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Searching for Susy Thunder
- 0xedd 5y ago
- wildlogic 5y ago
- Ueland 5y agoWhat is your point with posting a comment containing just a single word? Like, really? What do you hope to achieve with that "comment"?
- dfsegoat 5y agoNot saying this is the case here, but there is at least a historical precedent from WW2, for the one word reply: "[McAuliffe] is celebrated for his one-word reply to a German surrender ultimatum: "Nuts!" [1] 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_McAuliffe#%22NUTS!%22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_McAuliffe#%22NUTS!%22
- kergonath 5y agoHa, I did not know this one. What came to my mind was https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/le_mot_de_Cambronne https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/le_mot_de_Cambronne . The idea is the same.
- temp8604 5y ago
- Taniwha 5y agoThe last line sums it up: “All the best hackers, all the best phreakers in the world, we don’t know who they are because they never got arrested. And they never went to prison. This is why you don’t know who the best ones in the world are. This is the truth. Think about it.”
- grapescheesee 5y agoFound her.
- ravenstine 5y agoOr the ones that got away just knew when to quit.
- lamontcg 5y agoThey went legit and then wrote Stuxnet or something and got safely paid a lot of money for it.
- mcv 5y agoI don't know if that's "legit", but it's probably a lot more profitable.
- nkrisc 5y agoIt’s legit if the man says it’s legit.
- JoelMcCracken 5y agoright. just like if you kill with the government's blessing, it is war heroics, but if you kill without, it is murder/etc
- renewiltord 5y ago
- csk111165 5y agoWhere did you make this beautiful and interactive article? Is id done via some Web framerwork or you are just writing it in the website.??
- qbasic_forever 5y ago"Scrollytelling" is the nickname for this kind of presentation. There are lots of nifty js frameworks for it, check out this for an overview: https://pudding.cool/process/how-to-implement-scrollytelling/ https://pudding.cool/process/how-to-implement-scrollytelling...
- ktpsns 5y agoThe nice thing with this particular website at theverge.com is that it is not scrollytelling, as it does not mess around with scrolling. That is: Nothing is moving while you scroll. Images got faded in when scrolled to (looking like good old lazy loaded images, but with intention). Maybe we could agree to call this layout a very gentle form of scrollytelling. As somebody who does not like scrollytelling so much, I really like the beautiful layout of this article.
- kodemager 5y agoI think your definition of storytelling is too narrow. When I took “storytelling” as a university class 20 years ago it had nothing to do with having moving parts on a website, but the concept is the same for both this article and interactive articles. Storytelling is simply a tool that enables you to tell and present a long story in a way that that makes people read all of it. I’d say this article succeeds as much as that as an interactive article would.
- Dah00n 5y agoscrolly, not story ;)
- Brybry 5y agoFor more detail: the 'with intention' part is using an IntersectionObserver[1] to toggle image opacity, via CSS style, when the image enters the viewport. So the effect repeats as you scroll through the document, even after the images are first lazy loaded. [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Intersection_Observer_API https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Intersectio...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- herodoturtle 5y agoWikipedia page featuring her, for those that are interested: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Headley https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Headley
- SpaceInvader 5y agoSign of times with that mobile links ;)
- teddyh 5y agohttps://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/skip-mobile-wikipedia/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/skip-mobile-w...
- The_Colonel 5y agoIn case of Wikipedia, I'm not even mad. Their mobile interface is better than the desktop one.
- herodoturtle 5y agoSign of the times with omitting the nose :)
- caaqil 5y ago> When she was asked to tell a lie, she would tell the truth. When she was asked to tell the truth, she would lie. She manipulated her breathing, balled her hands into fists against the chair, and pressed her feet hard against the floor, causing her hands to sweat and her blood pressure to spike. The polygraph test was inadmissible. This is a tangent but it's mind-boggling that this piece of pseudoscientific garbage [1][2][3] is still used by supposedly legitimate government agencies. [1]: https://www.apa.org/monitor/julaug04/polygraph https://www.apa.org/monitor/julaug04/polygraph [2]: https://www.apa.org/research/action/polygraph https://www.apa.org/research/action/polygraph [3]: https://www.nap.edu/read/10420/chapter/5#101 https://www.nap.edu/read/10420/chapter/5#101
- elahieh 5y agoPolygraphs are the "fan death" of America.
- albatrosstrophy 5y agoThat's the perfect analogy I could never think of.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- serverlessmom 5y agoI was thinking that too. It's really wild to me how much of the technology we allow courts to rely on is totally unreliable and fake.
- acatton 5y agoI have no opinion on Rittenhouse, but I watched his trial as a non-American for the show. It was mind-boggling, to me, the argument on the iPad zooming feature[1]. This was three people — with no technical knowledge at all — arguing about a technology which, ultimately, could influence the rest of the life of a fourth person… How often does this happen and is not recorded by a camera?! [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sf7xCMFBv5c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sf7xCMFBv5c
- Lamad123 5y agoWhat a beautiful page!!!
- emmelaich 5y agoVideo of her from Geraldo Rivera .. https://hackcur.io/trashing-the-phone-company-with-suzy-thunder/ https://hackcur.io/trashing-the-phone-company-with-suzy-thun...
- huhtenberg 5y agoRefuses to play the video "due to the privacy settings". Direct Vimeo link says the same. First time seeing Vimeo breaking like this. That's in Firefox. Edit - the exact message is "Because of its privacy settings, this video cannot be played here." I'm guessing it's geo-locked.
- kome 5y agoit works for me, also firefox.
- andyjohnson0 5y agoPlays ok for me. Firefox 96.0.2 on Win10.
- mgbmtl 5y agoHad the same problem with Firefox, non-US IP address. It worked with youtube-dl on the linked URL (not the iframe).
- radicalbyte 5y agoNo it's not - you need to open it on the linked page + disable adblock (and referrer spoofing if you use that.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ffpip 5y ago> guessing it's geo-locked. It is because you turned off sending a referrer in Firefox (network.http.referer.XOriginPolicy in about:config). The video is domain blocked, meaning it can only be played when you are on a specific domain. Because you disabled referrers, vimeo doesn't know you are on hackcur.io so it thinks you are opening it through a direct link.
- JediPig 5y agopfft.. most were recruited to work in a base.
- richardfey 5y agoIt's a delightful write up and her story is 100% worthy to be told, however I wouldn't trust the hacking stories because there's no way of verifying them. Too easy to add embellishments.
- Freskis 5y agoShe claims to have slept with all 4 members of The Beatles. Methinks most of the stories she tells are nonsense, but she suits the prevailing narrative for a certain segment of the media.
- aortega 5y agoShe also claimed she entered area 51. Likely she was playing with the interviewer to see how much bullshit she would believe.
- Freskis 5y agoGood point. So perhaps she is a genius at social-engineering and managed to "play" the journalist by appealing to the journalist's pre-conceived notions about her.
- aortega 5y agoYou dont need to be a genius to play a journalist.
- crocwrestler 5y ago>she figured out how to set off US missiles from a phone booth Uhuh, yeah, ok
- Someone 5y agoBut that’s easy. If the writer fact-checked this article (did she even talk with the real Susy Thunder?) before publishing it, it would be very short, and wouldn’t get as many clicks. That isn’t in the interest of the writer.
- hereforphone 5y agoPossibly unpopular view: social engineering is not hacking. It is conning. People have been doing it since the beginning of time and one can do it with very little technical skill. It's an insult to those who work hard for deep knowledge and technical ability, to call social engineering "hacking".
- protontorpedo 5y agoAs a counter argument, social engineering is hacking through a different interface. You're still exploiting vulnerabilities, but in a low-tech, process-based system. But I agree that we should use different terms.
- ThinkBeat 5y agoSocial Engineering is marketing speak to make [swindle, con, defraud, dupe, etc] to make it sound fancier and more palatasble- This is handy when youa re selling your consulting services. One of our consultants will con .. We have sone of the best con artists .... The term itself is a con.
- PickledHotdog 5y agoYes, I mean, if you consider hacking to be purely technology based and not about, in part, accessing forbidden systems or manipulating components of the system to perform unintended functions then you may be right
- kalium-xyz 5y agoHacking is a very broad category. I think you’re right to say this tho, it doesnt agree much with what the public considers hacking now
- sen 5y agoGood social engineering is a lot harder to do than 90% of online hacks, which are generally just skiddies downloading some PoCs from GitHub and spamming them until they get results. The Project Zero and APT type stuff that hits the news is the exception, not the rule, which is why it hits the news in the first place.
- rob74 5y agoCool article! And, as the eternal nitpicker, I only found one inaccuracy: > Back then, everyone had a landline, but people in the public eye kept their phone numbers out of the Yellow Pages. The Yellow Pages were for company/business numbers, the phonebook (or part of the phonebook) with the personal phone numbers was plain white. Makes me feel old (and wonder how young the author is). Or is "keeping your number out of the Yellow Pages" a commonly-used expression I'm not familiar with?
- chronogram 5y agoIf I recall correctly, the yellow pages was a hip way to refer to the entire telephone book, because it had yellow pages in it, and most other books did not have any yellow pages.
- RappingBoomer 5y agothe phone book had 2 parts: the white pages, the front part, which was everyone, by default, and the yellow pages (the 2nd part), which cost money to put your business name in (with more money, you got a large ad with graphics)...you could pay $1 to keep your name out of the white pages...
- cycomanic 5y agoThe interesting bit is that this even translated to other languages. In Germany the "Gelbe Seiten" (literally yellow pages) was the commercial listings and the "Telefonbuch" (telephone book) was for normal numbers.
- ringworld 5y agoI wonder if this is related, specifically the origin and use of the term in the 1890s - it somewhat connects as to why yellow paper was used for advertising, perhaps? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism
- na85 5y agoIn Canada at least, when I was a kid The Yellow Pages was the colloquial name for the entire book; yellow, green, white and all.
- aortega 5y agoOnce again, the media trying to pass someone with social engineering skills as a hacker. You might as well call it Lying engineering, those people are just good at lying and manipulation, for me, hacking is another entirely different activity. Also she ratted on Mitnick, those people are called informants, not hackers.
- wjnc 5y agoFor me the anarchist in 'the anarchist cookbook' and newsletters that were spread via BBS and early internet capture the hacker (as in 'hacker news') spirit quite spot on. Haven't we come full circle with social engineering being one of the main digital crimes? A good pentester has good social engineering skills. I expect a 'hacker' not to have too much in common with a 'con man', but a 'con man' with technical skills or interests seems to fit with 'hacker'? It's all loose categorization based on stereotypes anyways.
- aortega 5y ago>A good pentester has good social engineering skills. There is a difference between a pentester and a con man. A con man with technical skills is still a con man. A hacker is more similar to a modern-day wizard commanding computers to do his bidding.
- geocrasher 5y agoRight. The pentester gets the money up front.
- Dah00n 5y agoMitnick using social skills to get a pincode for a door is also hacking even though he didn't need use any computer commanding skills.
- aortega 5y agoIIRC Mitnik is good at technical hacking, but mostly known for being a master at conning people. Not as good as the cops that got him, surely.
- thesaintlives 5y ago
- zhdc1 5y ago> As for the woman on the other end of the line, she seems concerned with statutes of limitation. She’s married now and lives a quiet life in a large Midwestern city, collecting coins. Guessing there's a chance this might be her? https://www.thesprucecrafts.com/susan-headley-768108 https://www.thesprucecrafts.com/susan-headley-768108
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y agoI doubt it. I’ll bet that lady gets a lot of weird questions that have nothing to do with coins, though. It sounds like the real Susan H. had a fairly intense life. A lot of the stuff that she’s credited with, does not age well. I’m hoping that she has managed to find some modicum of happiness and peace.
- waffle_maniac 5y ago> eBay dealer of ancient Roman coins The article says she had a coin hobby.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y agoHmmm… maybe. In any case, she wants to be left alone. I have no interest in doxxing her.
- severak_cz 5y agoWhat a character! Like some straight out of some cyberpunk novel.
- ehnto 5y ago> Headley was one of the first females to join one of the most renowned hacking groups in history, Cyberpunks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Headley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Headley
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dataviz1000 5y agoIt seems the hackers who get caught are the ones who were compelled to brag about what they did. Perhaps, the greatest quality a hacker can have is humility.
- naasking 5y ago> It seems the hackers who get caught are the ones who were compelled to brag about what they did. You mean, they were socially engineered into revealing themselves? Hoisted by their own petard.
- knome 5y agoLooks like both her introduction and some of the "hippo-hips" messages can be found in this 8BBS dump. https://archive.org/stream/8BBSArchiveP1V1/8BBS_Archive_P1V1_djvu.txt https://archive.org/stream/8BBSArchiveP1V1/8BBS_Archive_P1V1... Seems it was digitized from dot-matrix printout by a packrat/historian who got the logs alongside some old gear they were buying. http://silent700.blogspot.com/2014/12/is-this-something.html http://silent700.blogspot.com/2014/12/is-this-something.html Found this while poking around. Seems someone representing their self as one of the DEC employees that ran 8BBS dropped a short message about it on everything2 back in 2006. https://everything2.com/title/8BBS https://everything2.com/title/8BBS https://everything2.com/user/FTCnet https://everything2.com/user/FTCnet And here's a 1987 interview with the Tuc that acted as the contact at the beginning of the article. http://protovision.textfiles.com/phreak/tuc-intr.phk http://protovision.textfiles.com/phreak/tuc-intr.phk
- kingcharles 5y agoThat 8BBS dump is incredible. The fact that someone realized what they had and took the time to scan it. When I was reading it before I read your 2nd link I wondered what the cause of all the corruption was - perhaps poor quality coupler connection - but it was actually OCR failure from scanning printouts. If someone (not I) had the time to go through and fix them, that would be awesome.
- Silent700 5y agoThanks. I thought so, too ;) The printouts were old 9-pin dot matrix, and somewhat faded in parts. The OCR I had access to does very poorly with that sort of type. There is an effort underway to transcribe all of the posts into an interactive web format. Someday!
- kingcharles 5y agoThank you! The hardest part is done - the finding and the scanning. It's great that Susy's first post is hidden in there. I searched for "blond" and there it was.
- deleted 5y ago
- mpenick 5y ago“When the phone system went electric” I have trouble getting past this sentence. Did they mean “digital”?
- anpat 5y agoIIRC old telephone lines used to work without electricity not sure if they’re alluding to that. I don’t know how much the modern cellphone infra is grid dependent.
- goodcanadian 5y agoLandlines are still independent of the electric grid . . . that is not quite the same as saying "work without electricity" as they most definitely do work with electricity. The power is provided by the phone line itself, however.
- bjornorn 5y agoI guess they're referring to the upgrade from manual to automatic switchboards.
- kikoreis 5y agoYeah. It might be a reference to "electronic"; this usually describes the transition from electromag and crossbar to fully digital switching: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_switching_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_switching_system
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- bArray 5y ago> One day she asks me, “You know why nobody knows who I am?” > No, I say, thinking back to a year previous — before the plague, before our phone calls, before I finally found Susan, when her name still meant nothing to me. > “Because I never got caught,” she says. “All the best hackers, all the best phreakers in the world, we don’t know who they are because they never got arrested. And they never went to prison. This is why you don’t know who the best ones in the world are. This is the truth. Think about it.” And it's that kind of arrogance and survivorship bias that gets you thinking you're better than you are. She was lucky she was not caught, or the others were unlucky they did get caught. The people around her that she considered as her fellow peers got caught after all. > I went looking for the great lost female hacker of the 1980s. I should have known that she didn’t want to be found. But then she _WAS_ found for the purpose of writing this article. So if not getting caught is the measure of being a good hacker... And she'll be incredibly easy to track down now. > Kevin Mitnick publicly maintains that he had nothing to do with the destruction of the US Leasing files. In his autobiography, he characterizes Susan as a “wannabe hacker” who took revenge on him and Lewis using a backdoor into the US Leasing system that he had created. I'm inclined to agree with Mitnick. There are numerous examples in this article alone of her acting in a vengeful manner, e.g.: > But when one of her exasperated targets called her a small-brained little twerp, Susan got mad. In retribution, she called the phone company and, posing as the woman, had her phone number changed. And really how likely is this to actually be true: > She claims to be one of only three women to have slept with all four Beatles, securing the trickiest, Paul McCartney, through an elaborate pretext that involved having his wife Linda whisked away in a limo for a staged photoshoot. It reads like the wishful thinking of somebody who had bigger dreams than their own reality, clinically delusional. Some of these things I could let go, but there is too much "it happened, trust me". Bare in mind that the _ENTIRE_ point of social hacking is to spin a lie so good that you believe it yourself.
- makeworld 5y ago> But then she _WAS_ found Her friends were found. The journalist only got her email after Susan agreed for her friend to share it.
- 5y ago
- egberts1 5y agoSusan Headley! Wow. She got her 15-minute fame, in form of the Internet.
- edub 5y agoMy first job out of school was at a dot-com in Vegas in the year 2000 initially as the network administrator. Susan was the Director of Marketing. My first interaction with her was typical assisting someone with some issue or another, but I noticed her book shelf was full of very technical books, and it turned out she was a Microsoft Certified Solutions Expert and I was just a simple MCP (I was new to Windows NT, my background was in Netware). I was about 22 and she was about 40, and it was very intimidating at the time, especially after I learned she was Susan Thunder. While the company was downsizing (dot-com bust) the CTO told me to batten down the hatches while Susan was being laid off. I told him that I'm fairly confident she knows more about NT than I do and that I didn't think I could do enough to secure things, so we more or less shut things down for the night. I sort of remember the whole company being scared of her in general. I don't know why though, she was always very nice to me and seemed pleasant in general. It was an overreaction to shut down the network that night, Susan never attempted revenge. In hindsight, she was probably an adult that understood that companies fail and it wasn't personal.
- labrador 5y agoAbandoned by her father and abused by her step-dad, I'd say she did alright for herself and didn't become too evil. She skirted the edge without going over for the most part afaik