Date: Mon, 18 Jan 93 13:55:17 EST
From: mcmullen@MINDVOX.PHANTOM.COM(John F. McMullen)
Subject: File 5--Attempted Mindvox Break-in

The following appeared on Newsbytes, a copyrighted commercial service,
on January 18, 1993. It is republished here with the express consent
of the authors:

Phantom Access Foils Cracking Attempt 01/18/93 NEW YORK, NEW YORK,
U.S.A.,1993 JAN 18 (NB) -- An attempt to illegally break into, or
"crack" the "Mindvox" conferencing stem contained in Phantom Access, a
flat-rate New York-based online service recently featured in various
news publications, was detected and rebuffed.

Bruce Fancher, co-owner of Phantom Access, told Newsbytes, "There was
no real damage and we have notified all of our users about the attempt
in the hope that they will be even more conscious of security. The
nature of this attempt points out one of the things that users of any
on-line system must be aware of in order to protect her/his privacy."

The attempt came to the attention of the owners of the system, Fancher
and Patrick Kroupa, when subscribers reported receiving the following
message:

    "It has been brought to my attention that your account has been
    'hacked' by an outside source. The charges added were quite
    significant which is how the error was caught. Please
    temporarily change your password to 'DPH7' so that we can judge
    the severity of the intrusion. I will notify you when the
    problems has been taken care of. Thank you for your help in
    this matter. -System Administrator"

The system owners immediately sent a message to all subscribers
declaring the message to be fraudulent. In addition to pointing out
the textual errors in the message -- for example, Mindvox is a "flat
rate" system and charges are not accumulated -- the owners admonished
users to both safeguard their passwords and insure that they are not
easy to decipher.

Fancher told Newsbytes that the review of Mindvox in a recent issue of
Mondo 2000, its mention in an issue of Forbes, and his speaking
engagements on behalf of the system have led to more rapid growth than
had been anticipated. He said, "We are moving to larger space on
February 1st and will be upgrading our equipment from a single Next
system to multiple Suns. We will also increase the number of dial-in
ports and greatly increase the speed of our Internet connection. We
are very grateful for the user response to date."

(Barbara E. McMullen & John F. McMullen/Press Contact: Bruce Fancher,
Phantom Access, dead@phantom.com (e-mail), 212-254-3226,
voice/19930115)

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