Fry Guy

Fry Guy was an old-school hax0r who earned his nickname by hacking into a local McDonald's computer and giving raises to his hamburger-flipping friends. In 1989, Fry Guy was responsible for redirecting calls to Palm Beach County Probation Department to a phone sex worker named Tina. He was arrested and charged with 11 counts of computer fraud, unauthorized computer access and wire fraud, and was sentenced to 44 months' probation and 400 hours of community service.

Legends Are Made, Not Born

Only known picture of Fry Guy, seen here with a novelty soft drink and a pile of human feces.

Fry Guy (IRL name unknown) started his hacking career rather inauspiciously. He was born and raised in Indiana and sought ways to rise above the crippling boredom that is so pervasive in flyover America. Fry Guy found his calling in computers, namely on Telnet. Telnet offered the teenage Fry Guy an opportunity to rise above his mundane classmates, to be part of an elite hacker upper class who freely traded their secrets and methods on the burgeoning internet.

Fry Guy idolized his hacker forerunners. He frequented message boards and chat rooms across the world. The people who worked these boards - the young IT professionals who would later form the companies who would build backbone of the internet - were impressed with the attitude and skills of the young hacker. Fry Guy shared information with the hackers that showed an impressive command of how systems worked, and how to exploit the retards who were in charge of them.

Social engineering

What a social engineer looks like today. My, times have changed.

Calling Fry Guy a 1337 hacker is a bit of a misnomer: we should instead call him a social engineer - or a person who uses his superior knowledge to ruin the lives of the stupid and misinformed for fun or profit. Fry Guy earned his nickname during one such incursion; using the Sprint Telnet system used by McDonald's payroll to give his unwashed burger-flipping stoner buddies raises without the knowledge of their manager.

Early success emboldened Fry Guy. He decided that he would have to showcase his mad skillz in an epic battle against the man. His target was one of the most accessible systems of the time: BellSouth, now a part of lumbering behemoth AT&T. Ma Bell was one of the main targets of early hackers. A whole generation of "phone phreakers" (best personified by pedophile Captain Crunch and pretty cool guy Woz) had made a cottage industry out of scamming the phone company. And Ma Bell deserved it. They had a crippling monopoly extending back to the days when the only person with a working phone line was named Bell. While an antitrust lawsuit in 1984 had stripped some of Bell's power it remained a huge, evil corporation.

BellSouth had just installed a whole brand new infrastructure in Florida, including digital call centers which needed no operators and could easily handle the increasing load of information brought about with the information revolution. However, Ma Bell didn't want to pay for such things as security or complicate things with passwords to restrict access to the centers. This left their systems as open and exploitable as your mom's distended asshole and vagina.

Fry Guy experimented with wire fraud at first, using his knowledge of Ma Bell's systems to route calls from Western Union through a bajillion proxies to a pay phone. The unsuspecting caller assumed that the person on the other end was the person who had asked for the original transfer, confirm the transaction, and rout the money to Fry Guy's accomplice. It's estimated that Fry Guy scammed a couple grand out of the system with absolutely no repercussions.

Oh My, Look at the Time

Finally, the time had come for one of the most reported/funniest moments in hacker history. One epic night - June 13, 1989 - every single call to the Probation Department of Palm Beach County in Delray, Florida was routed to a New York phone sex operator - using less than ten lines of code in the process. Hundreds of calls from parolees and employees were given over to an increasingly frantic slut named "Tina."

If Tina was getting confused about her popularity amongst Floridian men, then Ma Bell was having a fucking fit. They promptly sent out security experts to the offending switching station, intending to put pressure on the wound before the entire system bled out. What they found was mayhem. Not only had Fry Guy freely accessed the system, but hundreds of false accounts, phone numbers registered to nobody, and malicious code had infested their system. What they had on their hands was a level-one script kiddy.

Some time during this chaos, Fry Guy silently disconnected from the system, laid low, and watched his fame rise. BellSouth employees spent months un-raping the system and undoing the damage.

Ah fuck, I can't believe you've done this

Fry Guy might have had the brains to keep his head down for a while, but he was only a 15 year old at the time of his intrusion. He just had to brag to somebody. After all, the premiere dork magazine of the time, 2600, had given the story feature coverage. He just had to gloat. And gloat he did. He called up Bell employees to point out that he was the coolest mofo on the block.

However, by this point, the Secret Service was involved. They had more than enough resources to bring to the task of catching this little punk before he made anyone else look like total assholes. They put sniffers on Bell employee numbers and within a month had tracked the hacker down to his redneck hometown. Soon after they put Dialed-Number Recorders (or "pen registers") on his phone lines, recording his every move and uncovering evidence of wire and credit fraud, along with stealing long-distance time from Bell. Thus began the rape.

Aftermath

And this makes me want McDonald's how?

When the smoke had cleared, Fry Guy had gotten lucky. The feds had taken all of his equipment and information. Fry Guy was charged with 11 counts of computer fraud, unauthorized computer access and wire fraud. He was sentenced to 44 months' probation and 400 hours of community service. All things considered, it could have been worse, and Fry Guy was saved mostly by his age.

Early hacker groups who were associated with Fry Guy were decimated, most famously the Legion of Doom and some German groups he had passed dox to. Fry Guy's identity remains a mystery to this day, but many hackers agree, he was one of the last of a generation: one of the true greats to emerge before the decimation of the Eternal September.

• Fact: Fry Guy is also the old nom-de-guerre of those pom-pom looking retards from early McDonald's advertisements. They're now called "Fry Kids" to appease the feminazis. Now you can't say that that ED hasn't taught you anything.

See Also

• Hacker
• McDonalds
• Kevin Mitnick
• Social engineering
• Woz
• Subservient Chicken