Chris Goggans

Background

Chris Goggans is an American computer security practitioner who is better known in the history of the computer underground by the handle Erik Bloodaxe. He came to prominence in Austin, Texas, in the late 1980s as a member of the Legion of Doom, the loose hacker group whose members produced technical files on telephone switching, packet-switched networks and operating-system security and circulated them through bulletin board systems and the electronic magazine Phrack.

By late 1989 Goggans was co-sysop of the Austin bulletin board Phoenix Project, run by Loyd Blankenship, who used the handle The Mentor. In The Hacker Crackdown, Bruce Sterling describes Phoenix Project as a Legion of Doom board intended to revive the digital underground and to bring hackers into direct contact with telephone-company security staff, and describes Goggans at the time as a University of Texas student and an avowed member of the group.

The 1990 Secret Service raid

On the morning of 1 March 1990, as part of the federal investigation that also produced the raids on Loyd Blankenship and on the publisher Steve Jackson Games, United States Secret Service agents searched Goggans' Austin residence. Sterling records that agents seized his terminal and other electronic equipment, including his telephone, and found a copy of the source code for the Morris worm among his files. Goggans was neither arrested nor charged; Sterling notes that two years later the authorities still held the material they had taken.

An intercepted 1990 telephone call involving Goggans and the Australian hacker Nahshon Even-Chaim was later described by the Australian investigators Bill Apro and Graeme Hammond as evidence used in proceedings against Even-Chaim in Australia. According to their account the conversation touched on access to systems belonging to Execucom, a Texas software company.

Comsec Data Security

Around 1990 and 1991 Goggans and several other Legion of Doom associates founded Comsec Data Security, a computer security consultancy generally referred to simply as Comsec. In the account published by Michelle Slatalla and Joshua Quittner in Wired in December 1994, the venture grew directly out of the running feud with the New York group Masters of Deception, whose members had harassed Goggans by telephone and had used a Southwestern Bell switch to alter his long-distance carrier. Comsec opened in Houston in May 1991, and the Slatalla and Quittner account states that a Time magazine story about the founders published the following month brought the firm its first paying clients.

The same account describes Masters of Deception member John Lee eavesdropping on Comsec's own telephone lines through a Southwestern Bell switch, and Goggans contacting the FBI after discovering the interception. A federal indictment charging five Masters of Deception members with computer intrusion was announced in July 1992. Comsec did not survive; in a 1993 interview published the following year, Goggans attributed its failure to a combination of negative press coverage and what he described as being shut out by the established security industry.

The LOD-MOD conflict

Goggans was one of the principal antagonists in the running dispute between the Legion of Doom and Masters of Deception that later became known as the hacker war. The Slatalla and Quittner account describes him running a copy of the Masters of Deception group history through a program that substituted words to produce a mock dialect version, a stunt widely criticised as racist, and later selling T-shirts at the December 1992 Ho-Ho Con gathering in Houston bearing the slogan The Hacker War and the score LOD 1, MOD 0. With other former Legion of Doom members he also assembled and sold archives of message traffic from 1980s bulletin boards through a venture called LOD Communications.

Editing Phrack

Goggans edited Phrack magazine during its middle period. Phrack's own issue records credit Erik Bloodaxe as editor of issues 42 through 47, from issue 42 dated 1 March 1993 to issue 47 dated 15 April 1995; editorship then passed to Voyager for issue 48 in January 1996 and to daemon9 for issue 49 in November 1996. Goggans also wrote technical material for the magazine, including a piece on packet-switched network security in issue 42.

Under his editorship Phrack sponsored SummerCon '95, which was opened to the public rather than run by invitation. A conference report published in IEEE Cipher records that Goggans opened the event on Saturday 3 June 1995 and closed it with a talk on international hacking in which he argued that the hacker community lacked focus and suggested, using France as his example, that it direct its attention at a foreign country. The remark drew attention as an example of the unsettled relationship between the underground and the emerging professional security field.

Later career and significance

Goggans moved into professional security work, serving as a senior network security engineer at WheelGroup, and has been credited as a co-author on several computer security books, among them Implementing Internet Security, Internet Security Professional Reference, Windows NT Security and The Complete Internet Business Toolkit. In an interview conducted at Pumpcon in 1993 and published in Gray Areas in 1994, he said that destructive hacking ran contrary to his understanding of hacker ethics and that he had never destroyed data or intentionally damaged systems.

His significance lies less in any single intrusion than in the transition he represents. Comsec was one of the earliest attempts to convert underground expertise into a commercial security consultancy, and its difficulties illustrated how little appetite the corporate market of the early 1990s had for consultants with hacking reputations. His editorship of Phrack spanned the period in which the magazine shifted from telephone-network material toward internet and Unix security, and his public disputes with Masters of Deception remain among the most extensively documented episodes of the pre-commercial hacker scene.

Timeline

• 1989Goggans is co-sysop, with Loyd Blankenship (The Mentor), of the Austin bulletin board Phoenix Project, described by Bruce Sterling as a Legion of Doom board.
• 1990-03-01U.S. Secret Service agents search Goggans' Austin home on the same day as the raids on Loyd Blankenship and Steve Jackson Games; he is not arrested or charged.
• 1990An intercepted telephone call between Goggans and Australian hacker Nahshon Even-Chaim is later described as evidence in Australian proceedings against Even-Chaim.
• 1990The dispute with the New York group Masters of Deception escalates, including telephone harassment and the alteration of Goggans' long-distance carrier via a Southwestern Bell switch.
• 1991-05Comsec Data Security, founded by Goggans and other Legion of Doom associates, opens for business in Houston.
• 1991-06A Time magazine story about the Comsec founders, published about a month after the firm's debut, brings the company its first paying clients.
• 1992-07A federal indictment charging five Masters of Deception members with computer intrusion is announced; Goggans had earlier contacted the FBI about eavesdropping on Comsec's phone lines.
• 1992-12At Ho-Ho Con in Houston, Goggans sells T-shirts commemorating the hacker war with the slogan LOD 1, MOD 0.
• 1993-03-01Phrack issue 42 is released with Erik Bloodaxe credited as editor; Goggans also contributes an article on packet-switched network security.
• 1994-10-30Computer underground Digest reprints a Gray Areas interview with Goggans in which he says destructive hacking is contrary to his understanding of hacker ethics.
• 1995-04-15Phrack issue 47, the last credited to Erik Bloodaxe as editor, is released; issue 48 in January 1996 is edited by Voyager.
• 1995-06-03Goggans opens and closes SummerCon '95, sponsored by Phrack, arguing the hacker community lacks focus and suggesting it target a foreign country such as France.
• 1990sGoggans works as a senior network security engineer at WheelGroup and is credited as co-author on several computer security books.