Re: tapping hardware? (was re: Mark Abene (Phiber Optik) sentenced)

[David Kovar <kovar@nda.com>]

> >> o the charges against MoD marked the first use of wiretaps to record both
> >>   conversations and datacomm by accused hackers.
> 	This I find quite interesting... As a guess, if I were to
> attempt such monitoring, I would start with a pair of off-the-shelf
> modems, but I don't know the details of modern compression (v.42) or
> wire encodings to know how easy that would be to make work...
> 	Anyone have more details on how the tap was accomplished?

  I'd just copy everything to tape as I'd been doing for years. You don't
need anything new to tap the phone line to pick up the data. After that,
you just need to figure out the baud rate, parity, and data compression
(which could be done by trial and error pretty quickly) and then just
play the tape into a modem that was set up correctly. 

  Unless I'm missing something, it seems pretty simple.

-David