How Telephone Phreaking Worked

[Music] [Music] every October for the last four years I have traveled to Portland Oregon to attend the Portland retro gaming expo it takes place in the Oregon Convention Center this convention is like mecca for the retro gaming enthusiasts the vendor area alone is truly amazing people come from all over to shop for games or look for that special vintage computer or gaming console that they've been wanting to find [Music] they'll often run into me and want to show me the cool thing that they managed to scoop up they also have gaming competitions here have multiplayer games of all kinds and of course lots and lots of original stand-up arcade machines these are all set to free plays so there's no need to insert a quarter or a token they also have an enormous number of pinball machines of course one of the most popular machines in the place is actually the ATM it always has aligned myself I don't usually get a chance to play much since I'm running a booth and doing a speech but I do sneak away for a little bit here and there to play something there are more Ataris than you can shake a stick at I also love the traditional 1980s living rooms they have set up but this one has an Atari 2600 and over here is a Nintendo they also have tabletop systems and when people get tired there's an area with beanbags you can take a break and relax some and much like any gaming convention there's a lot of cosplay going on I try to capture some of it [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] and this may be the only place you'll ever see Darth Vader riding a unicycle and playing the bagpipes they also host the tetris world championships here which I didn't get to see and there's a video game history museum so for example if you've ever wondered how big a complete set of Game Boy games is well now you know likewise there was a complete set of box Genesis games for Tusa what's in all of these clear display cases and here's one of the original Gameboy display units that has the larger screen so people can see what you're playing and here's a display of everything that would have been in a Nintendo tech support cubicle back in the day myself I found the telephone most interesting because it's the exact same model that I used to do text stored on at AST as I've discussed previously there were also dozens of celebrities at the event such as Pat NES funkier selling his books and metal Jesus but them I wasn't able to meet up with most of them because I was too busy people often ask me to autograph a variety of interesting objects and this year I tried to capture some of those and a lot of people bring me cartridges whether they be Nintendo cartridges or Game Boy cartridges etc but it isn't uncommon for people to ask me to sign things like this commodore vic-20 however this is the first time i've ever signed a macbook air looks like quite a few other people have signed it already now I'm the only one designed it in black I also signed one of those Hummer DTV games from back in the day and one of the neatest things was this laserdisc I was also asked to sign a pornographic anime magazine and now it's time for the main event here for this video which was my presentation on telephone freaking of the past okay people are gonna get started here even though people are still filing in just a little bit but we're running a little bit behind schedule so um every time I come to this convention I'm a little bit bad about getting the topic of my presentation given to the Expo so that they can print it on the materials and on the website and whatnot so it's it's always interesting how you guys come in having absolutely no idea what I'm gonna talk about and but you usually like it so this this year we're gonna be talking about phone phreaking now I told some people a few days ago that I was gonna be talking about phone phreaking in the Portland retro gaming expo and I was surprised a lot of people didn't even know what that was in fact a lot of people thought I was talking about telephone pranking which is not the same thing they're entirely different however back in the 1980s before the advent of caller ID I did my probably more than my fair share of telephone pranking however that's not actually what we're gonna be talking about although you can use freaking to accomplish pranking which we can talk about later so what is cell phone phreaking that is basically where you hack the telephone system in order to make long-distance calls for free among other things and I will preface this by saying it is highly illegal however before anybody gets worried about me teaching their kids about doing illegal things I will preface this entire presentation by saying everything I'm going to be talking about is obsolete no longer works it's just being presented for historical purposes freaking 'he's been around for quite a while probably not quite that long but started in like the 1960s became particularly popular in the 1970s and talked about how the the first method was using a 2600 Hertz tone and now explain a little bit about how that works so this is your typical well I wouldn't say typical but this is a DT F keypad now the original ones actually had these ABCD letters down the side but most year consumer telephones never had these but the operator phones did as well as the military phones had these and they had their own set of tones another way a DTMF tone works for those who don't know is you basically have particular frequencies across horizontally and then particular frequencies vertically and so when you push a button it actually combines these two tones and that creates the sounds you hear when you push buttons on the phone now a lot of people thought and still think that those buttons on the phone actually directly control the phone system but they don't they literally just make sounds and when I was a kid I thought yeah there must be some kind of direct connection between these buttons and the phone companies so they know which button I'm pushing and that the sounds I heard was just like a byproduct of how they work but in reality is I had it exactly opposite the tones is all of the phone company cares about and you can actually generate these tones externally for example you could record the DTMF tones to a cassette tape and then hold the cassette player up to your phone and it would actually dial the phone number and the phone company doesn't care where the tones come from as long as it hears tones that it recognizes and so this is kind of important for what we're going to be talking about here in just a minute so imagine this is your local neighborhood phone company here now there's going to be anywhere from dozens hundreds maybe thousands of telephone lines going into your local phone exchange and those phones could be home phones business phones payphones you know whatever now these phones can call each other without incurring any long distance charges and without even going outside of your local phone company but if you needed to make a long-distance call and that's where things changed and you would go over these other special lines that linked phone exchanges together and they were called trunk lines now trunk lines don't actually work all that different from a regular telephone line in that they also are controlled by tones or at least like they used to be and the trunk lines they had their own dial tone are their own ready tone and that tone was a 2600 Hertz tone which is really high-pitched sound not normally the type of sound that you would hear like in nature so it wouldn't necessarily be a problem the shoot of this is that if you were to place a long-distance phone call your local exchange would pick up a trunk line and dial a phone number for that trunk line to connect to and you would not typically have been aware of this it would happen right after you dialed your number but if a 2600 Hertz tone was introduced during the course of the call it would cause the trunk line to hang up and go back into ready mode and wait for you to dial the number of where you want to connect to so the officer this was that if you were to call a 1-800 number it's a toll-free number right your local exchange says oh well this is a long-distance call so we're going to need to use a trunk line but it's a toll-free call so we're not going to build a customer for this call so you would call the 1-800 number and then as soon as it starts ringing you could play the 2600 Hertz tone and the trunk line would hang up and wait for you to now enter a new number because it's back in ready mode again and then you could call whoever you wanted to and your local exchange still believes you're talking to a toll-free number so you didn't get billed for it and then the early 1970s one of the early pioneers of this method was John Draper and he went by the code name of Captain Crunch now you might wonder how a person would get a code name like Captain Crunch was a bit more straightforward than you might think it actually came from this little whistle that was included as a toy in the Captain Crunch cereal box back around 1971 or so and what Draper figured out was that there's two little ports on the side of that and if you covered one of them up it actually produced a 2600 Hertz tone perfect for causing trunk lines to hang up in fact one of the interesting offshoots he would talk about was that if you were to walk through an airport there would be banks of pay phones back then and people would be on the phones and of course you can imagine in an airport most of those calls are probably long-distance calls so they're probably using trunk lines and he could just walk by a bank at payphones and blow his little Captain Crunch whistle and it would hang up every payphone the people were talking on and they wouldn't know why they think there's something wrong with the phone company but yeah you could use that for literally making free telephone calls if you knew how so that was the 70s now when the computer age came in and 80s things changed quite a bit I'm gonna play you this little 60-second clip from the movie wargames when you've probably already seen this but I'll be just a little refresher here Oh dialing numbers expensive there's ways around that go to jail for that only if you're over 18 she asks isn't that expensive and his reply is that there's ways around that and and in the movie they never really go into any particular detail as to how he's getting around it and so we really don't know exactly which method he was using but there's actually a lot of different things happening in the scene and I wanted to go ahead and talk about some of that first I want a little refresher on how telephone numbers work and for most of the guys in this audience that are my age or older this is gonna be old news but for a lot of the younger kids who've grown up with cell phones they may not understand how the anatomy of a telephone number works so I want to start by talking about first three digits which is course the area code and this typically refers to a particular geographical area typically like a County something like that now back in my day we actually didn't even have to dial the area code we just dialed the seven digits and the only reason you would ever dial an area code back then was if you were making a long-distance phone call so that was one way you always knew whether your call was gonna be local or long-distance was whether you're not you were dialing the area code now I grew up in the Dallas Fort Worth area and we had primarily two area codes if you lived in Tarrant County where I did we had the area code of of eight one seven and if you lived in Dallas County then it was two one four actually we've got like ten different area codes and they're now but back in the 80s this was this is all we had and actually one were particularly unfortunate scenario was it was really expensive to call from Fort Worth to Dallas or Dallas to my Fort Worth and I've to this day do not really understand why that was because like I want to say that I could call like Dallas and it was like 85 cents a minute or something like that where I could call Los Angeles and it would be like 11 cents a minute or New York and it would be like 11 cents a minute or something but for some bizarre reason it was like four or five times more expensive to call between these two counties than to make an actual like really long-distance call and if you were really unfortunate and you lived along this dividing line your next-door neighbor could actually be like a really expensive phone call to make which is which is really crazy anyway the next three digits is the prefix and again this had particular significance back in the 80s the prefix would actually narrow down a very specific geographical area so back in the 80s the 473 prefix was the city of Mansfield which is where I lived so you knew if you saw a telephone number you could actually narrow down almost like a zip code you could narrow down a particular geographic area where that telephone number was and unlock cell phones and stuff today you know they can have any number and there's really not any significance to them but back then they you know you could you could tell a lot by looking at the phone number so if you wanted to be like David on wargames and you wanted a hack into your school computer and change your grade well before you can even start to hack the computer you'd have to find it first you'd have to know that not likely to tell the students what the number was to the modem for the school computer but you could probably make several assumptions in that the area code and prefix you could probably figure out just by the geographic location of your school in fact it would probably be the same as the main office number that would be advertised for to call the school so all you would have to figure out is the line number which is the last four digits so there's still 10,000 combinations but how could you narrow that down even more well you could do what they were doing in the movie which is called war dialing and so the way that works is you would have your computer and you would tell it probably before you go to bed at night to start calling phone numbers now you would are to go go ahead and tell it a specific area code and prefix and then you just started off at like 0 or 1 and it would just it would just start calling probably in the middle of night and probably some irritated person is you kind of wake up in the middle of the night answering a call there's not gonna be anybody there and the computer of course can't tell who answered the phone especially back then they couldn't even detect busy signals or ringtones or operator recordings or if a human being answered and said hello they couldn't tell all they knew is that there was no computer answering so they would just timeout and then after a moment later the computer would try again it would call the next number in the sequence and again you'd probably wind up with irritating some other person in the middle of the night but eventually after a certain amount of time you would call a number and another computer would answer and when this would happen the computer would mark that number as being significant it would either print it to your printer or it would save it to a disk for a file you could look at so when you get up in the morning after you've woke up half the town you could look and see there probably be about I know from experience about 20 about 20 or 30 computers that it would have found and those could be you know one of them was probably your school computer they could be banks or any number of things back in the time and you could attempt to hack into them but you know at least you've narrowed it down now to two 20 or 30 different phone numbers so that would give you a head start but let's talk about the second part about that which is how do you do it for free now we already talked about one way which was using a blue box now that was using the when they call a blue box it's because back then they actually had to construct a box back in the seventies to do this kind of stuff and there were all these different kinds of boxes that do different things now when the computer age came around we ended up doing a lot of these things with our personal computers so we didn't really need a box but we still called it blue boxing or black boxing red boxing or whatever and I'm not gonna go through all these because it would take like two hours I'm just gonna briefly tell you what some of these different ones did the blue box we already talked about which was the 2600 Hertz tone I'm an 800 number the black box actually kind of does the exact opposite you modify your own phone line so that when somebody calls you long distance it would trick the phone company into thinking that you haven't actually answered your phone yet it would the phone company on the other end would actually think that your phone was still ringing so they wouldn't actually charge the person calling you but you would actually be able to answer and talk to them didn't always work and only work in certain geographical areas but that was called a black box the red box this was used for payphones so just like trunk lines and regular phones payphones made very specific tones that they sent to the phone company to tell them how many quarters dimes or nickels that you've inserted and so you could actually take a red box and take it to a payphone and just hold it up to the microphone and you know push the button and it would create the sounds for quarters and the phone company would think you've inserted quarters you could put $10 worth of quarters in there for example and then make whatever call you wanted to - wherever you had to be a little bit careful though not to put I think there was a certain number I want to say it was like $200 like if you ever put more than $200 of fake quarters into pay phone they would immediately send the police to investigate because the phones actually couldn't hold more than that amount of money and so they had like a flag that says hey if any phone come ever says you've inserted like $300 send the police immediately to investigate that pay phone it's good to be a little bit careful how much money you told that you you were putting in there but the silver box adds the ABCD functions that the operators had which you could do multiple different things with adding and military phone lines also had the ABCD buttons and there's a lot of information could be talked about there but that would be a whole separate discussion oh and then there's the blotto box has anybody ever heard of a blotto box that's see a few hands yeah you know how you people you always say oh we used to sit around campfires and talk about this or that well you know us hackers when we were 12 we'd sit around campfires and talk about building blotto boxes and we believed seriously believe this actually existed although we found out later it was it was just a hoax it was mythical didn't really exist but the idea was you would take like a Honda generator or Tesla coil or something like that and hook it up to your phone line and it would paralyze the entire city's phone all the phones would ring constantly and nobody would be able to place or receive any calls and we thought that would be like the pinnacle of hacking to do that but it actually you know knowing what I know about electronics today you can immediately know this this would never work because those little copper wires I mean they much amperage could you possibly put down before they'd melt I mean come on but yeah we believe this back in time it was quite a fable so let's talk about another way of getting free phone calls and that was by using these calling cards now the way these worked these are ancient history as well but they looked very much like a credit card and they would have a code access code printed on the front and what you would do is if you had one of these cards you would call a local number or 1-800 number and then it would a little recording would come on saying please enter your access code and you would type in the code on the card and then you would get another doll tone and then you would type in the long-distance number you wanted to call and the purpose behind this was actually a lot for like travelling businessmen for example because if you needed a place your long-distance business calls you could do it from a payphone you could do it from a relative's house you could do it from a hotel room wherever you happen to be and you would make sure the calls got billed to your company's long-distance card instead of you know wherever you happen to be but all you had to do was find some access codes if you wanted hack these so how would you do that it'd actually be surprisingly similar to war dialing yeah you could set up your computer to call whatever access code or whatever the the the phone number was for the long-distance company and then just and then it would dial a random access code and then you would need to give the computer a known good modem number and it didn't matter what it was as long as it was a known good phone number that would guaranteed to be answered by a modem it could be a BBS it could be your school's computer it could be whatever as long as a modem would answer that line and so what the computer do would it would do this entire sequence and it would call that and then most likely it would timeout because the code probably doesn't work and so just repeat the same thing again and it would use another random number for the code and probably still wouldn't work but eventually it would another computer would answer the other line and what this would tell the program you are using is bingo that code worked and it would save that code to your print it to your printer or save it to your to your floppy disk and you would do this before going to bed at night and at least you don't wake up have to town town doing it but um you get up the next morning and bam you've got like five or six long-distance codes available and you would use those codes throughout the day now what you would do is you would do this every night because you wouldn't want to really use the same code over and over again because then you'd probably get caught because they'd be like well this this codes being abused all the time and it's coming from the same house so you just want to use new codes every day and that would keep the phone companies guessing as to what was going on there so that was another way of freaking that didn't involve any particularly special hardware there's a little program that a lot of us Commodore guys used back in the day and this is just an emulation of course I'm not going to be able to completely demonstrate this but I think you'll definitely get the idea of how it worked so this is called tell a clone is made by sergeant pepper this is one of the later versions he made it all throughout the 1980s and this program actually does a lot of different things and I'm not even gonna begin to show them all but I wanted to show a few of them so let me go to the phone and freak box mode and you'll notice there's all these different colors of boxes in here that do all kinds of different things so I'm gonna show you the blue box this is one we talked about at the very beginning where we did the the 1-800 number and then the 2600 Hertz tone on the trunk line and so you could do this all from your computer so do you need the 2600 her tone yes we don't need the pink noise this would be like the phone number like the long-distance number you actually wanted a call so you could put in like two one four and then you know whatever and then you would want a 1-800 number it doesn't matter what the number is long as it's a valid number actually interesting this is the default number that the program includes I actually looked this up the other day this was a I think that like the customer service number to GTE which is kind of ironic I actually tried calling it a few days ago to see what it was and it's actually some scam company now so I got like I don't remember what it was like a warrant II scams or something like that but but anyway yeah so yeah at this point it's ready to go now I'm you actually don't even need a modem to use this program of what you could actually do is take the handset for your telephone and hold it up to your monitor or television screen or whatever right next to the speaker and it would dial the number and then it would wait as soon as you hear it ringing you press ENTER and now I've got a free telephone call to wherever it is that I wanted it was that easy and I mean I literally just holding it up to the monitor and then bring her back to my I didn't even have to touch the phone to do it and that's so that's how easy it became to do this in the in the computer age when we had these things and it became quite popular and it's obvious why the phone company eventually had to change the way everything work so these these things didn't work anymore so let me show you a couple of little things so here's the red box so now you probably couldn't use this you know computers weren't terribly portable at the time but what you would probably do is just record these tones like onto a cassette tape you're like so here's the quarter tone the dime or nickel and yeah you could just record those like onto a cassette tape and then just go to like a payphone and then hold it up and you've got free free calling on your pay phone now I want to show you the cracker box so how this works this is for those long-distance calling cards as I was talking about so you would type in the phone number to whatever the long-distance company was and then you would say whether you want random or sequential numbers doesn't really matter it'll just say random numbers you could set a particular time interval between the calls and then you tell how many digits this the particular long-distance company card like the calling card how many digits they used for their access codes so let's just say six digits you could tap in a code you know like whatever you wanted to start with and then this would be the number you would expect a modem to answer so it could test the code with so this would be any number that you would expect a modem to answer and then you've wanted to do you want to do you want to put your codes to a printer or disk so you just say printer if you want to just print them out as it finds them and if everything that's correct and you go yes and then you go to bed and it starts its thing and it would of course we're not gonna able to see anything on here it's emulator but yeah in the morning you'd wake up and it's show you on the screen number of good codes found and be like five or six and you know they'd be ready they're waiting for you so that's how that worked so yeah the next thing I was gonna talk about is uh why people did it and there's actually more reasons than you might think Sgt pepper and people like Steve Wozniak have talked about this and a lot of the reason they did it was not necessarily because they wanted to cheap the phone company but simply because it was challenging it was a packing it was fun it was a way of trying to challenge themselves to see what they could figure out next and like Steve Wozniak said for example you know this is back before he was wealthy right he said that he did it for the fun of it but when he called his own personal family and friends that he always paid for the calls he only did freakin when he was simply trying to figure out how stuff worked and he said once he figured it all out he got bored of it and didn't do it anymore but that's one element but in the 80s particularly a lot of us teenagers did it because it was our only way of transferring files on computers with our friends because back then long-distance calls were extremely expensive so if you for example even if I wanted to transfer a file to a friend who lived in Dallas which is only like a 30-minute drive it would be well just to do the math back then I mean just one disk used to take like five or six hours to transfer over a modem so if you multiply that by like 89 cents a minute that was a heck of a lot of money you'd have to pay it'd be much cheaper just to mail it to him or get in a car and drive over there but particularly if they lived in Germany or Australia or the UK or something like that it could be insanely expensive and so the way we looked at it is it was especially we were teenagers we were broke we didn't have jobs it was kind of like piracy it's you know the way we kind of tended to think of piracy back then was you know we copied games from each other because we couldn't afford them some people could but most of us teenagers were broke and so you'd say oh well you're cheating the game companies the publishers that made the games and well there's a certain amount of truth to that but one way of looking at it is that we wouldn't have had the games regardless I mean like if we had to buy them we just wouldn't had them so the game companies still wouldn't got any money from us because we were broke but so we looked at it from a standpoint of I mean I mean I'm gonna copy this game because that's literally the only way I can get it and so we looked at telephone freaking kind of the same way we're gonna do the freaking because it's it was the only way we could make these long-distance phone calls because yeah our parents found out that we were you know calling and charging you know hundreds of dollars for our phone bill that wouldn't last very long so that's that's two of the main reasons why freaking was done and we are exactly on time at 4:30 so I guess I'm ready for questions [Music] [Music]

Channel: The 8-Bit Guy

Views: 1,778,794

Rating: 4.9119306 out of 5

Keywords: phone, telephone, bell, ringing, hacking, phreaking, steve wozniak, captain crunch, john draper, lines, trunk, wargames, war dialing, vintage, retro, commodore, atari, IBM, blue box, 2600, DTMF, tones

Id: 4tHyZdtXULw

Length: 29min 17sec (1757 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 24 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Lazysquared]

Retro gaming con was a lot of fun this year. I did not catch this conference, I got stuck Saturday in the vendor area spending money. Thanks for posting this. Also the bag pipe unicycle guy was briefly sonic the hedgehog too

[u/nllpntr]

I LOVE this topic, phreaking has such a rich history, with so many characters and legendary tales.

Here's another really good talk from HOPE 2008 that goes into the history of phreaking in more depth, with even more technical details if anyone's so inclined: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VyEzTTrHeg

If you really want to geek the fuck out, check out Phone Trips...

[u/drjankies]

I miss Wardialing. When you got a good number and all you got was LOGIN: with nothing to identify what the system was.
Exciting!