to the user, to a pornographic phone-sex hotline hundreds of
miles away!

This practical joke may seem utterly hilarious at first hearing, and
indeed there was a good deal of chuckling about it in phone phreak
circles, including the Autumn 1989 issue of 2600. But for Southern
Bell (the division of the BellSouth RBOC supplying local service for
Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina), this was a
smoking gun. For the first time ever, a computer intruder had broken
into a BellSouth central office switching station and re-programmed it!

Or so BellSouth thought in June 1989. Actually, LoD members had been
frolicking harmlessly in BellSouth switches since September 1987. The
stunt of June 13--call-forwarding a number through manipulation of a
switching station--was child's play for hackers as accomplished as the
Georgia wing of LoD. Switching calls interstate sounded like a big
deal, but it took only four lines of code to accomplish this. An easy,
yet more discreet, stunt, would be to call-forward another number to
your own house. If you were careful and considerate, and changed the
software back later, then not a soul would know. Except you. And
whoever you had bragged to about it.

As for BellSouth, what they didn't know wouldn't hurt them.

Except now somebody had blown the whole thing wide open, and BellSouth
knew.

A now alerted and considerably paranoid BellSouth began searching
switches right and left for signs of impropriety, in that hot summer of
1989. No fewer than forty-two BellSouth employees were put on 12-hour
shifts, twenty-four hours a day, for two solid months, poring over
records and monitoring computers for any sign of phony access. These
forty-two overworked experts were known as BellSouth's "Intrusion Task
Force."

What the investigators found astounded them. Proprietary telco
databases had been manipulated: phone numbers had been created out of
thin air, with no users' names and no addresses. And perhaps worst of
all, no charges and no records of use. The new digital ReMOB (Remote
Observation) diagnostic feature had been extensively tampered
with--hackers had learned to reprogram ReMOB software, so that they
could listen in on any switch-routed call at their leisure! They were
using telco property to SPY!

The electrifying news went out throughout law enforcement in 1989. It
had never really occurred to anyone at BellSouth that their prized and
brand-new digital s