HACKERS

We hear a lot of stories about hackers these days.   Some new company or government agency seems to be the victim of information hacking every week.

Well, I want to tell you about the very first hacking.  It took place in the 1960's.  Understand this, there were no cell phones.  Land lines were it.   Phone booths were placed in buildings and outdoors for your convenience.  Long distance calls, anything outside of your area code, were expensive.  In a phone booth, you had to insert coins; lots of coins.  You get the picture.

Well, those old phones operated on tones.  Each number had a different tone.  That's how the phone system worked.   There was a special tone that put the phone into "operator mode".  In this mode, a phone company employee could talk to anyone anywhere for any length of time without cost.

The other half of the story was that it was common for food products to come with free give-a-ways.  Like Cracker Jacks, the cereals companies often packed toys and trinkets for kids.  Cap'n Crunch cereal gave away a toy whistle in each box during this period.

Turns out that this particular whistle had a tone of 2600 hertz. A hacker discovered that this was the exact tone required for phones to go into "operator mode."   There were tens of  thousands of these whistles all over the country and there was nothing the phone company could do about it.  It would have been impossible to change their system.  Millions of dollars worth of phone calls went uncharged before the hack was discovered.

o.o