This story appeared in the November 2020 issue as "Cracking the 414s." Subscribe to Discover magazine for more stories like this.
In the 1983 techno-thriller WarGames, David Lightman, played by a fresh-faced Matthew Broderick, sits in his bedroom, plunking away on a boxy computer using an 8-bit Intel processor. As text flashes across the screen, David’s face lights up; he believes he’s hacking into a video game company, but the unwitting teenager is actually facing off against a military supercomputer. “Shall we play a game?” the computer asks ominously. In the film, the subsequent showdown triggers a countdown to World War III.
The same year the film was released, a group of teenagers and young adults from Milwaukee were playing a game of their own. Much like Broderick’s character, these suburban tech savants — who dubbed themselves the 414s — hacked into large, networked computer systems used by high-profile organizations, looking for new games to play. And similarly, what started out as innocuous fun had some very real consequences. The group eventually was caught by the FBI for raiding around a dozen government and industry systems. Among these were Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and the Los Alamos National Laboratory, a nuclear weapons research site that produced atomic bombs used during World War II.
