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Bruce Fancher (also known as Timberwolf) (born April 13, 1971) is a former computer hacker and member of the Legion of Doom hacker group. He co-founded MindVox in 1991 with Patrick K. Kroupa.
Bruce Fancher grew up in New York City. He is the son of Ed Fancher, who founded The Village Voice with Dan Wolf and Norman Mailer, in 1955. [1]
Fancher attended YIPL/TAP meetings that were taking place on the Lower East Side of New York City. Fancher's peers included several hackers and phone phreaks of the day. [2]
The hacker publication Phrack is filled with out-of-character rants at Fancher's work. [3] [4] [5] [6] Around the time MindVox was first launched, with Phrack's only humor issue (Phrack #36), [7] also called "Diet Phrack". Phrack 36 included the first and last, official publication of an article co-written by Fancher and Patrick Kroupa, called "Elite Access", [8] which was a cynical and funny expose of the "elite" and private hacker underground of the day. The article was apparently worked on and edited during a 5-year period, and there are at least 3 different versions of it that still remain online, [8] [9] [10] including a much earlier, hardcore technical revision which has most of the commands to control phone company computers, deleted out of it. [9]
Fancher and Kroupa's "games" with the "elite" made it into Kroupa's "Agr1ppa", a parody of William Gibson's Agrippa , which had been leaked to the world from MindVox. The opening verses include a letter dated 1985, from the SysOp (System Operator) of a pirate Bulletin Board System which had apparently thrown both Fancher and Kroupa off the system, for uploading cracked software, which they then infected with a virus. [11]
Although MindVox quickly became notorious for the escapades of its hard-partying clientele, there is little or no evidence that Fancher was involved personally in the wild lifestyles of its members. However, he was at least indirectly affected, in that by 1995 Kroupa's drug use was fast becoming legendary and his ability to function on a daily basis was diminishing. While the media attention never ended, the development and growth of the system had slowed down and Phantom Access Technologies was taking on consulting positions to help other companies create their own online presence, [12] and Fancher gained growing acclaim as a software architect and member of the dot.com technocracy. [13] [14] [15] [16] [17]
There are perpetual signs of MindVox coming back to life and opening again, [18] [19] it appears likely that MindVox either went dark, or shut off public access, at some time in late 1997. The two main publications which covered the shutting of the gates, were The New York Times and Wired , who were apparently unable to arrive at a consensus, with the Times listing the sale of MindVox's client-base and the closing of the system, in 1996. [20] Wired was still covering an apparently open and at least partially operational MindVox circa 1997, more than one year after the Times listed MindVox as being closed. [21]
By the late 1990s, Fancher was involved in a series of start-ups where he founded and started companies and then sold after a few years. The best-known of these appears to be DuoCash, [22] a micropayments company made infamous through a series of photographs posted on MindVox, [23] taken from the DuoCash office building, located across the street from where the World Trade Center had stood a few days before. [24] [25]
Phrack is an e-zine written by and for hackers, first published November 17, 1985. It had a wide circulation which included both hackers and computer security professionals.
Phreaking is a slang term coined to describe the activity of a culture of people who study, experiment with, or explore telecommunication systems, such as equipment and systems connected to public telephone networks. The term phreak is a sensational spelling of the word freak with the ph- from phone, and may also refer to the use of various audio frequencies to manipulate a phone system. Phreak, phreaker, or phone phreak are names used for and by individuals who participate in phreaking.
The Conscience of a Hacker is a short essay written on January 8, 1986 by Loyd Blankenship, a computer security hacker who went by the handle The Mentor, and belonged to the second generation of hacker group Legion of Doom.
Masters of Deception (MOD) was a New York–based group of hackers, most widely known in media for their exploits of telephone company infrastructure and later prosecution.
MindVox was an early Internet service provider in New York City. The service was referred to as "the Hells Angels of Cyberspace".
Loyd Blankenship, better known by his pseudonym The Mentor, is an American computer hacker and writer. He has been active since the 1970s, when he was a member of the hacker groups Extasyy Elite and Legion of Doom.
Operation Sundevil was a 1990 nationwide United States Secret Service crackdown on "illegal computer hacking activities." It involved raids in approximately fifteen different cities and resulted in three arrests and the confiscation of computers, the contents of electronic bulletin board systems (BBSes), and floppy disks. It was revealed in a press release on May 9, 1990. The arrests and subsequent court cases resulted in the creation of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The operation is now seen as largely a public-relations stunt. Operation Sundevil has also been viewed as one of the preliminary attacks on the Legion of Doom and similar hacking groups. The raid on Steve Jackson Games, which led to the court case Steve Jackson Games, Inc. v. United States Secret Service, is often attributed to Operation Sundevil, but the Electronic Frontier Foundation states that it is unrelated and cites this attribution as a media error.
Mark Abene is an American information security expert and entrepreneur, originally from New York City. Better known by his pseudonym Phiber Optik, he was once a member of the hacker groups Legion of Doom and Masters of Deception.
Chris Goggans is an American hacker, a founding member of the Legion of Doom group, and a former editor of Phrack magazine. He is known as an expert in security as well as for his statements on hacker ethics and responsibility.
Craig Neidorf, a.k.a.Knight Lightning, is an American editor. He was one of the founding editors of Phrack Magazine, an ezine.
The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier is a work of nonfiction by Bruce Sterling first published in 1992.
Festering Hate and CyberAIDS are the names of the first two Apple ProDOS viruses. CyberAIDS appears to have been a series of viruses with minor changes in the code, culminating in the final version called Festering Hate, which appeared in 1988. When the virus went off, the title page credited "Rancid Grapefruit" and "Cereal Killer" of the "Kool/Rad Alliance!"
Phantom Access was the name given to a series of hacking programs written by Patrick Kroupa of LOD. The programs were worked on during the early to mid-1980s (1982–1986), and designed to run on the Apple II computer and Apple-Cat modem.
John Lee, a.k.a. John Threat, used the name "Corrupt" as a member of Masters of Deception (MOD), a New York based hacker group in the early '90s.
Leonard Rose, aka Terminus, is an American hacker who in 1991 accepted a plea bargain that convicted him of two counts of wire fraud stemming from publishing an article in Phrack magazine.
Patrick Karel Kroupa known colloquially as Lord Digital is an American writer, hacker and activist. Kroupa was a member of the Legion of Doom and Cult of the Dead Cow hacker groups and co-founded MindVox in 1991, with Bruce Fancher.
The PHIRM was an early hacking group which was founded in the early 1980s. First going by the name of "KILOBAUD", the firm was reorganized in 1985 to reflect Airwolf, a favorite television show of the time. By the mid-1980s The PHIRM was sysopping hundreds of boards. Some of the more notable boards included Thieves' Underground sysoped by Jack The Ripper, Angel's Nest sysoped by Archangel, World's Grave Elite sysoped by Sir Gamelord, and SATCOM IV. The PHIRM broke up in 1990, voluntarily, stating that after the Legion of Doom arrests that they had become too high-profile.
Plover-NET, often misspelled Plovernet, was a popular bulletin board system in the early 1980s. Hosted in New York state and originally owned and operated by a teenage hacker who called himself Quasi-Moto, whom was a member of the short lived yet famed Fargo 4A phreak group. The popular bulletin board system attracted a large group of hackers, telephone phreaks, engineers, computer programmers, and other technophiles, at one point reaching over 600 users until LDX, a long distance phone company, began blocking all calls to its number (516-935-2481).
Elias Ladopoulos is a technologist and investor from New York City. Under the pseudonym Acid Phreak, he was a founder of the Masters of Deception (MOD) hacker group along with Phiber Optik and Scorpion. Referred to as The Gang That Ruled Cyberspace in a 1995 non-fiction book, MOD was at the forefront of exploiting telephone systems to hack into the private networks of major corporations. In his later career, Ladopoulos developed new techniques for electronic trading and computerized projections of stocks and shares performance, as well as working as a security consultant for the defense department. As of 2015, he is CEO of Supermassive Corp, which is a hacker-based incubation studio for technology start-ups.
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