Word: quittners
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Dates: during 1994-1994
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Thanksgiving weekend was quiet in the Long Island, New York, home of Michelle Slatalla and Josh Quittner. Too quiet. The phone didn't ring all weekend -- which is unusual for a pair of working journalists. Nor did they hear the familiar beep of electronic mail arriving from the Internet, although Quittner tried several times to log on. It wasn't until their tenant complained about a strange message on their answering machine that the couple investigated and discovered all was not well in their electronic cocoon...
...been hacked," says Quittner, who writes about computers -- and hackers -- for the newspaper Newsday, and will start writing for TIME in January. Not only had someone jammed his Internet mailbox with thousands of unwanted pieces of E-mail, finally shutting down his Internet access altogether, but the couple's telephone had been reprogrammed to forward incoming calls to an out-of-state number, where friends and relatives heard a recorded greeting laced with obscenities. "What's really strange," says Quittner, "is that nobody who phoned -- including my editor and my mother -- thought anything of it. They just left their messages...
...gets stranger. In order to send Quittner that mail bomb -- the electronic equivalent of dumping a truckload of garbage on a neighbor's front lawn -- someone, operating by remote control, had broken into computers at IBM, Sprint and a small Internet service provider called the Pipeline, seized command of the machines at the supervisory -- or "root" -- level, and installed a program that fired off E-mail messages every few seconds. Adding intrigue to insult, the message turned out to be a manifesto that railed against "capitalist pig" corporations and accused those companies of turning the Internet into an "overflowing cesspool...
...their dread firewalls, the group's targets include a pair of journalists and a small, regional Internet provider. "It doesn't make any sense to me," says Gene Spafford, a computer-security expert at Purdue University. "I'm more inclined to think it's a grudge against Josh Quittner...
That is probably what it was. Quittner and Slatalla had just finished a book , about the rivalry between a gang of computer hackers called the Masters of Deception and their archenemies, the Legion of Doom -- an excerpt of which appears in the current issue of Wired magazine. And as it turns out, Wired was mail-bombed the same day Quittner was -- with some 3,000 copies of the same nasty message from the I.L.F. Speculation on the Net at week's end was that the attacks may have been the work of the Masters of Deception -- some of whom have...