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L0pht Heavy Industries
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LHI Logo

LHI Logo
OriginBoston, Massachusetts
CountryUnited States
Years active1992–2000
Categoryhacker think tank
Founder(s)Count Zero
White Knight
Brian Oblivion
Golgo 13
Product(s)L0phtCrack
Affiliated Group(s)CULT OF THE DEAD COW
Website(s)Main Site |


L0pht Heavy Industries (pronounced "loft") was a famous hacker collective located in the Boston, Massachusetts area between 1992 and 2000.

Name

The "Ø" in its name represents a zero, recalling the slashed zeroes that were used on old teletypewriters and still in some character mode OSs, so its normal on-line name, including its domain name, is "l0pht" (with a zero), not "lopht" (with an O) or "lØpht" (with a Nordic slashed letter O), which at that time would not have been a valid domain name.

Along with the significance of the "Ø", the name was not without meaning. Some of the founding members of the L0pht shared a common loft apartment space in Boston, from where they inter-connected and experimented with their own personal computers as well as equipment purchased from the Flea at MIT, and items garnished from dumpster diving local places of interest.

History

The L0pht was founded in 1992 in the Boston area as a location for its members to store their computer hardware and work on various projects. In time, the L0pht members quit their day jobs to form a business venture, named L0pht Heavy Industries. This hacker think tank released several security advisories and produced some widely-used software tools, like L0phtCrack (a password cracker for Windows NT).

On May 19 1998, all seven members of the L0pht (Brian Oblivion, Kingpin, Mudge, Space Rogue, Stefan Von Neumann, John Tan, Weld Pond) famously testified before the Congress of the United States that they could shut down the entire Internet in 30 minutes.

In January 2000, L0pht Heavy Industries merged with the startup @stake, completing the L0pht's slow transition from an underground organization into an above ground "whitehat" computer security company.

Symantec announced its acquisition of @stake on September 16, 2004, and completed the transaction on October 9 of that year.

Products

As the L0pht occupied a physical space it had real expenses such as electricity, phone, Internet access, and rent. Early in the L0pht's history these costs were evenly divided amongst the L0pht members. This was soon subsidized by profits made from selling old hardware at the monthly MIT electronic flea market during the summer. Occasionally shell accounts were offered for low cost on the L0pht.com server to select individuals; while these individuals had access to the L0pht.com server they were not members of the L0pht. One of the first tangible products sold for profit by the L0pht was a POCSAG decoder kit. The kit was sold in both kit and assembled form. The Whacked Mac Archives was transferred to CD-ROM for sale which was soon followed by CD copies of the Black Crawling System Archives. The command line version of L0phtCrack (the password cracker for Windows NT) was given away but the GUI version was sold as a commercial product. This was followed by the creation of the Hacker News Network website to host advertisements. Even with all of these various income sources the L0pht barely broke even. Eventually the L0pht started doing custom security coding for companies like NFR.

Members

Founders

  • Count Zero
  • White Knight
  • Brian Oblivion
  • Golgo 13

Final Members (January 2000)

Note

Two of L0pht's members when it closed its doors (Mudge and Dildog), as well as two of its original founders (Count Zero and White Knight), are also members of CULT OF THE DEAD COW.

External links

Boston, Massachusetts

Flag
Seal
Nickname: Beantown, The Hub (of the Universe), The Cradle of Liberty, City on the Hill, Athens of America
Location in Suffolk County in Massachusetts, USA
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Commonwealth of Massachusetts

Flag of Massachusetts Seal
''Nickname(s): Bay State State Bird = Black-capped Chickadee''
''Motto(s): Ense petit placidam sub libertate quietem (Latin: By the sword she seeks peace under liberty)''


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Motto
"In God We Trust"   (since 1956)
"E Pluribus Unum"   ("From Many, One"; Latin, traditional)
Anthem
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Hacker has several common meanings, the unifying characteristic of which is only that it refers to a person who is an avid computer enthusiast. It is most commonly used as a pejorative by the mass media to refer to a person who engages in illegal computer cracking, which is its
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A think tank (also called a policy institute) is an organization, institute, corporation, or group that conducts research and engages in advocacy in areas such as social policy, political strategy, science or technology issues, industrial or business policies, or military
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L0phtCrack is a password auditing and recovery application (now called LC5), originally produced by Mudge from L0pht Heavy Industries. It is used to test password strength and sometimes to recover lost Microsoft Windows passwords, by using dictionary, brute-force, and hybrid
..... Click the link for more information.
CULT OF THE DEAD COW, also known as cDc or cDc Communications, is a computer hacker and DIY media organization founded in 1984 in Lubbock, Texas. The group maintains a weblog on its site , also titled "CULT OF THE DEAD COW".
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Hacker has several common meanings, the unifying characteristic of which is only that it refers to a person who is an avid computer enthusiast. It is most commonly used as a pejorative by the mass media to refer to a person who engages in illegal computer cracking, which is its
..... Click the link for more information.
collective is a group of people who share or are motivated by at least one common issue or interest, or work together on a specific project(s) to achieve a common objective.
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Boston, Massachusetts

Flag
Seal
Nickname: Beantown, The Hub (of the Universe), The Cradle of Liberty, City on the Hill, Athens of America
Location in Suffolk County in Massachusetts, USA
..... Click the link for more information.
slashed zero looks just like a regular letter 'O' or number '0' (zero), but it has a slash through it. Unlike the Scandinavian vowel 'Ø' and the "empty set" symbol '∅', the slash often touches the walls of the surrounding O shape but does not extend past them on the outside.
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A teleprinter (teletypewriter, Teletype or TTY for TeleTYpe/TeleTYpewriter) is a now largely obsolete electro-mechanical typewriter which can be used to communicate typed messages from point to point through a simple electrical
..... Click the link for more information.
domain name has multiple related meanings:
  • A name that identifies a computer or computers on the internet. These names appear as a component of a Web site's URL, e.g. wikipedia.org. This type of domain name is also called a hostname.

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Ø" (minuscule: "ø"), is a vowel and a letter used in the Danish, Faroese and Norwegian alphabets. The vowel is not to be confused with the slashed zero.

Usage


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Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private, coeducational research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing 32 academic departments,[3]
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Dumpster diving (DD), is the practice of sifting through commercial or residential trash to find items that have been discarded for being unusable by their owners, but may be useful to the Dumpster diver.
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A think tank (also called a policy institute) is an organization, institute, corporation, or group that conducts research and engages in advocacy in areas such as social policy, political strategy, science or technology issues, industrial or business policies, or military
..... Click the link for more information.
L0phtCrack is a password auditing and recovery application (now called LC5), originally produced by Mudge from L0pht Heavy Industries. It is used to test password strength and sometimes to recover lost Microsoft Windows passwords, by using dictionary, brute-force, and hybrid
..... Click the link for more information.
Password cracking is the process of recovering secret passwords from data that has been stored in or transmitted by a computer system. A common approach is to repeatedly try guesses for the password.
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Windows NT

Company/developer: Microsoft
Source model: Closed source / Shared source
Stable release: +/-
Preview release:
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Peiter C. Zatko (better known as Mudge) was a member of the high profile hacker think tank, the L0pht1.

Born in December 1970, Mudge graduated from the Berklee College of Music and is an adept guitar player.
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United States Congress

Type Bicameral
Houses Senate
House of Representatives
President of the Senate
President pro tempore Dick Cheney, (R)
since January 20, 2001
Robert C.
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Internet is a worldwide, publicly accessible series of interconnected computer networks that transmit data by packet switching using the standard Internet Protocol (IP). It is a "network of networks" that consists of millions of smaller domestic, academic, business, and government
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@stake, Inc. was a computer security company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. It was founded in 1999 by Dan Geer (who became its Chief Technical Officer) and others and merged in January 2000 with L0pht Heavy Industries (who were known for their many hacker employees),
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white hat hacker, also rendered as ethical hacker, is, in the realm of information technology, a person who is ethically opposed to the abuse of computer systems. Realization that the Internet now represents human voices from around the world has made the defense of its
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Symantec Corporation

Public (NASDAQ:  SYMC )
Founded Sunnyvale, California (March 1 1982)
Headquarters Cupertino, California, USA (incorporated in Delaware)

Key people John W.
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September 16 is the 1st day of the year (2nd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 0 days remaining.

Events

  • 1400 - Owain Glyndŵr declared Prince of Wales by his followers.

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20th century - 21st century - 22nd century
1970s  1980s  1990s  - 2000s -  2010s  2020s  2030s
2001 2002 2003 - 2004 - 2005 2006 2007

2004 by topic:
News by month
Jan - Feb - Mar - Apr - May - Jun
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October 9 is the 1st day of the year (2nd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 0 days remaining.

Events

  • 768 - Carloman I and Charlemagne are crowned Kings of France.

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POCSAG is a standard used to transmit data to pagers. The name comes from Post Office Code Standardization Advisory Group, this being the British Post Office which used to run nearly all telecommunications in Britain before privatization.

The modulation used is FSK with +- 4.
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