Phone Phreaks: What We Can Learn From the First Network Hackers?

Before smartphones and iPads, before the Internet or the personal computer, a misfit group of technophiles, blind teenagers, hippies, and outlaws figured out how to hack the world's largest machine: the telephone system. Lapsley will trace the birth of the telephone, the rise of AT&T's monopoly, the discovery of the Achilles heel in Ma Bell's network, and the advent of the kids and outlaws—the "phone phreaks"—who hacked the telephone network for fun and profit in the 1960s and 1970s. He will conclude with some lessons identified (if not actually learned!) relevant to today's network security environment.

Phil Lapsley is the author of Exploding The Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell, described as the "definitive account of the first generation of network hackers" and as a "fantastically fun romp." Lapsley co-founded two high-technology companies in the San Francisco Bay Area before moving to McKinsey & Company. He holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in EECS from the University of California, Berkeley and an MBA from MIT Sloan. He is the coauthor of a book on digital signal processors, 19 patents, and numerous technical articles. He is also the co-creator of Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP).