Phantom Access
Encyclopedia
Legion of Doom (hacking)
The Legion of Doom was a hacker group active from the 1980s to the late 1990s and early 2000. Their name appears to be a reference to the antagonists of Challenge of the Superfriends...
. The programs were worked on during the early to mid 80s (1982–1986), and designed to run on the Apple II
Apple II
The Apple II is an 8-bit home computer, one of the first highly successful mass-produced microcomputer products, designed primarily by Steve Wozniak, manufactured by Apple Computer and introduced in 1977...
computer and Apple-Cat modem
Modem
A modem is a device that modulates an analog carrier signal to encode digital information, and also demodulates such a carrier signal to decode the transmitted information. The goal is to produce a signal that can be transmitted easily and decoded to reproduce the original digital data...
.
History
There are a variety of references to the Phantom Access programs in texts from underground Bulletin Board SystemBulletin board system
A Bulletin Board System, or BBS, is a computer system running software that allows users to connect and log in to the system using a terminal program. Once logged in, a user can perform functions such as uploading and downloading software and data, reading news and bulletins, and exchanging...
s from the 80s,. Reading the files and messages, it appears that the Phantom Access name was a given to an entire series of programs coded by Lord Digital and apparently for internal LOD use, because the programs were not distributed to the "public" or even most other members of the hacker
Hacker (computer security)
In computer security and everyday language, a hacker is someone who breaks into computers and computer networks. Hackers may be motivated by a multitude of reasons, including profit, protest, or because of the challenge...
underground of the time.
Much like Festering Hate
Festering Hate
align=right| [WOP] -666- FESTERING HATE -666- [FOG] -:-:-:-W| The Good News: You now have a copy |Fo| of one of the greatest programs |rr| that has ever been created! |is| The Bad News: It's quite likely |e...
, there are references to the programs in a variety of mainstream press articles of the early and mid 90s when MindVox
MindVox
MindVox was a famed early Internet Service Provider in New York City. A controversial sometime media darling — the service was referred to as "the Hells Angels of Cyberspace" — it was founded in 1991 by Bruce Fancher and Patrick Kroupa , two former members of the legendary Legion of Doom hacker...
first came online,. Phantom Access is also where the parent company that launched MindVox, Phantom Access Technologies, took its name from.
Hacking as Art
The overall package is extremely polished and surprisingly professional looking, taking into consideration that Phantom Access was made for internal release, and definitely fell into the black hatBlack hat
A black hat is the villain or bad guy, especially in a western movie in which such a character would stereotypically wear a black hat in contrast to the hero's white hat, especially in black and white movies....
category of tools. It was obviously something that would never be commercially released, or apparently, released at all. Yet the attention to detail is stunning. The Phantom Access disks contain graphics, utility programs, extensive, well written and formatted documentation, and sample "sub-modules" which contain instructions for the Phantom Access program itself.
The programs also contain a high level of aesthetics, melting Matrix-style
The Matrix
The Matrix is a 1999 science fiction-action film written and directed by Larry and Andy Wachowski, starring Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Carrie-Anne Moss, Joe Pantoliano, and Hugo Weaving...
green text screens that spin and fall apart as the next section of the program opens, a collection of strange easter eggs
Easter egg (media)
Image:Carl Oswald Rostosky - Zwei Kaninchen und ein Igel 1861.jpg|250px|thumb|right|Example of Easter egg hidden within imagerect 467 383 539 434 desc none...
, random poems, and Pink Floyd
Pink Floyd
Pink Floyd were an English rock band that achieved worldwide success with their progressive and psychedelic rock music. Their work is marked by the use of philosophical lyrics, sonic experimentation, innovative album art, and elaborate live shows. Pink Floyd are one of the most commercially...
lyrics. There are endless details contained in the package, which must have taken a tremendous amount of time to add, yet contain nothing that is essential for the program function. After looking at the Phantom Access package as a whole, you are left with the impression of painstaking attention to detail, for no logical reason. It's a package that would never be seen by more than a handful of people from the era, and certainly never sold.
It is quite likely that Phantom Access would have sunk back into mythology and never seen the light of day were it not for the efforts of digital historian
Historian
A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the study of all history in time. If the individual is...
and film-maker, Jason Scott
Jason Scott Sadofsky
Jason Scott Sadofsky , more commonly known as Jason Scott, is an American archivist and historian of technology. He is the creator, owner and maintainer of textfiles.com, a web site which...
, who featured Phantom Access as the first exhibit on textfiles.com
Textfiles.com
textfiles.com is a web site run by Jason Scott dedicated to preserving the digital documents that contain the history of the BBS world and various subcultures. The site categorises and stores thousands of ASCII files. It focuses on text files from the 1980s, but also contains some older files and...
, in January 2006. Nearly 20 years after it was written, Phantom Access had made the transition from lost artifact of the past, to finally being made available to anyone who wanted to see what it was all about.
Phantom Access 5.7K
The Phantom Access disks that were leaked, contained one full Apple II diskDisk II
The Disk II Floppy Disk Subsystem was a 5¼-inch floppy disk drive designed by Steve Wozniak and manufactured by Apple Computer. It was first introduced in 1978 at a retail price of US$495 for pre-order; it was later sold for $595 including the controller card and cable...
side of software and an additional disk of documentation written about the programs. There is another text archive of messages from the era that were apparently posted when Phantom Access was leaked to The Underground BBS in the late 80s.
The programs come on a disk containing something called "ZDOS". As of 2006, there is not a single reference to any disk operating system or variant, for the Apple computer, with any such name. It is unknown if ZDOS was ever a commercial product, or something written specifically for Phantom Access. It is also unknown whether ZDOS is itself some kind of virus
Computer virus
A computer virus is a computer program that can replicate itself and spread from one computer to another. The term "virus" is also commonly but erroneously used to refer to other types of malware, including but not limited to adware and spyware programs that do not have the reproductive ability...
. Messages from the era indicate that the Phantom Access leak may contain a virus, and taking into account Festering Hate
Festering Hate
align=right| [WOP] -666- FESTERING HATE -666- [FOG] -:-:-:-W| The Good News: You now have a copy |Fo| of one of the greatest programs |rr| that has ever been created! |is| The Bad News: It's quite likely |e...
, it is certainly possible.
|
Phantom Access itself appears to be a highly-programmable common interface, which follows instructions contained in a variety of files. At the topmost level it seems to be a toolkit for utilizing all the special functions of the Apple-Cat modem, it scans systems, hacks codes, functions as a blue box, and exports the results into a series of files which can be manipulated using all the other programs in the series.
A quote from the Phantom Access Documentation:
- Phantom Access 5.7K is the hacker itself. It could be described as the final processing unit of the instruction sets, but without the utilities it would be useless to the end user, as that is ALL it is. Sub-Modules must already exist prior to usage. This was a necessary compromise, as there is NO memory left on a 64K system once the Slider's and Rotation system are activated.
It uses EXEC
Execution (computers)
Execution in computer and software engineering is the process by which a computer or a virtual machine carries out the instructions of a computer program. The instructions in the program trigger sequences of simple actions on the executing machine...
files as a form of primitive scripting for the Apple II. Reading through the messages of the era, the scripts are doing direct writes to various registers
Hardware register
In digital electronics, especially computing, a hardware register stores bits of information, in a way that all the bits can be written to or read out simultaneously.The hardware registers inside a central processing unit are called processor registers....
and parts of memory
Memory-mapped I/O
Memory-mapped I/O and port I/O are two complementary methods of performing input/output between the CPU and peripheral devices in a computer...
using the POKE
PEEK and POKE
In computing, PEEK is a BASIC programming language extension used for reading the contents of a memory cell at a specified address. The corresponding command to set the contents of a memory cell is POKE.-Statement syntax:...
command. The programs regularly check memory to see what is running or loaded and generally seem to take over control of the computer.
Final Evolution
Lacking an Apple II computer and Apple-Cat modem, in addition to their historical value, perhaps the most useful and interesting part of the Phantom Access programs is the extensive documentation Kroupa wrote. In addition to explaining how to program the sub-modules, the documents provide an extensive overview of phreaking information, information about the other programs in the Phantom Access series (which appear to have been other system penetration tools and rootkitRootkit
A rootkit is software that enables continued privileged access to a computer while actively hiding its presence from administrators by subverting standard operating system functionality or other applications...
s, before the term "rootkit" existed), and the eventual goal of the whole series, which seems to have been turning the entire Apple II computer and Apple-Cat modem into a programmable phreaking box, which could be plugged into the computers Kroupa and other LOD members were abandoning the Apple platform and switching over to (NeXT
NeXT
Next, Inc. was an American computer company headquartered in Redwood City, California, that developed and manufactured a series of computer workstations intended for the higher education and business markets...
, Sun
Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems, Inc. was a company that sold :computers, computer components, :computer software, and :information technology services. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982...
and SGI
Silicon Graphics
Silicon Graphics, Inc. was a manufacturer of high-performance computing solutions, including computer hardware and software, founded in 1981 by Jim Clark...
hardware).
From the Phantom Access documentation:
- The eventual goal of Phantom Access was to realize a fully automated system for the Apple-Cat modem. The sound sampling and evaluation system has been almost unchanged from revision 4.0 to 5.7 of the series, everything else has been rewritten several times. The final 6.6 revision is a full implementation of the original design (read: it has very little in common with anything in the 5.7 series) with a final processor that is capable of passing data through the Apple-Cat's serial port to an external machine, thus allowing use of the entire Apple computer system as nothing more than a very sophisticated auxiliary modem.
Towards the late 80s, it looks like Kroupa and LOD had exactly one use left for the Apple II: to utilize the entire computer as a host for the Apple-Cat modem. This makes a very strong statement about how highly valued Novation's
Novation CAT
Novation was an early modem manufacturer whose CAT series were popular in the early home computer market in the late 1970s and early 1980s, notably on the Apple II...
, Apple-Cat modem was amongst phone phreaks
Phreaking
Phreaking is a slang term coined to describe the activity of a culture of people who study, experiment with, or explore telecommunication systems, such as equipment and systems connected to public telephone networks. As telephone networks have become computerized, phreaking has become closely...
.
- This was my solution to working within the Apple's limits. No other modem comes close to having the Apple-Cat's capabilities, but the Apple itself leaves much to be desired.