WarGamesthe Movie

One of the first mainstream examples of computer hacking that brought it into the public eye was the 1983 movie WarGames. In this movie, Mathew Broderick's teenage character, David Lightman, uses his IMSAI 8080 home computer and a 300 baud acoustic modem to hack into the US government's NORAD computer system. Once in, he stumbles across a war game scenario called "Global Thermonuclear War" that he thinks is just a game but turns out to be a real-life simulation that almost starts World War III.

How did he gain access? Pretty simply. He programmed his computer to sequentially dial phone numbers from, say 555-0000 to 555-9999, and listen for another computer modem to answer. If a person answered, the computer just hung up. His program ran unattended while he was at school and created a list of "hot" numbers. After school, with that narrowed down list, David called the numbers individually to see which ones would allow him to log-in.

In the case of the NORAD computer, he did some sleuthing to uncover the name of one of the government programmers and found the name of his deceased son. Typing the son's name, JOSHUA, into the login password field gained him full access to the military's "high security" computer system.

More than 20 years later, the technology has changed, but the processes and techniques remain the same. Software and computer systems are now much more interconnected and, unfortunately, there are many more hackers. You might say that WarGames has taken on a new meaning from what it had in the moviethe hackers are playing games and the software industry is fighting a war against them. Software security, or more correctly, the lack of it, has become a huge issue.

WAR DRIVING

With the popularity of wireless "WiFi" networks in metropolitan areas, resourceful hackers have discovered that they can search for open computer networks much like Mathew Broderick's character in WarGames. They simply drive around city streets, sit outside corporate buildings, and walk through coffee shops and restaurants with laptops or inexpensive "sniffers" looking for unprotected wireless networks. The technique, named after the movie, is known as "war driving."