Wire Pirates

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it can be
instructive to look at the security record of other parts of the international
communications infrastructure.

The first, biggest error that designers seem to repeat is adoption of the
"security through obscurity" strategy. Time and again, attempts to keep a system
safe by keeping its vulnerabilities secret have failed.

Consider, for example, the running war between AT&T and the phone phreaks. When
hostilities began in the 1960s, phreaks could manipulate with relative ease the
long-distance network in order to make unpaid telephone calls by playing certain
tones into the receiver. One phreak, John Draper, was known as "Captain Crunch"
for his discovery that a modified cereal-box whistle could make the 2,600-hertz
tone required to unlock a trunk line.

The next generation of security were the telephone credit cards. When the cards
were first introduced, credit card consisted of a sequence of digits (usually
area code, number and billing office code) followed by a "check ...

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