Great Hacker War

The Great Hacker War was a purported 1990–1991 conflict between the Masters of Deception (MOD) and an unsanctioned splinter faction of the older guard hacker group Legion of Doom (LOD), amongst several smaller subsidiary groups. Both of the primary groups involved made attempts to hack into the opposing group's networks, across Internet, X.25, and telephone networks. In a panel debate of The Next HOPE conference, 2010, Phiber Optik re-iterated that the rumoured "gang war in cyberspace" between LOD and MOD never happened, and that it was "a complete fabrication" by the U.S attorney's office and some sensationalist media. Furthermore, two other high-ranking members of the LOD confirmed that the "Great Hacker War" never occurred, reinforcing the idea that this was just a competition of one-upsmanship. However, there was indeed a conflict between the "New-LOD" led by Erik Bloodaxe, and the MOD hackers from primarily, NYC. And the one-upsmanship was not matched evenly on both sides, in fact if this was a "war", it was not a fight at all.

The Phrezh Prince of Bellcore (aka sw1tchg0d) was 16 when he allegedly controlled RBOCs Qwest, Bell Atlantic, and ILEC GTE (the latter two becoming Verizon) - and, according to his associates, all North American telcos from '99-'01. Long after the end of the 'war', there was still tension between sw1tchg0d and Erik Bloodaxe; largely attributed to MOD and sw1tchg0d's knowledge of Erik Bloodaxe being an informant. Members of sw1tchg0d's primary group, H4G1S, alleged friends and associates of MOD have stated that sw1tchg0d was the best at breaking internal bell systems and networks, as well as the last and probably youngest to learn the art of the Bell Systems in an age where more security was in place (SecurID authentication, among others). sw1tchg0d's (Jonathan) nickname was previously used by a mentor of his, H4G1S founder Shokwave Rider (sw_r), another telco hacker. Jonathan, assumed the sw1tchg0d nickname after a while, to pay homage to Mohammed (sw_r).

The respect sw1tchg0d had for MOD - through reading the published book - drove him to allegedly own even the switch of Phiber Optik, a Manhattan DMS, pulling qcm, qinfo and qdn records strictly as keepsakes, and not as a sign of disrespect. Phiber Optik was called at home and explained what had been taken, allegedly, from the DMS SuperNode information that allegedly validated this newcomer to the walking telco dictionary, Mark Abene. He apparently knows COSMOS replacements SWITCH and FOMS internals extremely well, as with the switches and Datakit network which are used to connect to switches and Bellcore (now Telcordia) OSS apps (FOMS/FUSA, FOMS/FM, SWITCH, MARCH, etc.) which ran on Amdahl Mainframes to which the internals were figured out via reverse engineering. sw1tchg0d has played pranks on Erik Bloodaxe, one of these involved purportedly distributing court records involving Bloodaxe emptying a shotgun towards his wife, specifically to the women of the hacking scene.

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