Phreaking in United States
Phreaking
Overview of Phreaking in relation to cyber crime: [1] Initially, phreaking was pioneered by blind teenagers in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Some of these teenagers, such as Joe Engressia (aka ”Joybubbles”), had the ability to whistle tones into the telephone with perfect pitch. Using this and similar abilities, in combination with clever manipulation of telephone operators and engineers, Engressia and many other phreaks explored and exploited telephone networks throughout the world. Phreaking spread from blind teenagers as they contacted other young people with technical engineering and electronics skills for the construction of tone generating devices (Sterling, 1992). These ”homebrew” devices were referred to as ”boxes” and performed a variety of different functions. The most notorious of these was the ”blue box” that was used to generate the same control tones that telephone operators had access to, allowing free telephone calls among other functions. Other commonly engineered and used boxes allowed users to accept phone calls free of charge to the caller (black box) or allow free phone calls from pay phones (red box).
Resources
Notes and References
- By Nathan Fisk
See Also
- Types of Cybercrime
- Cybercriminal
Further Reading
Rosenbaum, R. (1971, October). Secrets of the little blue box. Esquire, 124; Gadaix, E. (2004, October 14). Phreaking in the 21st century. Presented at HITBSecConf2004, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; Sterling, B. (1992). The hacker crackdown. New York: Bantam.