Hafner, Katie and Markoff, John. Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier. New York: Simon & Schuster (Touchstone), 1992. 368 pages.

With the end of the Cold War, it seems that the "hacker gap" is replacing the "missile gap." The only thing that's certain is that the media can never be accused of a "hype gap." Katie Hafner, a technology reporter, and John Markoff, who reports on computers from the San Francisco bureau of the New York Times, take the dive into cyberpunk culture with this book.

They describe three notorious cases. One case is Kevin Mitnick, who thrived on junk food and began hanging out with Southern California phone phreaks in 1980. By 1988 he was busted by the FBI for breaking into Digital Equipment Corporation's computers. (He must be doing something right -- suddenly he's famous. So he keeps at it, and in 1995 is busted again.) Another case involves low-level Internet espionage by West Berlin's contribution to Generation X: punks who did it for fun and pocket change. The KGB, which provided the pocket change, basically got ripped off; it was the media who made out like bandits. The last case is more interesting: Roger Morris Sr., a hot-shot expert for the National Security Agency, raises a genius but forgets to teach him about right and wrong. Whereupon Roger Morris Jr. launches a virus that shuts down thousands of Internet computers in 1988. Junior gets probation, so the only real losers were all those trees that were cut down to follow the incident in newspaper headlines.
ISBN 0-671-77879-X

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