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Canadian Hackers - Remember The Past "H4G1S"

11 hours ago
5 min read
Editor's note: This one is personal. Alberta Radio's host was there. By the host's own firsthand account, H4G1S got its start in Sudbury, Ontario, and the host was a member of the crew and of its allied groups. The first-person recollections in "The Sudbury connection" are the host's own and have not been independently verified. The rest of this story is backed by the sources listed at the end.

Before ransomware gangs and leak sites, there were teenagers-at-heart with a grudge, a modem and a message. Welcome to Remembering Past Hacks on Alberta Radio, where we dig up the moments that shaped the internet we live on today. First up: a crew with one of the strangest names in hacking history, and the most famous hacker of the 1990s.

Who were H4G1S?

H4G1S (written "HAGIS", often expanded as "Hackers Against Geeks In Snowsuits") was a loose 1990s group that left its mark by defacing websites, which means swapping a site's front page for its own message. The Attrition.org defacement archive credits them with five hits:

  • NASA headquarters, March 5, 1997

  • Yahoo, December 8, 1997

  • Slashdot, September 9, 1998

  • Rootshell, October 28, 1998

  • Greenpeace, January 27, 1999

The one everyone remembers is Yahoo.

The Sudbury connection

Here's the part you won't find in the archives. I was there. H4G1S originally came out of Sudbury, Ontario. It didn't operate alone either: it ran alongside allied groups called Wrecking Krew, Panz and 3th0, and I was a member of all of them.

From my own memory of those years, here's what our crew did: we manipulated Northern Telecom (Nortel). We gave Parry Sound free long-distance calling for an entire 36 hours. In 2001, we shut down the internet from Toronto to James Bay for 12 hours. In 2003, we hacked US military linguistics servers. And we hacked every BBS system in Canada.

That's my account, from the inside. I'm sharing it as I remember it.

The night Yahoo got "logic bombed"

Around 7 p.m. Pacific time on Monday, December 8, 1997, visitors to what was then one of the web's most popular sites saw something odd. Signed by "PANTS/HAGIS" and the "Mitnick Liberation Front," a note claimed that anyone who had used Yahoo in the past month now had "a logic bomb/worm implanted deep within their computer." On Christmas Day, it warned, the bomb would go off, "wreaking havoc upon the entire planet's networks." An "antidote" would be handed over only upon "the immediate release of Kevin Mitnick."

It was a bluff. Yahoo spokeswoman Diane Hunt told Wired, "There absolutely is no virus." She told CNET the company's monitoring caught the break-in right away and the pages were restored by 7:15 p.m., with no files destroyed. Wired reported the page was mostly visible to people using text-based browsers like Lynx, and called the whole thing a hoax. Still, the stunt landed: hackers had briefly owned the front door of the internet, and they used it to talk about one man.

Who was Kevin Mitnick?

Kevin Mitnick was a self-taught Los Angeles-area hacker who, in his own words to a U.S. Senate committee in 2000, spent his teens studying "methods, tactics, and strategies used to circumvent computer security." He became infamous for social engineering: talking people into handing over access, not just cracking code.

After a two-year federal manhunt, he was arrested in Raleigh, North Carolina, in February 1995. He admitted to stealing software from computer and cellular phone companies during a hacking spree in the early 1990s.

What happened next turned him into a cause. Mitnick sat in jail for roughly four years as a pretrial detainee, without a bail hearing. The judge in his case, Mariana Pfaelzer, was quoted rejecting bail outright, and Mitnick said he was kept from properly reviewing the electronic evidence against him.

The Free Kevin movement

That's where "Free Kevin" came from. Led largely by 2600: The Hacker Quarterly and its editor Eric Corley, supporters printed bumper stickers and T-shirts, raised money for his defence and rallied outside federal courthouses across the U.S. in 1999. Their argument: no violence, no proven financial gain, yet years behind bars with no trial.

H4G1S was the loud, lawless wing of that sentiment. Their Yahoo page praised Mitnick for acting "out of intellectual curiosity, without compromising the hacker ethic," and attacked security researcher Tsutomu Shimomura and New York Times reporter John Markoff, the two men who wrote the book about his capture. Mainstream supporters wanted a bail hearing; H4G1S wanted headlines, and got them.

The plea, the release and a second act

In March 1999, Mitnick pleaded guilty to seven counts of computer and wire fraud. He walked out of federal prison on January 21, 2000, with credit for time served and good behaviour, but under strict release conditions that, for a time, barred him from using computers and cell phones.

Then he flipped sides. Mitnick became a "white hat," built Mitnick Security Consulting, wrote books and spoke around the world. In 2011 he became Chief Hacking Officer and part owner of security training company KnowBe4, teaching companies to spot exactly the kind of con he once ran.

Kevin Mitnick died on July 16, 2023, at 59, after more than a year with pancreatic cancer.

From pranks to payouts: why this still matters in Canada

The H4G1S Yahoo threat was fake. Today's threats aren't. Canada's Centre for Cyber Security calls ransomware the top cybercrime threat to the country's critical infrastructure. This month alone: a ransomware attack on Burnaby schools, tax slips exposed at Canadian Mennonite University, and a Save-On-Foods More Rewards breach.

The 90s hackers wanted attention. Today's crews want money and your data. Mitnick's lesson still holds: the weakest link is usually a person.

Remembering Past Hacks is an Alberta Radio series. Got a hack you want us to revisit? Let us know.

Sources

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