Masters of Deception: The Gang That Ruled Cyberspace [Paperback]

Michele Slatalla (Author)

Book Description

Release date: December 1, 1995

The bestselling account of a band of kids from New York who fought an electronic turf war that ranged across some of the nation's most powerful computer systems. "An immensely fun and -- one cannot emphasize this enough -- accessible history of the first outlaws in cyberspace."--Glamour

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

On January 15, 1990, the AT&T long-distance phone network crashed. Although it was eventually ruled an accident, the event was a wake-up call to telephone companies and law enforcement agencies everywhere, exposing the fragility of the systems that we all heavily depend on. The feds decided that the time had come to crack down on the handful of computer hackers they had been monitoring for several years in connection with the phone companies. The term "hacker" is about to become a household word, and not in the sense of "great programming."

Set against this backdrop, two rival gangs--The Legion of Doom and The Masters of Deception--are about to go to war. What sounds like a clash of comic-book supervillains is actually a feud between factions of teenagers, fueled by misunderstandings and adolescent testosterone. The events leading up to the conflict and its climax are riveting and fun. The book features great depictions of some of the earliest celebrities of hackerdom, including Acid Phreak and Phiber Optik, as well as tales of their exploits and rivalries. Slatalla and Quittner do a great job of portraying the principals as both the powerful cyberspace masters they want to be and the scared, emotional young men they really are.

There is also a nostalgic attraction at work in Masters of Deception. Anyone who remembers their first Commie 64 or TRS-80 will long for those golden days and be thankful that they were elsewhere when the Secret Service came calling.

From Publishers Weekly

This riveting account of electronic gang warfare and computer crimes by two rival bands of hackers raises disturbing questions about computer security. One group of brainy teens based in New York City and calling themselves Masters of Deception (MOD) downloaded confidential credit histories (including those of Geraldo Rivera and Julia Roberts), broke into AT&T's computer system and stole credit-card numbers. Their arch rivals, the Texas-based Legion of Doom (LOD), launched a security service firm to assist corporations whose computers MOD has penetrated. MOD had one African American member, and it was the racial epithet electronically hurled at him by LOD hackers that triggered the feud, according to New York Newsday reporters Slatalla and Quittner, husband-and-wife coauthors of mystery fiction. The Secret Service, using unprecedented authorized datataps (wiretaps on a computer), helped bust MOD in 1992; four hackers got jail sentences ranging from six months to a year. First serial to Wired; author tour.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial (December 1, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060926945
• ISBN-13: 978-0060926946
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.3 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (78 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #441,859 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Never put it down January 22, 2000

By Lars Rasmusson

Format:Paperback

I read this book a while ago, but I was still so impressed by it that as I'm showing a friend of mine the web page here I couldn't help but add a review. My aunt bought me this book for Christmas, and I put it down only once over the course of two days. Masters of Deception brought to me, a teenager in the computer age, a wonderfully vivid description of what it was like to be a pioneer in the world of the Internet. With 100,000,000 people on the net or however many there are now, companies have become so security aware that adventures like the ones in the book require an amazing amount of expertise. Not to mention how much damage we can do now that the computing sector makes so much money. But the point is that through this book we're able to relive the experience, with all of the wonder and naive excitement that comes with exploring new territory, and we don't have to damage anything. The book was technically vivid, emotionally engaging, and just plain fascinating.

15 of 18 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Painful to read: cliched and factually wrong July 7, 2001

By zem

Format:Paperback

I read this after reading Clifford Stoll's Cuckoo's Egg which is a much better book on the same subject matter. Stoll is just a smart and observant graduate student who simply tries to tell his story accurately. The 2 authors of Masters of Deception are apparently professional writers and they spend too much time trying to liven up what is essentially an account of high school and college kids playing on computers. You get the feeling they writing this with a screenplay in mind. The book is filled with cliches, bad metaphors, contrived rhetorical questions: "Destroy people's lives? Make them look like saints? Is this what hackers do?" There is very little interesting technical info and much of what there is is dumbed down and often wrong. The discussion of tymnet in chapter 13 is completely off. They obviously don't understand it. Cuckoo's Egg is much better and even the Littman books are better books on the same topic.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Slightly cliched, but a good read. April 14, 2002

By "asestrin"

Format:Paperback

This book is essentially a slightly jumbled, chronologically organized log of all the events and occurences that lead to the hacking scandal of the early 1990's and the war between MOD and LOD, two rival hacker groups.

The book begins with an introduction to all these hacker kids, and continues on through all their hacking exploits, life occurences, and various important events leading up to the cyberspace war, and computer law scandal.

The book is cliched in some ways, and attempts to answer the question of what a hacker really is, and what a hacker really does. In the end the book ends up being a bit of a cautionary tale.

None of the boys' deepest feelings or psyches are really explored, and it really seems that if they ever get below the surface to show what they're really thinking, it's very brief. In the end it seems a bit like reading a log of events.

All in all the book is informative, and there are few, if any, technical mistakes (not that there is much technical dialogue to begin with).

I urge you to buy this book, simply to be informed, and if you're up for some light reading on the subject, it's likely you'll enjoy it.