did you know that Apple a $3.5 trillion
company is only around due to an illegal
back alley product back in the early 1970s Apple co-founders Steve Jobs and
Steve wnac constructed a device called a
blue box that essentially hacked phone systems allowing the user to make free
long-distance calls a huge deal at the time as it wasn't uncommon to have to
pay upwards of $3 a minute for calls across state lines the blue box was a
result of a discovery that phone connections could be manipulated by
playing certain sounds into a phone's handset a process called
freaking to be more specific a tone of
2600 Hertz which sounds like this was
used by phone companies as a control signal that a certain line was now free
typically because one of the callers had hung up but in the late 1950s a blind
child named Joe Andia discovered a similar form of freaking accidentally
while whistling into a phone that was playing a recorded message because our
friend Joe had Perfect Pitch he was able to recreate this Behavior to make calls
drop without hanging up the phone essentially manipulating the phone's
backend systems from the user interface
sort of like people on Twitter telling AI Bots to ignore all previous
instructions a community started to emerge around phone freaking and
eventually the blue box built upon Joe's Discovery to democ TI longdistance
calling or cheat the phone companies out of Revenue depending on your perspective
here's how it worked the user of the blue box would dial a toll-free 1800
number to ensure they wouldn't be charged for the call when it heard the
phone ring on the other end the blue box would play that 2600 HZ tone into the
phone's handset which would trick the system into thinking the caller had hung
up before anyone answered the line was marked as being free but the caller
using the blue box was still on the line the blue box would then send the tones
that corresponded to the number the user actually wanted to reach since the line
was still active and voila free longdistance calling not a bad deal
considering they were sold for 170 bucks each but no more than 100 of them were
ever made because they were so rare one of them ended up selling at auction in
2017 for $125,000 similar in price to the new
iPhone 16 Pro with 2 TB of storage of
course phone companies became wise to the blue box especially after a rather
anti-establishment magazine ran an article with instructions on how to
construct a similar device yourself at home we'll tell you about how the phone
companies tried to put an end to freaking as well as how the freaking
Community countered their counter right after we thank MSI their magx 870
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using our link today the main countermeasure against phone freaking is
called signaling System 7 and I use the
present tense is because it's actually still around today even though it was
rolled out in the early 1980s the basic idea behind ss7 is simply to put the
control signals on a separate line so they be manipulated by sounds played
into the phone itself and while ss7 was reasonably effective at stopping that
2600 htz attack it couldn't stop every
kind of attack especially as phone technology continued to evolve a later
common way to freak the phone network for free long-distance calls was to
exploit the system of calling cards used
by smaller carriers in the mid1 1980s back then it was common to have to dial
a special local number owned by the phone company and then enter the code
off a page card which let the network know you were authorized to make a
long-distance call only then could you dial the number you were trying to
connect to the problem for the phone companies was that the codes on these
cards were quite short meaning it was easy for PCs to quickly guess lots of
different combinations and try those combinations using a modem lots of codes
were found this way and subsequently shared to the point where long-distance
companies were losing a half billion dollars a year to this form of Brute
Force freaking by 1987 this scam was
very popular among college students in fact over 2500 of them were busted in a
drag net but it was impossible for the phone companies to track down everyone
who did this this form of freaking only disappeared when phone companies
eventually made direct dialing of long-distant numbers more Universal and
the use of PCS to hijack phone lines continues to this day we actually did a
collaboration on our sister Channel L Tech tips with veritasium where they
actually used ss7 to intercept calls to Linus's smartphone they did this by
buying access to ss7 which is surprisingly easy to do for a few
thousand bucks then using the access to steal a unique identifier code off the
victim's SIM card after this is done an attacker can use that ID number to trick
the network into thinking the victim's phone is roaming in a different country
which results in the network routing calls and texts to a number registered
with that country code that the attacker controls that was a really cool and
frightening experiment so if you want to find out more go watch that video next