Phreaking

                                  Phreaking – "Freek-er"

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Some say that all phreaking is just boxing. This is totally untrue. There are many aspects of phreaking. There is teleconferencing, social-engineering, field phreaking and much much more. I will be discussing many of these aspects in modern terms. Phreaking has been around since Bell created the telephone, which was long before hacking came about. Except it wasn't called phreaking at the time. In fact they did not have a word for it. But because of people breaking into telephone systems becoming more and more numerous around the early 80's, there was more and more need for a name. The people who broke into telephone systems were dubbed "phreakers". (Freek-er) is defined as someone who enters a telephone system without the proper authority. If you have seen the movie Wargames (which is a hacker/phreaker classic), you will see the boy sticking a small, metal object into the telephone. In this movie he played a phreaker/hacker. This movie was very popular at the time (The early 80's). This shows you a small piece of how phreakers were treated in those days.

Phone Phreaking really began. It spread throughout the world like a wild-fire and did not stop until the early 90's. People would generally rather watch television and use the computer rather than talk on the telephone. Phreaking is not dead by any means. There are thousands of teens as well as adults around the world learning the art of phreaking.

The main problem for phreaking is the small amount of technology that telecommunications have gone through over the years compared to computerized forms of communication. Most kids think that there are more "options" available as a computer user (which there is) than a telephone user. And This is because of this twenty-first century leap into computers, software as well as hardware has been changing rapidly and more and more people are buying computers and getting online, which gives hacker more targets to claim "UNSECURE!".
This is also use of false information to register as a new user at a pay site. Most commonly, immediate access is authorized after a credit card number is provided. This is of course forbidden and the attention of webmasters is primarily the main objective here. They should use this information to protect against misuse.

Phreakers usually use anonymous Internet accesses. Test access into the Internet through AOL is most commonly misused for this purpose. In almost every computer magazine there is a test membership offer.

Okay.net also allows immediate access after the necessary information has been filled in. The information holds false names and non-personal bank account numbers obtained from some receipt or somewhere else.

This enables one to be an anonymous member for a month with AOL or okay.net with full Internet access. One also needs a valid credit card number (preferably VISA or MASTERCARD). This is somewhat harder to obtain.

A simpler way is by using credit card generators like “Credit Wizard”,“Cardpro” or “creditmaster”. A search using “metacrawler.com” for phrases like “credit card generator” often yields success.

It should be noted that the online transaction centres are not able to exactly judge if the given credit card number exists or not, or who the owner is. Logarithms are used to match the credit card number to the expiry date and validity structure. Therefore it becomes easy -- and acceptable -- to give and use any name and address together with the generated card number. The generators do not however give the correct expiry dates.

Easy and effective tricks do exist and one can use them to obtain correct expiry dates and card numbers. Most of the programmes mentioned above, make it possible to generate new card numbers using valid existing numbers. The difference usually lies in the last few digits, and since the credit card providers issue the cards in ascending series, the generated numbers usually have the same expiry date of the one used to extrapolate.