Roman Hackers
by Hal from Rome
The following article is another in a series of overseas tales of hacking and phreaking.
I have seen that sometimes you give space to foreign contributors, so I hope to tell you some things that could be interesting.
In Europe we still have the pulse dial system and in Italy we probably have the oldest telephone system in Europe. In my country we make every effort to be compared with the rest of the world. So even if we do have a bad telephone organization, we miraculously have a lot of services and our fantasies make up for the faults of the Government.
We have successfully created a good organization of people who use a modem and through this organization we successfully hack a lot of things.
First of all, as described in the May 1987 issue, we learned how to easily call free from the phone booths, first using a little tool (an electric wire) and then without any tools - simply by hanging the handset up quickly, thereby "unlocking" the line for calling everywhere. Unfortunately, our company locked all of the booths in July so we're trying to find another way.
We are also able to use "Black Boxes" when receiving a call. If Someone calls, you can switch on this electric box connected to the line, lift up the receiver and talk while the phone is still "ringing." In this case the person who has called you doesn't pay anything because this box makes the telephone exchange believe that you didn't lift the receiver. So the exchange believes the telephone in your house is still ringing!
Sometimes you may have to put up with a light "ring" while you talk. On local calls you can talk as long as you want because the phones can ring forever. On "extra local" calls (we call them "extra urban" calls), the line will be cut after three minutes and you will have to dial again.
Hacking via Modem
We also have a network for long-distance calls via modem.
While the United States has Telenet, Tymnet, etc., we fortunately have only one network because the telephone system is controlled by the Government. Our network is called "ITAPAC" and, as you can imagine, once you get a password to use it you can call all of the biggest computers in the world (BIX, DIALOG, CompuServe, etc.) and only spend money for a local call.
We have several of these passwords and we're quite sure they won't change soon because they belong to the telephone company! Strange but true: in Italy it is easier to find passwords that belong to the telephone company instead of hacking private passwords. This is because our telephone company (called "SIP") doesn't believe there are very many hackers and so it doesn't care too much about keeping their passwords secret!
Now using ITAPAC, I very often use systems in the United States and one of my favorite ones is an out-dial system - one that you can call and say, "O.K., now dial this number in the USA." So using this out-dial, I can connect to every number via modem in the United States and I can join a lot of BBSes normally not connected on the network.
I hope this is of interest to those of you in the United States. Please contact me on BIX (write to "capoccia" and if you want I can give you my password for a while so you don't have to spend anything and so we can write to each other) or write me a number of a BBS at which I can reach you.
In Italy, there isn't actually any law against hackers, so you can use this information as you want. I'm not afraid at all and you can publish my address:
Because of existing laws in the United States and because we are always wary of over-confidence, we have omitted any references to specific hacking on specific systems.