What is Phreaking

The hacker scene from the field of computer security goes back historically to phreaking, a subculture which deals with the manipulation of telephone connections, which in particular provides the ability to switch telephone conferences and make free phone calls.

The roots of this subculture go as far back as the mid-1840s, when the first major telegraph networks went into service about 30 years later, followed by the first telephone networks.

Technophile operators of this period used their knowledge to use the network for their own purposes. They are among the forerunners of those hackers who developed the practice of phreaking and reached its peak in the 1970s to the mid-1990s.

They no longer were subject to the operators, but were used primarily by end users. This culture evolved in the micro-computer dial-up scene of the 1980s. Gradually, the development of computer networks and telephone companies began to turn to computerized telephone systems.

A portion of the telephone hackers developed subsequently into hackers of the digital computer networks. Thus the culture of network hacking, or more generally the culture of hackers in the field of computer security, increased.

Phreaking has been operated for the purpose of entering into foreign computers in order to not bear the high costs of long-lasting phone modems or acoustic couplers and dial-up connections.

In this context, the practices of phreaking also served to complicate the tracking of such activities. Wide popularity reached the hacker scene, finally with the availability of Internet services to households during the 1990s and was present especially in the context of the magazine 2600: The Hacker .