How a Cereal Box Toy Hacked AT&T's Phone Lines

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDh_XRTpXxI

Transcript:

If you grow up with the fun kind of parents that let you stay up late, play violent video games, skip
schools three to four days a week, set fire to the neighbor’s cat, and eat bowls of tiny little cookies
for breakfast, you might remember that all of the very best breakfast cereals used to include some
sort of prize inside. Ever since 1909, when Kellogg’s realized that plain cornflakes might be almost
palatable if you bribe children with a 3-page picture book, cereal boxes have been stuffed with all
sorts of plastic knick-knacks – yoyo’s, digital watches, lightsaber spoons, a ghost detector that
doesn’t work, straight up cash, a deed to 1 square inch of land in the Yukon that doesn’t even have
mineral rights and was repossessed by Canada in 1965, and, completely accidentally, a tiny whistle
that could hack into the back-end of AT&T’s phone lines. You see, back when phones had buttons
and handsets and didn’t waste your time with YouTube videos about cereal box prize, every bit of
information that your phone received and produced, needed to travel long a big web of physical
telephone lines – these wires carried all of your greetings, your gossip, and your scary horror movie
heavy breathing sounds, but they also needed to carry certain metadata about the call, like the
number you were calling from and who you were. Since early telephone lines were only built to
transport a single stream of audio, this metadata needed to take the form of audio as well. For
example, if you’re one of the fifteen viewers of this channel who have ever touched a push-button
telephone, you’d know that the phone produces certain tones when certain numbers are pressed –
and no, this was not just so that you could play the first 4 seconds of “Funky Town” by typing a long
string of numbers into the keypad. It was because the phone actually recorded and sent the tones to
a central switching station, where they could decode them into numbers and connect the call to the
right telephone light. It’s sort of like how nowadays, when the NSA hears a dissenting tone, like you
talking about the United States Postal Service is kinda slow, they know to connect you with the
nearest friendly neighborhood surveillance center. This system of recorded tones is called “in-band
signaling” and, as you might imagine, it didn’t take very long for nerds to start abusing it. In the late
1960’s, a group of hackers called “phone phreaks” discovered that AT&T used a certain tone – 2600
hertz – to indicate that a long-distance phone line was empty. Of course, that’s different to how it is
today. Now, if you call them, specifically about why their retail employee literally stabbed you in
your chest when you try to buy a Galaxy Note 9, you hear a cruel tone from the agent, saying that
you shouldn’t have gone to the store if you didn’t want to get stabbed in the chest by their
employee. But back in the 1960’s, if they didn’t have the 2600 hertz tone, the unused phone lines
would just be silent and they’d be indistinguishable from a long-distance phone call between two
sad mimes who are in love and tragically separated by fate. Now, playing that exact tone back into
the phone would disconnect one line, but it would indicate to the switching station that the other
line was an operator, which would free them up to make long-distance phone calls without any
charge. The phone phreaks experimented with an organ, a few exotic birds, whistlers with perfect
pitch, but the easiest way to crack AT&T’s phone lines was discovered by this guy: John Draper, who
realized that the Captain Crunch Bo’Sun Whistle that came in his box of cereal just so happened to
emit a tone of exactly 2600 hertz. Oh, and for those of you who are wondering, 2600 hertz sounds a
little like this. So, really, my point is: it’s probably better that these whistles were in the hands of a
criminal syndicate than the actual children they were intended for. Now, while Captain Crunch
eventually stopped putting telecom hijacking tools in their boxes of breakfast cereal, phone
phreaking continued to evolve over the next decade or so. Many hackers began using tone-
generating devices called “blue boxes”, a design that was perfected by this nerd and sold at an
egregious markup by this nerd, who later dropped out of a college to run a fruit stand, or sth like
that. But, before you run over to your dusty old house phone and begin blowing whistles into it, you
should know that, much like beloved actor Rick Moranis, these sorts of techniques haven’t really
worked since the 80s. Landlines slowly became more sophisticated over the years – Bell Telephone
started putting filters over long-distance lines that blocked out single-frequency tones, and
eventually shifted all their hardware over to a system of out-of-band signaling, where telephone
lines had dedicated data channels for information like the number dialed and the identity of the
person who dialed it. On top of that, many modern landline phones don’t even actually use landlines
at all, and rely on internet protocols to send and receive data instead. So, until Kellogg’s starts
accidentally dropping black-market Wifi-cracking kits into their boxes of Honey Smacks, no cereal
box prize will ever quite live up to the humble Bo’Sun whistle.

Design:

If you grow up with the fun kind of parents that let you (1) __________________________ of tiny
little cookies for breakfast, you might remember that all of the very best breakfast cereals used to
include some sort of prize inside.

Ever since 1909, when Kellogg’s realized that plain cornflakes might be almost (2)
_______________________ if you bribe children with a 3-page picture book, cereal boxes have been
stuffed with all sorts of (3) ______________________ – digital watches, lightsaber spoons, straight
up cash, a deed to (4) ___________________________ in the Yukon that doesn’t even have (5)
_________________________ and was repossessed by Canada in 1965, and, completely
accidentally, a tiny whistle that could hack into the (6) _________________________ of AT&T’s
phone lines.

When a (7) ________________________ was heard by NASA, they know to connect you with the
nearest friendly neighborhood surveillance center.

In the late 1960’s, a group of hackers that discovered that AT&T used a certain to indicate that a
long-distance phone line was empty was called (8) __________________________.

Back in the 1960’s, if they didn’t have the 2600 hertz tone, the unused phone lines would just be
silent and they’d be indistinguishable from a long-distance phone call between two (9)
_______________________________ who are in love and tragically separated by fate.

So, really, my point is: it’s probably better that these whistles were in the hands of a (10)
________________________________ than the actual children they were intended for.