Phreaking 101

Phreaking 101

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PHREAKING 101 By Godoffire. This Article will be divided up into a couple of sections. The First section is boxing the second section has a few stories and in the third section there is some history on the famous phreaker Captain Crunch Also this article will be in a slightly different format then most. It shall have bullets Telling “what it is" or "how to easily make a redbox." This way if you just so happened to be l337 you can scan the bullets and then find something you don't know. Huge timesaver in my Option. Well that’s all I have to say. On to Phreaking 101! Note some of the objects of information in this article would be illegal to use in life. This article is for informational purposes only.

1. Boxes • Busy Box o What is it? A busy box is one of the most easy and cheapest boxes to make. A busy box makes it so that once you attach it to a person’s telephone box they no longer have a dial tone when they pick up there phone thus no calls can be sent and no calls and be received. o Finding a telephone box to Busy Box A telephone box is the box on someone’s house that connects all of the phone lines. Most of them are bell’s phone boxes. They are usually gray or green or painted (out of sloppiness) the same color of the house. Every house that can make phone calls has a phone box. o Making/Using a Busy box. All you need is a piece of copper wire. You open someone’s telephone box and you will see four screws. The only ones that matter are the ones with green wire wrapped around it. Now all you have to do is to attach one part of the copper wire to the screw with red wire around it and the other end to the screw with green wire around. Now you have effectually Busy boxed someone. o Legal uses With permission. (kind of a catch 22.) On your own phone box. April Fools (only if you know they won’t get too mad at you.) • Red Box. o What is it?
2. When you put a coin into a payphone it makes a certain tone/frequency telling the lichen what the coin is. A redbox imitates these tones and gives you free payphone calls.

o Finding a Payphone to redbox. Simply go to GTE/Bell/A++ payphone, pick up the phone and pus a number or two, to get rid of the dial tone. If you blow into it and you can hear the blowing from the receiver then you have a perfect red boxing payphone. If you have followed step one and you can't here a thing coming from the payphones, then the mouth piece is muted. Ether you can just find another payphone that does work or you can cut the wires from the payphone. If you look there will be 4 wires a red, a green, a yellow, and a black wire. If you cut the red and green then attach those wires to the wires on a beige box (read further in the article for info on the beige box.) Make the beige box phone the same as a payphone only now without a muted mouth piece

o How to easily make a redbox Get a digital recorder (analog's work as well but it has a higher chance of distorting the tones) Go to www.phonelosers.org. Then go to the link on red boxing. If you scroll down there will be some tones that you can record. Get out your recorder and then simply well … record them.

o How to make a redbox, the hard way. First off, find a payphone, once you have done that, go up to it and put in 50 cents or whatever it costs. Call up your home phone when no one is around or when you know no one will pick up the phone. Your digital answering machine will pick up. Here you put in some more money like oh say a dollar in quarters into the phone. Once you have done all of that, go home and record you message. Make sure to do it when no one is around because background noise might distort the tones. Once again, if you need to you can use analog recorders or even an analog answering machine. But every time you do, the chance greatly increases of distorting the tones.

o How to use a redbox. Dial operator (00) say something dumb like "There's gum on the 8 button so I'm calling through you okay?" (S)he will ask you to deposit some amount of money. If (s)he's nice then (s)he'll say something like "That'll be fifty cents please." Or if (s)he happens to mean (s)he'll charge you extra and say something like "That'll be $1.50 please." Here is where you put up the redbox to the mouth piece of the phone. Play the tones and if your lucky the won't be distorted. If you happen to be really really unlucky you'll get an operator who has been doing his/her job for so long she can tell the slight difference between a redbox and a quarter (even if the computer can't)next place if so just talk about a few things, annoy and your call and viola.

o Legal use You work for FBI CIA etc, and you need to use this technique to save the world (though I find that highly unlikely) 2) None. • Beige Box o What is it? A beige box is basically a lineman’s handset. A lineman’s handset just allows a lineman to check and see if your phone line is working. But if you wanted to, you could hook up your beige box to someone’s telephone box. And then make free calls charging the cost of using the phone to that person’s phone bill or by tapping into that phone line you can also listen in onto some good gossip. o Finding a telephone box to beige box The exact same way as in busy boxing. o How to a make a basic beige box. You truly don’t need every much to make a beige box. All you need is a cheap phone, wire strippers, alligator clips, scissors, and electrical type. You can get most of this at a local hardware store or thrift store for under $15 (U.S.A.) Next cut of the male plug of the phone (That is the part you stick into a phone jack) and strip the cord about 5 inches so that it shows 4 wires, or if the phone is old it will only show 2. Cut off the yellow and black wires, leaving the green and red. Next strip the two wires about 2 inches and using the electrical type attach the alligator clips to the striped part of the wires. And you now own your very own beige box. (I suggest you type up the alligator clips because if you just so happen to hook up the beige box while someone is already talking on the phone you’ll get zapped with 10 volts.) o How to use a beige box. All you have to do is find a phone box, and then open it. All this takes is a screwdriver. Once opened there will be four screws with wires wrapped around them. There will be black wires, red wires, green wires, and yellow wires. Take the alligator clips and the one connected to the green wires to the screw with red wires around it, and the alligator clip attach to the red wire to the screw with the green wires around it. Or if you didn’t want to ruin your phone you might notice that there is a jack in the phone box (not in all of them.) and you can put the male plug into the jack and call. But if you do that then you can’t lesson to calls, so you must get on of those, for lack of better word, things that you plug into a jack and it acts as two. o Legal use If you work for the FBI CIA etc. On your own house. With permission of anyone else. 2) Stories • Bad as Shit Recently, a telephone fanatic in the northwest made an interesting discovery. He was exploring the 804 area code (Virginia) and found out that the 840 exchange did something strange. In the vast majority of cases, in fact in all of the cases except one, he would get a recording as if the exchange didn't exist. However, if he dialed 804-840 and four rather predictable numbers, he got a ring! After one or two rings, somebody picked up. Being experienced at this kind of thing, he could tell that the call didn't "supe", that is, no charges were being incurred for calling this number. (Calls that get you to an error message, or a special operator, generally don't supervise.) A female voice, with a hint of a Southern accent said, "Operator, can I help you?" "Yes," he said, "What number have I reached?" "What number did you dial, sir?" He made up a number that was similar. "I'm sorry that is not the number you reached." Click. He was fascinated. What in the world was this? He knew he was going to call back, but before he did, he tried some more experiments. He tried the 840 exchange in several other area codes. In some, it came up as a valid exchange. In others, exactly the same thing happened – the same last four digits, the same Southern belle. Oddly enough, he later noticed, the areas worked in seemed to travel in a beeline from Washington DC to Pittsburgh, PA. He called back from a payphone. "Operator, can I help you?" "Yes, this is the phone company. I'm testing this line and we don't seem to have an identification on your circuit. What office is this, please?" "What number are you trying to reach?" "I'm not trying to reach any number. I'm trying to identify this circuit." "I'm sorry, I can't help you." "Ma'am, if I don't get an ID on this line, I'll have to disconnect it. We show no record of it here." "Hold on a moment, sir." After about a minute, she came back. "Sir, I can have someone speak to you. Would you give me your number, please?" He had anticipated this and he had the payphone number ready. After he gave it, she said, "Mr. XXX will get right back to you." "Thanks." He hung up the phone. It rang. INSTANTLY! "Oh my God," he thought, "They weren't asking for my number – they were confirming it!" "Hello," he said, trying to sound authoritative. "This is Mr. XXX. Did you just make an inquiry to my office concerning a phone number?" "Yes. I need an identi–" "What you need is advice. Don't ever call that number again. Forget you ever knew it." At this point our friend got so nervous he just hung up. He expected to hear the phone ring again but it didn't. Over the next few days he racked his brains trying to figure out what the number was. He knew it was something big – that was pretty certain at this point. It was so big that the number was programmed into every central office in the country. He knew this because if he tried to dial any other number in that exchange, he'd get a local error message from his CO, as if the exchange didn't exist. It finally came to him. He had an uncle who worked in a federal agency. He had a feeling that this was government related and if it was, his uncle could probably find out what it was. He asked the next day and his uncle promised to look into the matter. The next time he saw his uncle, he noticed a big change in his manner. He was trembling. "Where did you get that number?!" he shouted. "Do you know I almost got fired for asking about it?!? They kept wanting to know where I got it." Our friend couldn't contain his excitement. "What is it?" he pleaded. "What's the number?!" "IT'S THE PRESIDENT'S BOMB SHELTER!" He never called the number after that. He knew that he could probably cause quite a bit of excitement by calling the number and saying something like, "The weather's not good in Washington. We're coming over for a visit." But our friend was smart. He knew that there were some things that were better off unsaid and undone. • The toilet paper crisis in Los Angeles One of the things that was really easy to do, was to pop into the AutoVerify trunks by accessing the trunks with that "Class mark". You couldn't just dial an 800 number that terminates into Washington DC, but you also had to pop over to a trunk class marked for what they call "Auto-Verification". This is used when a phone user has to reach someone and the line is busy. The operator selects a special trunk, class marked for this service, and dials either the last 5 digits of the phone number, or a special ttc code like 052, and followed by the whole 7 digit number. After that, the operator hears scrambled conversation on the line. The parties talking hear nothing, not even a click.

Next, the operator "Flashes forward" by causing the equipment to send a burst of 2600 Hz, which makes a 3 way connection, and places a beep tone on the line so that both parties originally on the line can hear the initial click (flash, in this case), followed by a high pitched beep. At this point, the parties can her you, and you can hear them. Usually, the operator an Our first problem was to extract what exchange this number terminated in, because AutoVerify wouldn't know about 800 numbers. Then, all 800 numbers had a one-to-one relation between prefix and area code. For instance, 800-424 ––> 202-xxx, where xxx was the 3 digit exchange which was determined by the last 4 digits. In this case, 800-424-9337 mapped to 202-227-9337. The 227 (which could be wrong) was a special White house prefix used for faxes, telex's and in this case, the CIA Crisis line.

Next we got into the class marked trunk (Which had a different sounding chirp, when seized). and MF'ed KP-054-227-9337-ST into this special class marked trunk. Immediately we heard the connection tone and put it up on the speaker so we would know when a call came in.

Several hours later, a call did come in, and it did appear to have CIA related talk, and a code name of Olympus was used to summon the President. I had been downstairs that time, hanging out with friends when I learned what was going on. I rush upstairs just in time to hear the tail end of the conversation as I entered the room.

We had the code word that would summon Nixon to the phone. Almost immediately, another person was starting the process of dialing the number. I stopped them just in time and recommended that they stack at least 4 tandems before looping the call to the White house. Sure enough, the man at the other end said "9337", my other friend said "Olympus please!", the man at the other end said "One moment sir!"… About a minute later, a man that sounded remarkably like Nixon said "What's going on?". My friend said "We have a crisis here in Los Angeles!", Nixon said "What's the nature of the crisis?" , My friend said in a serious tone of voice "We're out of toilet paper sir!". Nixon said "WHO IS THIS?" My friend then hung up. Never did learn what happened to that tape, but I think this was one of the funniest pranks, and I don't think that Woz would even come close to this one. I think he was jealous for a long time.

To the best of my recollection, this was about 4 months before Nixon resigned because of the Watergate crisis. 3) The History of Captain Crunch John T Draper is one of the most famous phreakers in all of phreaking history (no pun intened) and will most likely stay there for a long long time. John’s handle was Captain Crunch because he learned from a blind friend of his that the whistles in the Cap’n Crunch cereal can be used to make a 2600 frequency. The 2600 frequency was used in phone companies to turn switches so you can call, thus giving you free calls. The Interested Captain Crunch quite a bit leading him to build machines that made these tones. The Captain later on had an interview in the “Esquire” magazine about blue boxing (a blue box is an object of some sort that makes the 2600 frequencies.) This attracted the attention of Steve Jobs and a Steve Wozniak (founders of apple) who learned from John how to build a blue box (which Wozniak later used to call up the Vatican and pulled a prank call on the Pope.) But this also caught the eye the F.B.I. who imprisoned Captain Crunch for a little while. But while in jail the Captain worked on the first word program for the Apple 2 computer. He has done much more than that now. And if you want to visit his site then you should go to http://www.webcrunchers.com/crunch where it has a lot more history on John.

Thanks for read phreaking 101 On the next phreaking article (202) there will be *Boxes *Socail engenering *History on anouther famous phreaker/hacker *and more If you have any good ideas that you think should be in 202 then e-mail me at tehh4cker@gmail.com

Shout outz: www.phreaksandgeeks.com www.phonelosers.org www.hackthissite.org www.hellboundhackers.org and www.webcrunchers.com/crunch thanks for all the help support and info guys.

God this looks differn't then how i wrote it. if you want me to send an attachment of it to you guys then e-mail me