The Underground
The culture that grew up around breaking things: 2600, the bulletin boards, the Chaos Computer Club, DEF CON and the conference circuit, the FREE KEVIN campaign, and later the hacktivism of Anonymous and LulzSec. This is where the field recruited itself, long before it had an industry.
Part of Cybersecurity
46 moments in this segment.
- — CBS Nightwatch on computer security after WarGames. A 1983 CBS Nightwatch segment on computer safety, hackers and the 414s, broadcast after the group's intrusions into systems including Los Alamos National Laboratory and while WarGames had made nuclear-command fears mainstream. Period television coverage of the first hacking panic.
- — Hackers in Switzerland, 1989. Swiss television reports on the hacker scene that emerged alongside the arrival of personal computers in the workplace during the 1980s, and on young people repeatedly breaking into supposedly secure systems. The item is drawn from the SRF archive.
- — The 2600 panel at the first HOPE conference. The 2600 panel recorded at Hackers On Planet Earth on 13 August 1994, in which the magazine's staff discuss how it started, the lawsuits and letters it attracted, and the people behind the pseudonyms. It is a primary record of the first HOPE and of hacker publishing in the early nineties.
- — The 'FREE KEVIN' bumper sticker. The yellow FREE KEVIN sticker produced by 2600 magazine during Kevin Mitnick's four and a half years of pre-trial detention after his 1995 arrest. It became the visual shorthand for a hacker community that felt the state was wildly overreacting. The design itself dates from the 1990s.
- — Phone hackers on BBC's The Net. A segment from the BBC series The Net on the harassment of writers Josh Quittner and Michelle Slatalla, whose phone line was attacked after they wrote about the New York hacking group Masters of Deception. It documents the reprisal culture of the early 1990s scene.
- — Session transcripts from the Kevin Mitnick investigation. A long screen capture of the session transcripts associated with the tracking of Kevin Mitnick, annotated with timestamps by the uploader. Raw material rather than narrative: the logs themselves, as they were presented.
- — The L0pht hackers testify before the US Senate, 1998. Full footage of the 19 May 1998 hearing before the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs, at which seven members of the Boston hacker collective L0pht testified under their handles - Mudge, Brian Oblivion, Kingpin, Tan, Space Rogue, Weld Pond and Stefan von Neumann. It is the moment the underground and US legislators spoke to each other on the record.
- — Back Orifice 2000 behind the scenes at DEF CON 7. Footage shot inside the Cult of the Dead Cow's suite in the hours before the group released Back Orifice 2000 at DEF CON 7 in Las Vegas. The tape sat unreleased for twenty years before cDc published it. First-hand documentation of a defining moment in hacker-group culture and remote-administration tooling.
- — Television special report on Kevin Mitnick. A broadcast special report on Kevin Mitnick, made around the time of his release, covering the pursuit, the 1995 arrest and the sentence. Period television treatment of the case that shaped the public image of hacking.
- — Freedom Downtime premieres at 17C3. The first showing of 2600's documentary Freedom Downtime, on the Free Kevin Mitnick campaign, followed by a talk from the magazine's editor Eric Corley. It was presented at the seventeenth Chaos Communication Congress.
- — Adrian Lamo. the 'homeless hacker' who broke into The New York Times and Microsoft from public library terminals. In 2010 he reported Chelsea Manning to the US Army, splitting the hacker community and prefiguring the Snowden argument three years later. Cropped from a group photograph taken around 2001.
- — Adrian Lamo, Kevin Mitnick and Kevin Poulsen, c. 2001. The three best-known American hackers of their generation photographed together around 2001: Adrian Lamo, Kevin Mitnick and Kevin Poulsen. Poulsen had rigged radio-station phone lines to win a Porsche; Mitnick had just come off supervised release; Lamo would later report Chelsea Manning to the FBI. All three ended up on the other side of the fence.
- — Cult of the Dead Cow activism panel at DEF CON 9. The Cult of the Dead Cow's panel on hacktivism at DEF CON 9, held in Las Vegas in July 2001. The group used its DEF CON appearances to argue that hacking tools and techniques could serve human rights work.
- — PBS Frontline: Hackers. The full 2001 Frontline documentary on computer intrusion, profiling self-described hackers and the investigators pursuing them at the point where network crime was becoming a mainstream concern. A period broadcast documentary preserved by an archival channel.
- — Project Blinkenlights at 22C3, Berlin, 2005. The Chaos Computer Club's Blinkenlights installation at the 22nd Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin, December 2005. The CCC, founded in 1981, is the oldest and most politically serious hacker organisation in Europe, and its annual congress predates DEF CON by more than a decade.
- — Trailer for the hacking documentary Code 2600. The official trailer for Code 2600, a feature documentary by Jeremy Zerechak on the rise of the information age and the hacker culture that grew alongside it. It is a short montage rather than the full film.
- — Kevin Mitnick demonstrating a keylogger, Campus Party 2010. Mitnick after his reinvention as a security consultant, holding up a hardware keylogger at Campus Party 2010. His talk was on social engineering, the technique that actually got him into most systems: he talked his way in far more often than he broke in. The image documents how the 1990s outlaw became the industry's most bookable speaker.
- — Freedom Downtime, the 2600 film about Kevin Mitnick. The complete 2600 Films documentary on Kevin Mitnick, who was held for nearly five years without bail, and on the Free Kevin campaign that grew around his case. Directed by Emmanuel Goldstein, it is a first-hand record of the hacker community arguing its own case.
- — The 2600 telephone-company van. 2600's modified New York Telephone van at the 2011 Maker Faire, a joke about the social engineering technique of simply dressing as the phone company and walking in. It is the phreaking era's sense of humour preserved intact.
- — Disinformation, a short film on the Cult of the Dead Cow. An eleven-minute documentary portrait of the American hacker group Cult of the Dead Cow, whose members discuss Back Orifice 2000 and its effect on the security industry. The film shows the group demonstrating remote control of a Windows machine.
- — We Are Legion, the hacktivism documentary. Brian Knappenberger's feature documentary on hacktivism and the rise of Anonymous, built from interviews with participants and observers. It traces the collective from imageboard pranks through Project Chanology and the payment-processor campaigns.
- — Our World: Meet the Hackers. A BBC Our World documentary in which Susan Watts meets a young member of LulzSec and traces how he was drawn into a life lived almost entirely online. It is the closest thing to a first-hand television account of the LulzSec period.
- — Hacking the Czech parliament by SMS, 30C3. A Chaos Communication Congress talk on flaws that allowed the speaker to interfere with systems used by the Czech parliament through text messages. A raw congress recording.
- — Kevin Poulsen. once 'Dark Dante' and the first American hacker banned from touching a computer, later an editor at Wired and co-creator of the SecureDrop whistleblower system. His arc is the clearest example of the 1990s hacker-to-journalist pipeline.
- — HOPE X conference badge, 2014. The badge from the tenth Hackers On Planet Earth conference in New York, July 2014. HOPE is run by 2600 magazine and is the direct institutional descendant of the phone-phreak scene that opens this archive.
- — The Hacker Wars. A feature documentary on hacktivists and the prosecutions brought against them, drawing on interviews with the people involved. It covers the legal pressure applied to activists and journalists associated with Anonymous.
- — CCC year in review, 32C3. The Chaos Computer Club's annual review session at the 32nd Chaos Communication Congress, covering the club's work over the year, its disclosures and its policy fights. A raw congress recording in German and English.
- — How the L0pht ended up testifying in Washington. The Washington Post interviews two members of the L0pht about how the collective formed and how it came to tell a Senate committee in May 1998 that it could take down the internet in thirty minutes. A retrospective built on first-hand recollection.
- — The contest area at DEF CON 24, 2016. Work tables in the contest area at DEF CON 24. The capture-the-flag and hardware-hacking villages are where the culture actually happens, and they look nothing like the stock image of hacking: fluorescent light, folding tables and laptops.
- — 2600: The Hacker Quarterly. An issue of 2600: The Hacker Quarterly, named for the 2600 Hz tone that opened AT&T's trunks. Founded in 1984 by Eric Corley, it ran continuously through Operation Sundevil, the Mitnick prosecution and the crypto wars, and published the FREE KEVIN campaign.
- — Jake Davis on why hackers do it. A talk by Jake Davis, formerly of Anonymous and LulzSec, on how loose groups of young people assemble around a shared idea and go on to hack global organisations, and what motivates them. A first-hand account from inside one of the most publicised hacking crews.
- — OpSec talk at 35C3. A German-language talk from the 35th Chaos Communication Congress in Leipzig on operational security for people doing offensive computer work. It is a raw conference recording from the CCC's own media archive.
- — DEF CON badges. A collection of DEF CON badges, including the electronic ones. DEF CON has run in Las Vegas since 1993 and its badge, an actual working circuit board with an embedded puzzle, is the conference's signature artifact. Badge hacking is now a genre of its own.
- — Hacking police speed measurement at DEF CON 27. Bill Swearingen's DEF CON 27 talk on reverse-engineering police speed-measurement devices and building countermeasures. A raw conference recording from the DEF CON archive.
- — US Air Force cyber airmen at DEF CON 27, 2019. Airmen from the 90th Cyberspace Operations Squadron running a demonstration at DEF CON 27 in August 2019. Twenty years earlier the federal government treated the same conference as a threat; this image documents the absorption of hacker culture into the state. US Air Force work, public domain.
- — Kevin Mitnick on stage, Perth 2019. Mitnick presenting at an Australian Information Security Association event in Perth in 2019, four years before his death in 2023. A useful late-career frame if the archive wants to close his thread rather than leave him in the 1990s.
- — Mustafa Al-Bassam on Anonymous and LulzSec. A first-hand interview with Mustafa Al-Bassam, a former member of Anonymous and a founder of LulzSec, on how he got into hacking as a teenager and on the group's 2011 attacks. A participant account rather than a retelling.
- — The Koobface botnet and the hunt for a hacker. A documentary episode built around the Koobface botnet, which spread through social networks from 2008, alongside the manhunt for Kevin Mitnick. Traces how malware moved onto social platforms.
- — A visitor's tour of the 37th Chaos Communication Congress. Footage and impressions from 37C3, the Chaos Computer Club's annual congress in Hamburg, filmed by an American attendee for a US security audience. It is a useful outsider's record of the CCC's assemblies, art installations and talk culture, the European counterweight to DEF CON.
- — 37C3, Hamburg, December 2023. Setup day before the 37th Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg. Forty years on from the CCC's founding, the congress runs at the scale of a small city, which is itself the story: what was a subculture is now infrastructure.
- — Newsthink profile of Kevin Mitnick's social engineering. A researched profile of Kevin Mitnick, the hacker whose intrusions into telecom and technology companies made him the most publicised computer-crime defendant of the 1990s. The video's focus is social engineering: persuading people, rather than breaking code, was his primary technique.
- — Cult of the Dead Cow panel on forty years of hacker history at DEF CON 32. Members of the Cult of the Dead Cow and their contemporaries look back over four decades, from Texas bulletin-board culture in the mid-1980s through the group's later releases and public campaigns. A first-hand oral history from people who were inside the scene.
- — Reticulum networking talk at 38C3. A Chaos Communication Congress talk presenting Reticulum, a cryptography-based networking stack designed to keep working over high-latency, low-bandwidth and adversarial links using commodity radio hardware. It is a working example of the CCC's long-running interest in infrastructure that cannot easily be switched off.
- — NetworkChuck's first DEF CON. A first-timer's walk through DEF CON 33 in Las Vegas: the villages, lockpicking, car hacking, and encounters with people behind well-known security tools. Useful as a record of what the conference actually looks like on the floor rather than on stage.
- — Fern's account of Kevin Mitnick. A carefully sourced telling of the Mitnick case, drawing on the published books about it, covering the intrusions, the manhunt, the years he spent in custody before trial and the gap between the media portrayal and the record. One of the better treatments of how the story was inflated as it was told.
- — Hector Monsegur on LulzSec and what came after. A long interview with Hector Monsegur, who as Sabu was part of LulzSec before being arrested and cooperating with the FBI, and who now works as a security researcher. A first-hand account from inside one of the most consequential hacktivist crews of the early 2010s.
