Global Hell says it's going legit
Published: 07 Sep 1999 14:10 BST
Global Hell is dead; long live Global Hell. This infamous digital underground clan, whose members have been the target of raids by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, claims to be in the midst of a dramatic about-face.
"We've gone legit," says gH co-founder "Mosthated".
Where once gH was the scourge of sloppily administered Web sites everywhere, the group now claims it has sworn off such illegal activity. "We are not a hacker group," Mosthated says, in an effort to distance the group from its negative press painting the group as a malicious "hacker gang".
gH rose to become more than a minor annoyance when it was linked to the defacement of the official White House Web site earlier this year. A short time later several members of the group around the nation were raided by the FBI. No arrests were made, though computer equipment was confiscated. In the aftermath of the raid, a cyberspace border war broke out. The electronic underground erupted with a spate of Web site defacements, all vouching support for gH while spewing profanity-laden tirades at the FBI.
In perhaps the ultimate insult to the FBI, its own Web site was put out of commission through a denial-of-service attack, which moved the bureau to shut down all public access to the site until the attack could be thwarted.
On 30 August, the hammer dropped: A joint FBI and Army Criminal Investigation Command investigation resulted in the arrest of Chad Davis, a 19-year-old Wisconsin man also known as "Mindphasr", a co-founder of gH, for breaking into a US Army computer. Davis also had been raided earlier in the year in the first crackdown on gH.
An indication that the sea change among gH members has actually taken hold is what happened in the aftermath of Davis' arrest: nothing.
An urgent bulletin was released by iDefense, a consulting group that monitors electronic threats, after Davis' arrest warning Web administrators to be on high alert for retaliation. It never came. Inside an IRC chat room where gH members congregate electronically, the word went out: No retaliation. It held, despite the fact that there are no hard and fast "ground rules" that bind the group.
"There is no hard control," says "nostalg1c", a gH member, "we just know what we should and shouldn't do."
gH is a loose coalition of 15 to 20 members spanning ages from 13 to 29, its members drawn from the United States, Canada, Belgium and Southeast Asia. A band of brothers -- and one female -- who find solace in their digital bonding wrapped around the camaraderie that comes from the sharing of knowledge about the most intricate workings of computers and computer networks.
Though the continued pursuit of gH by the authorities has resulted in but one arrest, the fallout has inflicted a kind of "scared straight" mentality on the group.
"We have grown up and realised that hacking gets you nowhere but locked up," says Mosthated, "unless you become a type of white hat hacker to hack for networks and businesses or being a consultant, which multiple people in gH have done."
Eighteen-year-old gH member "f0bic" put a fine edge on the FBI threat: "It made me realise that hacking isn't really worth going to jail for."
When another gH member pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges related to breaking into government and military sites that were really done by Belgium-based member "nostalg1c" -- when both were members of yet another hacker group -- the light bulb came on: "At that point I realised it ain't no game we're playing," nostalg1c said, "It is dangerous."
Members of gH are an eclectic blend whose lives, to date, could fill a couple of volumes of biographies. Several come from broken homes, others are living with both parents. Some have siblings; others are only children.
"Ben-z" a 16-year-old who was raided by the FBI, goes to a private school now because "I was a trouble maker in public school," and identifies himself , tongue-in-cheek, as a "jock, pothead, lush, asshole, geek, wigger." His big inspiration: "I was a big fan of the movie 'Tron' when I was a kid," he says.
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