Mark Abene

Background

Mark Abene was born on February 23, 1972, in New York City. He became active in the computer underground during the 1980s as a teenager, exploring dial-up bulletin board systems and minicomputer platforms of the period, and adopted the handle "Phiber Optik." His interests centered on telephone switching systems and the networks that connected them, a specialty that placed him in the overlap between traditional phone phreaking and the emerging practice of computer network intrusion.

Abene became a member of the Legion of Doom, the influential hacker group founded in 1984 by a hacker using the alias Lex Luthor. He was unusual in belonging simultaneously to the Legion of Doom and to the Masters of Deception, a rival New York group formed in the late 1980s whose founding members included Elias Ladopoulos ("Acid Phreak"), Paul Stira ("Scorpion"), and a member known as HAC. Other participants associated with the group included John Lee ("Corrupt") and Julio Fernandez ("Outlaw"). The rivalry between the two groups, sometimes described in later accounts as a hacker war, drew heavily on the personalities and reputations of their members.

The 1990 raid and state charges

On January 15, 1990, AT&T's long-distance network suffered a widely publicized collapse. Nine days later, on January 24, 1990, the United States Secret Service and New York State Police searched the homes of Abene and other New York hackers, including Acid Phreak and Scorpion, and seized property, based in part on suspicions that the hackers had caused the AT&T outage. AT&T subsequently attributed the failure to a flawed software update to its switching systems rather than to intrusion. The raid formed part of the broader wave of law enforcement activity against the computer underground that Bruce Sterling chronicled in The Hacker Crackdown.

In February 1991, Abene was arrested and charged under New York state law with computer tampering and computer trespass in the first degree. He initially pleaded not guilty, and eventually accepted a plea agreement to a lesser misdemeanor charge, for which he was sentenced to 35 hours of community service.

Federal prosecution

In December 1991, Abene was arrested along with four other members of the Masters of Deception. On July 8, 1992, a federal grand jury in Manhattan returned an eleven-count indictment against the group, prosecuted by the United States Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York. The case was notable procedurally: it was described as the first investigative use of court-authorized wiretaps in the United States to obtain the conversations and data transmissions of computer hackers. Within roughly six months of the indictment, all five defendants had pleaded guilty, receiving sentences ranging from probation to imprisonment.

Abene was sentenced by Judge Stanton to one year in federal prison. He served the term at the federal prison facility at Schuylkill, Pennsylvania, and was released in November 1994. On January 5, 1994, on the eve of his departure for prison, the New York radio program Off the Hook devoted an episode to him, and the following week's broadcast covered what it called the story of his trip to prison.

Aftermath and later career

Abene's release was marked in January 1995 by a celebration in New York billed as "Phiberphest '95" at Irving Plaza. Writing in Time, Joshua Quittner described him as "the first underground hero of the Information Age, the Robin Hood of cyberspace," a framing that reflected how sharply opinion had divided over whether his sentence was proportionate to the conduct charged. Quittner and Michelle Slatalla went on to publish a book-length account of the group, Masters of Deception: The Gang That Ruled Cyberspace, in 1995.

After his release, Abene worked in information security as a consultant and became a frequent speaker at universities and industry conferences, and he has given interviews on the history of the early computer underground. He also appeared in the film Urchin, released in the United States in February 2007.

Significance

Abene is remembered less for any single technical achievement than for the way his case shaped the legal and cultural treatment of hacking. The Masters of Deception prosecution demonstrated that federal authorities would apply conspiracy statutes and surveillance tools developed for organized crime to computer intrusion, setting expectations for the prosecutions that followed throughout the 1990s. At the same time, the sympathy his sentence attracted among journalists and technologists helped consolidate a narrative of the curious teenage hacker as a figure deserving of measured rather than exemplary punishment. His subsequent move into professional security work also prefigured a common trajectory, in which knowledge acquired in the underground was later applied in a commercial defensive context.

Timeline

• 1972-02-23Born in New York City.
• 1980sBecomes active in the computer underground under the handle Phiber Optik; joins the Legion of Doom and later the Masters of Deception.
• 1990-01-15AT&T's long-distance network collapses; the outage is later attributed to a flawed software update to its switching systems.
• 1990-01-24The U.S. Secret Service and New York State Police search the homes of Abene and other New York hackers and seize property.
• 1991-02Arrested and charged under New York state law with computer tampering and computer trespass in the first degree; later pleads to a lesser misdemeanor and receives 35 hours of community service.
• 1991-12Arrested along with four other members of the Masters of Deception.
• 1992-07-08Indicted on eleven counts by a federal grand jury in Manhattan, in a case described as the first investigative use of court-authorized wiretaps against computer hackers in the United States.
• 1993Sentenced by Judge Stanton to one year in federal prison.
• 1994-01-05The radio program Off the Hook devotes an episode to Abene on the eve of his departure for prison.
• 1994-11Released after serving his sentence at the federal prison facility at Schuylkill, Pennsylvania.
• 1995-01Return celebrated in New York at an event billed as Phiberphest '95 at Irving Plaza.
• 1995Michelle Slatalla and Joshua Quittner publish Masters of Deception: The Gang That Ruled Cyberspace.
• 2007-02Appears in the film Urchin, released in the United States.