Murphy's fame in his subterranean world is such that he worked as a consultant for Sneakers, the hit film about a gang of computer-driven spies (Robert Redford, Sidney Poi-tier, Dan Aykroyd) lured into doing some high-risk undercover work for what they believe is the National Security Agency.
Murphy loved the way the movie turned out. "It's like a training film for hackers," he says, adding that he saw much of himself in the Aykroyd character, a pudgy, paranoid fantasist named Mother who, like Murphy, plows through people's trash for clues. In fact when Aykroyd walked onscreen covered with trash, Murphy recalls, "My friends turned to me and said, 'Wow, that's you!' "
If that sounds like a nerd's fantasy, then check out Captain Zap's credentials. Among the first Americans to be convicted of a crime involving computer break-ins, he served only some easy community-service time in 1983 before heading down the semistraight, not necessarily narrow, path of a corporate spy. Today, Murphy, 35, is president of IAM Secure Data Systems, a security-consultant group he formed in 1982. for a fee of $5,000 a day plus expenses, Murphy has dressed up as a phone-company employee and cracked a bank's security system, he has aided a murder investigation for a drug dealer's court defense, and he has conducted a terrorism study for a major airline. His specialty, though, is breaking into company security systems—an expertise he applied illegally in his outlaw hacker days and now. legally. by helping companies guard against such potential break-ins. Much of his work lately, he says, involves counter-surveillance—that is, finding out if a corporation's competitors are searching its computer systems for useful information. "It's industrial spying," Murphy says, "and it's happening all over the place."
Murphy came by his cloak-and-daggerish calling early. He grew up in Gladwyne, Perm., on Philadelphia's Main Line, the son of Daniel Murphy, a retired owner of a stevedoring business, and his wife, Mary Ann, an advertising executive. Ian recalls, "As a kid. I was bored. In science I did wonderfully. The rest of it sucked. And social skills weren't my thing."
Neither was college. Ian had already begun playing around with computers at Archbishop Carroll High School; after graduation he joined the Navy. He got an early discharge in 1975 when the Navy didn't assign him to radio school as promised, and he returned home to start hacking with a few pals. In his heyday, he claim, he broke into White House and Pentagon computers. "In the Pentagon," he says, "we were playing in the missile department, finding out about the new little toys they were developing and trying to mess with their information. None of our break-ins had major consequences, but it woke them the hell up because they [had] all claimed it couldn't be done."
Major consequences came later. Murphy and his buddies created dummy corporations with Triple-A credit ratings and ordered thousands of dollars' worth of computer equipment. Two years later the authorities knocked at Murphy's door. His mother listened politely to the charges, then earnestly replied, "You have the wrong person. He doesn't know anything about computers."
Right. Murphy was arrested and convicted of receiving stolen property in 1982. But because there were no federal computer-crime laws at that time, he got off with a third-degree felony count. He was fined $1,000. ordered to provide 1,000 hours of community service (he worked in a homeless shelter) and placed on probation for 2½ years. "I got off easy," he concedes.
Too easy, by his own mother's standards. A past president of Republican Women of the Main Line, Mary Ann sought out her Congressman. Larry Coughlin, and put the question to him: "How would you like it if the next time you ran for office, some young person decided he was going to change all of your files?" Coughlin decided he wouldn't like it and raised the issue on the floor of Congress in 1983. The following year, Congress passed a national computer-crime law. making it illegal to use a computer in a manner not authorized by the owner.
Meanwhile, Murphy, divorced in 1977 after a brief marriage, had married Carol Adrienne, a documentary film producer, in 1982. Marriage evidently helped set Murphy straight, and he formed his company—now with a staff of 12 that includes a bomb expert and a hostage expert. Counter-surveillance has been profitable (he's making more than $250,000 a year and is moving out of his parents' house), but it has left him little time to work on his social skills—or for that mutter his health. At 5'6" and 180 lbs., wearing jeans, sneakers and a baseball cap, Murphy looks like a Hollywood notion of himself. He has suffered four heart attacks since 1986 but unregenerately smokes a pack of cigarettes a day and drinks Scotch long before the sun falls over the yardarm.
He and Carol divorced in April 1991, after 10 years of marriage. "She got ethics and didn't like the work I did," he says. These days Murphy dates—but not until he thoroughly "checks" the women he goes out with. "I want to know who I'm dealing with because I could he dealing with plants," lie explains. "The Secret Service plays games with hackers."
Murphy does retain a code of honor. He will work for corporations, helping to keep down the corporate crime rate, lie says, but he won't help gather evidence to prosecute fellow hackers. Indeed his rogue image makes it prudent for him to stay in the background. Says Reginald Branham, 23, president of Cyberlock Consulting, with whom Murphy recently developed a comprehensive antiviral system: "I prefer not to take Ian to meetings with CEOs. They're going to listen to him and say, 'This guy is going to tear us apart.' " And yet Captain Zap, for all his errant ways, maintains a certain peculiar charm. "I'm like the I Darth Vader of the computer world," he insists. "In the end I turn out to be the good guy."
MARK GOODMAN
ALLISON LYNN in Gladwyne
- Contributors:
- Allison Lynn.
