Masters of Deception (MOD)
termhackingISP & telecom
The New York hacker crew of the late 1980s and early 1990s, formed around Mark Abene (Phiber Optik) after his split from the Legion of Doom - younger, more urban and more publicly defiant than their Texan rivals, and deeply at home inside the switches of the regional telephone companies.
The LOD-MOD feud - the Great Hacker War - ran on hijacked conference bridges and pride rather than damage, but the 1992 federal indictments treated it as organised crime, and Abene served a year. New York threw him a welcome-home party and New York magazine put him on its list of the city's smartest people; the case is the cleanest early example of a culture and a courtroom holding irreconcilable views of the same behaviour.
Also known as: mod, phiber optik, the great hacker war