Phantom Access

Phantom Access was the name given to a series of hacking programs written by Patrick Kroupa (a.k.a., Lord Digital) of LOD. The programs were worked on during the early to mid 80s (1982–1986), and designed to run on the Apple II computer and Apple-Cat modem.

There are a variety of references to the Phantom Access programs in texts from underground Bulletin Board Systems 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 underground of the time.

Much like Festering Hate, there are references to the programs in a variety of mainstream press articles of the early and mid 90s when MindVox first came online,. Phantom Access is also where the parent company that launched MindVox, Phantom Access Technologies, took its name from.

Despite obviously being made for internal (rather than public/commercial) release, Phantom Access contains many of the qualities that would be more expected of a commercial release. The use of graphics (including animation), utility programs, extensive formatted documentation and sample "sub-modules" which contain instructions for the Phantom Access program itself is unusual for a program of this kind at this time due to the amount of work involved in setting up those elements when the expectation would be that the limited user-base would be able to manage without them. In addition to the functional aspects of the program there was also bundled easter egg type media such as random poems, and Pink Floyd lyrics.

The Phantom Access disks that were leaked, contained one full Apple II disk 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.

...
Wikipedia