Legion of Doom (LOD)
termhackingISP & telecom
The most influential American hacker group of the 1980s, founded around 1984 by a phreak calling himself Lex Luthor and named after the Super Friends villains. Its members were deep telephone-switch specialists whose technical files, published in Phrack, taught a generation how the phone network actually worked.
LOD's rivalry with the New York crew Masters of Deception became the Great Hacker War, the first documented gang conflict inside the underground. The group's spread of an internal BellSouth document about the 911 system - valued absurdly at $79,449 - triggered the Neidorf prosecution and the crackdown known as Operation Sundevil. Several members went on to found respectable security consultancies, a career arc the field would repeat for decades.
Also known as: lod, lod/h, lex luthor