VentureBeat

“War Games” was the seminal geek hacker movie that inspired many a young cyber sleuth when it debuted in 1983. The movie told the story of how a kid found a back door into a military computer and accidentally set off a nuclear confrontation and launched the careers of actors Ally Sheedy and Mathew Broderick. Twenty five years later, the movie is still credited for creating the public’s impression of the life of hackers. David Scott Lewis, the one-time hacker who was the model for Broderick’s David Lightman character, spoke about the movie on stage on Saturday at the Defcon conference. I first met Lewis in 1994 when one of his friends described him as a “walking encyclopedia.” Now 50, he’s a clean-tech executive living in China and just starting writing the Zero Day Defense blog. I caught up with him again in front of the faux Trevi fountain at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas under a cheerful but fake blue sky.

VB: Tell me about your early years and how you became a techie.
DSL: It started, like a lot of people in the 50 and over crowd, with ham radio. That’s what I did in junior high. I enjoyed my electronics class. I got a ham radio license. Built my own telescope. In 1975, when Popular Electronics had the first kit PC on its cover, I got very excited. That was 12th grade for me. Popular Science and the Andromeda Strain had a big impact on me. So did Future Shock. They influenced me to go into hacking, even though most of what they said was wrong.

VB: What got you into computers, going online, and into the world of hacking?
DSL: Hacking was a natural migration. It was lone hackers back then. It was a side thing, a hobby. Just like phone phreaking. That was very different, about doing cute tricks. I was more into hacking. Unlike in the movie, where David Lightman doesn’t know so much about the Defense Department and was much more into video games, I was into the military. I was in the United States Strategic Institute in high school. I went to Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association and Association of Old Crows meetings. That was the electronic warfare society. The command for the Blue Cube, which was broken into in War Games, was at the place where I went for meetings.

VB:What were some real-life events that led to the movie and to your participation in it?
DSL: “War dialing,” where you used the computer to randomly dial numbers in search of a computer to hack, was pretty common. That was more of a trick to start the hack. We didn’t call it that back then. But the term comes from the movie. It was about finding things you could break into. The Department of Defense had strong defenses. So you had to find back doors to get into DoD computers. But the front doors were pretty wide open in other organizations. It was easy to get in if you found a modem.

VB: You helped with the screen play?
DSL: I got together with the screenwriters Larry Lasker and Walter Parkes in the beginning of 1979. We had dinner. Talked about the plot.

VB: How did they know about you in the first place?
DSL: That was coincidental. They knew someone at the William Morris Agency who was a friend of mine. We were all in Los Angeles. They needed a hacker. They had an idea about doing a Stephen Hawking character with a protégé in the story. That wasn’t reflected in the movie at all or even the original screenplay. But what did come out was a screenplay that had space-based weapons systems.

VB: How much of the events were pretend and how much real?
DSL: Like Hollywood does to things, when they made it into a movie, they made it cute. They added the speech synthesis of the war computer. Nobody used this. Nobody needed it. I would still argue that, even to this day, War Games had the most accurate representation of real hacking than any other hacker movie. It didn’t have all of this ridiculous 3-D virtual reality and other nonsense. In the real world, hackers used command prompts that had no visualization tools. As we look back on the talk about space-based weapons, it looks silly now. That got changed to breaking into Norad and taking control of the system.

VB: So you’re a model for David Lightman. I guess you never did break into a military system?
DSL: Unfortunately, that’s one thing that can’t be discussed. (Laughs). That will remain an unknown. There were hacks into various places I shouldn’t have been. But it’s because I had a better knowledge of what the DoD systems were like. It was easier for me than it would have been for other people. Read the rest of this entry »