d
logged-on to the MacDonald's mainframe on the Sprint Telenet system.
Posing as the manager, Fry Guy had altered MacDonald's records, and
given some teenage hamburger-flipping friends of his, generous raises.
He had not been caught.

Emboldened by success, Fry Guy moved on to credit-card abuse. Fry Guy
was quite an accomplished talker; with a gift for "social engineering."
If you can do "social engineering"--fast-talk, fake-outs,
impersonation, conning, scamming--then card abuse comes easy. (Getting
away with it in the long run is another question).

Fry Guy had run across "Urvile" of the Legion of Doom on the ALTOS Chat
board in Bonn, Germany. ALTOS Chat was a sophisticated board,
accessible through globe-spanning computer networks like BITnet,
Tymnet, and Telenet. ALTOS was much frequented by members of Germany's
Chaos Computer Club. Two Chaos hackers who hung out on ALTOS, "Jaeger"
and "Pengo," had been the central villains of Clifford Stoll's Cuckoo's
Egg case: consorting in East Berlin with a spymaster from the KGB, and
breaking into American computers for hire, through the Internet.

When LoD members learned the story of Jaeger's depredations from
Stoll's book, they were rather less than impressed, technically
speaking. On LoD's own favorite board of the moment, "Black Ice," LoD
members bragged that they themselves could have done all the Chaos
break-ins in a week flat! Nevertheless, LoD were grudgingly impressed
by the Chaos rep, the sheer hairy-eyed daring of hash-smoking anarchist
hackers who had rubbed shoulders with the fearsome big-boys of
international Communist espionage. LoD members sometimes traded bits
of knowledge with friendly German hackers on ALTOS--phone numbers for
vulnerable VAX/VMS computers in Georgia, for instance. Dutch and
British phone phreaks, and the Australian clique of "Phoenix," "Nom,"
and "Electron," were ALTOS regulars, too. In underground circles, to
hang out on ALTOS was considered the sign of an elite dude, a
sophisticated hacker of the international digital jet-set.

Fry Guy quickly learned how to raid information from credit-card
consumer-reporting agencies. He had over a hundred stolen credit-card
numbers in his notebooks, and upwards of a thousand swiped
long-distance access codes. He knew how to get onto Altos, and how to
talk the talk of the underground convincingly. He now wheedled
knowledge of switching-station tricks from Urvile on the ALTOS system.