friend was playing a joke on her. Apparently she believed that he was using his last call to prank the PBX operator.
He tried this again, trying to get them to understand what was going on. Finally he gave up, and called from a pay phone to the PBX, then 911. "Trace this, bitch!" were the forever recorded words that the 911 operator heard. The location of sheriff’s department must have puzzled her, however.
The code was down within a month.
