2600 Flash
2600: A Hacking Victim
When we received our June SBS Skyline bill, we were a bit surprised. Over six hundred dollars of it came from calls we never made. But what's really interesting is the way that the Skyline people handled it. In early June, we got a call telling us that their sophisticated equipment detected hackers trying to guess a code by scanning numerically. They said our code would soon be discovered, so they were going to give us a new one, with two extra digits added. They did this and that very day our old code was inactivated. The illegal calls had occurred before that day, and we figure Skyline must have known this. Maybe they thought that 2600, in our corporate clumsiness, would pay a huge bill without investigation. Many big companies would. Gotta give them credit for trying.
When we called up about it, they didn't want to handle it over the phone! "Send the bill through the mail," they said. "Mark the calls you made and we'll deduct the rest." Why are phone companies so afraid to do things over the phone?
As long as Skyline decided to give the "perpetrators" some extra time before the investigation starts, we figure we might as well lend a hand too. Our old code was: 880099. We loved that code and are very upset at losing it. Our new eight digit one is very difficult to remember and nowhere near as fun.
And one last note about those new eight digit numbers. Phone phreaks have already figured out a way around them. If you dial the first six digits of an eight digit code, then the ten digit phone number and hit a # key, you'll get your tone back! That means there are only a hundred possible codes since there are only two more digits to figure out and one of them definitely works! If you enter six digits that are not part of an eight digit code, and then a ten digit phone number, you'll get an error message immediately or that fake carrier tone Skyline loves to send out. That tone, incidentally, is for you hackers with Apples and Commodores that scan all night long looking for the code that will get you through to a number that responds with a carrier tone. In the morning, you see how many carrier detects you got and which codes got them for you. Skyline's idea is that if every invalid code gives a hacker a carrier tone, there is no way for a computer to separate the good codes from the bad ones. Come on! How about setting your computer to dial a non-carrier and telling it to print out only those codes that didn't get a carrier tone? And there are probably a hundred more ways. Big corporations can be so much fun.
New Phone System for Courthouse
The Middlesex County Courthouse and Administration Building will have a new phone system installed to increase the security of the complex, according to Middlesex County Prosecutor Alan J. Rockoff. [Yes, the same Alan J. Rockoff that was convinced computer hackers were moving satellites through the "blue heavens".]
The phone system, due by September, will be able to detect and cut off unauthorized calls made in an emergency situation.
"Once a phone is activated it will show up on this massive diagram that will be on a computer screen and will show where that phone is being used in the courthouse or the administration building," Rockoff said.
The system would monitor which phones were active and would be able to cut connections in an instant. Rockoff promised that the system would not be designed to tap phones. [Of course, if his knowledge of tapping is anything like his knowledge of satellites...]