Advent of Computing - Episode 192 - Local Computer Held Hostage!

Episode Date: October 18, 2026

Have you ever wanted to use your computer, only to realize that it had been taken hostage? Over the decades there have been a number of cases where machines have been used as leverage against their owners. Today we look at tales of these digital kidnappings. Like Advent of Computing? Then check out the after show! Adjunct of Computing is now LIVE: YouTube Spotify Apple Podcasts Join the conversation on the OFFICIAL discord server: https://discord.com/invite/GpFNu3DTU2

You wake up, roll out of bed, down as much coffee as you can stomach, and make your way to the office. You're a computer operator, or a programmer or some other digital cleric. Your office could be in a traditional office building, or maybe it's a computer center at a university. For this hypothetical, it doesn't much matter. As you drive into the parking lot, you notice something odd. It seems there's some kind of commotion. There are more cars than usual, and, Wait a second, are those police cars?

Oh well, that doesn't matter to this hypothetical computer person. Your days are spent in an air-conditioned room tending to the machines, almost completely isolated from the outside world. Your office probably doesn't even have windows, or if it does, they're the high-up kind that only let in the suggestion of light. While in to your office, you're stopped. A cop blocks your path. You try to explain you're just trying to get to work, to go sit in your air-conditioned room,

but today's not the day. Your computer is being held hostage. You won't be able to crunch any numbers until its captors' demands are met. Welcome back to advent of computing. I'm your host, Sean Hass, and I'm scared. Today, I bring you the next episode of Spook Month, 2026, local computer held hostage. But first, I have the usual plugs.

Advent of Computing has an after show called Adjunct of Computing. We also record live over on the Advent of Computing Discord every other Friday night. If you want to listen or hop in on the live streams, there's a link to the Discord and a link to Adjunct of Computing down in the show's description. Also, Advent of Computing has a Patreon. on. The show is, in fact, supported by listeners like you. If you want to help keep the lights on, you can go to advent ofcomputing.com and click the support the show link. So, what are we talking about today? I took a bit of a winding path to reach this topic. At the start of this month, I sat down and went through my usual sources for spooky happenings. We're talking case studies

of hacking and fraud, tomes of folklore, and half-remembered notes that I keep crammed into a drawer in my office. One thing I ran into, which I haven't covered yet, is computer sabotage. Protesters breaking into computer centers and wreck and shop. Now, there's a reason I haven't covered that so much. It's interesting from a political standpoint, but the computer part isn't really central to the story. Computer serve as a target due to their value. The conversation here is more about protesting and organized movements than it is about

computers. In that sense, computer sabotage is just a continuation of a very old practice. Destruction of property or denial of use of property has always been a valid protesting tactic. This is especially true in America. The Boston Tea Party is an integral part of the lore of the United States. That's an example of folk destroying property as an act of protest. When the state refuses to listen to its citizens, when the state cares more about capital than people, then this kind of protesting becomes particularly effective. In the colonial period, a ship full of T was a good target, and in the digital period, computers become a similar target.

But, like I said, the conversation around computer sabotage and vandalism is more about politics than machines. I kept finding myself trying to get to the point at odd angles, to try and get meat on the bones. So I felt it didn't really fit. What made me change my mind? Well, I found some more sources, and I found some really unexpected information.

It seems a computer sabotage started as early as the 1950s. By the late 60s, there's a new phenomenon. Some computers are being taken hostage. One book, Security Procedures for Computer Systems calls this quote-unquote computer kidnapping. What I've found is that these hostage situations took many different forms, but were all bundled under that same headline. Today, we're going to be looking at a few times the computers were taken hostage, when machines were held as collateral. In some cases, the hostage makes it out unscathed, in uncaved. Others, negotiations break down.

Why would someone hold a computer ransom, and how would you even do that? Well, let's find out. In September 1980, DePaul University was right in the middle of registration for fall classes. Luckily, this wasn't a manual process anymore. The university was using a fancy HP-2000 mini-computer to crunch schedules and handle payment. All was going well until the darn thing turned itself off. the 17th, the mini-computer, without warning, shut off. The machine remained powerless until the 19th, but once it was back up, the nightmare was just beginning. Operators found a ransom

note stored on the machine's disk. This wasn't a bug, this was an intrusion, and the intruder was threatening to return. The note said, quote, if you don't give us a mixed assembly software program will shut you down again, signed System Cruncher and Vladimir. This, dear listener, is a clear-cut case of a computer taken hostage. Someone has gained remote access and could take the system down whenever they felt like it, unless, that is, their demands were met. The nightmare was just beginning. DecodeSystems.com has an article about this saga, which includes some emails from folk close to the disaster. The HP-2000 that the interloper had accessed was a gateway. Sure, it was used for its own compute power, but it was also hooked into the university's

IBM System 360, a much bigger and more expensive machine. If someone had access to the HP, they could get access to the IBM. They could wreak all kind of havoc. Or worse, they could plant some software deep in the mainframe that wouldn't be noticed until it was too late. When this kind of incident happens, an audit has to follow. University staff had to sort through the HP 2000 to look for any nasty surprises, and they had to do the same for the much larger mainframe. That probably meant taking both systems out of service while they were digitally, well, exercised, for lack of a better term.

But what about the interloper? Would they return? And who were they? Who had figured out how to hold a computer hostage at a distance? While that distance wasn't all that great, less than 30 miles away, two teenagers were bragging to friends about their intrusion. Later, they told police they did it because they had been told that such an act was impossible. Take the year into account here. The first conviction for cybercrime doesn't happen until 1984. Up to that point, folk didn't really talk publicly about intrusions, about their computers getting hacked. It was exceedingly difficult to prosecute. It would just make your business or institution look incompetent.

So why go public? For two teenagers in 1980, it probably seemed like hacking into a mainframe was impossible. But they did it. The two hackers were students at Frimmed High School. Their school district and a nearby community college had gone in havesys on, and get this, an HP-2000 mini-computer! The two schools shared the machine via remote access. A smattering of terminals and microcomputers were used at both ends. That's a really neat program.

It's one of those classic schemes to expose young minds to computers at a reasonable cost. a way to lift up the next generation to be smarter and better than the previous, to inspire students to tackle problems that their parents thought were impossible. And that's exactly what happened. We have to speculate a little on the details here. We don't have any statements from the hackers themselves, but we have newspaper articles and an email from one of their classmates. That email claims the hack was carried out using a Commodore 64 with an acoustic

modem and a little bit of software. Supposedly, the hackers wrote a program to brute force the admin password for DePaul's mini-computer. I don't believe that for a second, actually. Why, you may ask? Well, anyone with brains knows. The Commodore 64 wasn't released until 1982. That's two whole years after the intrusion.

It's possible the hackers were using another microcomputer as a terminal, but I also doubt the whole program part of the story. DePaul, it turned out, had very bad security. Their admin password only had three unique characters in it. Sure, a program would be slick, but three characters? Two high schoolers with a two-liter a cola, a teletype, and a free afternoon, could handle that manually. What got these crafty teenagers caught was their ransom note. You see, in their signature, they left a phone number.

That number led to a local bulletin board system, an old-school forum. System Cruncher and Vladimir had been bragging about the hack on the bulletin board. It didn't take very long for the FBI to show up at their school. The hack is resoundingly modern. Hackers find a weakness in a computer security. They exploit the weakness, then ransom back control. That's how many intrusions play out in the 21st century, but hackers have gotten better at that last part. Knuckle-headed mistake aside, I think we can see an instinct here.

Computers are valuable commodities. DePaul University claimed that this incident cost over $20,000. How do they justify that price? Well, it's in computer time. That's the value of running their machines for a few days. These two kids probably didn't understand that reality in terms of dollars and cents, but they got the gist. Computer time was important.

It was valuable. If you can control that access via a hack by a trick that turns the computer off 30 miles away, then you got leverage. You can use that to get what you want. In this case, the hackers wanted an assembler. There are, of course, other ways to control access to a computer. There is the physical layer, and that's where we get to the more flashy sagas. In the first days of 1969, a group of student protesters occupied Ford Hall at Brandeis University.

That building housed the campus's telephone switchboard and their huge PDP-10 computer. The protesters' demands were simple. Brandeis had been recruiting minority students. Once enrolled, the university did not treat them fairly. It hadn't listened to their concerns. It hadn't offered them the same scholarships, opportunities, or treatment as white students. The protesters wanted a seat for minority representation at faculty and board meetings. They just wanted to be listened to.

The university had heard the concerns and decided not to respond. They didn't even hold a meeting or hearing for faculty to discuss the matter. So, students held a peaceful protest. On January 6th, they occupied Ford Hall, denying access to the computer room and the switchboard. Meeting minutes show that at least one operator was turned away from the hall, physically prevented from accessing their beloved PDP 10. And make no mistake, this was a proper machine.

The PDP 10 was a straight-up mainframe. It's the kind of resource that was crucial to campus, just as important as a telephone switchboard. Access denial on its own is frustrating. That completely stops any digital. work on a campus. But as we saw with DePaul, there's a knock-on effect. Mainframes are big. When security is breached, you don't know what has been done to the computer. It could have been ignored. Data could have been taken or something could have been left behind, lying in wait.

With physical access, we get another option, destruction. Books like security procedures and even contemporary news articles paint this in a very specific way. They call these situations a siege or a riot, and they call student protesters militants. The protest at Brandeis was handled with delicacy by the administration. They negotiated, and crucially, they didn't send in police. The university did go to a judge and got a restraining order issued, which made it so they had legal standing to call in the cops. But they chose not to.

That choice prevented the destruction of the PDP 10, and probably saved lives. Protests, sit-ins, and building occupations can all do the same thing. They restrict access. They make an institution stop and listen. That's almost always the end goal. They tend to turn violent when violence is used to dissipate protesters. Just a year after Ford Hall was closed down,

the National Guard was called him to break up a protest against state. That protest started for similar reasons. it initially had to do with the Vietnam War. The result of that breakup was four deaths of student protesters. As an aside, if you ever want more information about student protesting in this period, then there's actually a source that's very connected to computer history. Lee Felsenstein's autobiography, me and my big ideas, starts with protest movements at Berkeley in the mid and late 60s.

there's a very explicit connection between these protest movements and the home computer revolution that comes in the 70s. But the computer hostage phenomenon, that, at least from everything I've found, seems to have existed on its own access, as part of these student protest movements, but not necessarily tied into a digital future. These computer hostage situations were also more widespread than I ever imagined. I mean, to start with, I didn't even know this was a thing at all. I've been able to find half a dozen well-attested examples. Most ended like the protest at Brandeis. A mainframe room is taken over for a time.

The university finally listens to its students because their precious machine is in danger and then the mainframe rooms returned unharmed. The computer is just a convenient shield. It's expensive and delicate, so universities are careful. Funnily enough, in some cases it seems like the administrations were more worried about damaging their computers than hurting their students. Perhaps like a certain administration and its precious tea. Not all these protests have a happy ending, though.

In January of 69, just a few days after protesters left Ford Hall, a similar event took place in Montreal, Canada. The setup is eerily familiar. Sir George Williams University recruited black students from the Caribbean. Once those students arrived on campus, they were met with discrimination. The university refused to listen to them about it. In this case, we have a lot of specifics. The event is known as the Sir George Williams Affair. There are multiple books written about the event, as well as a movie called The Ninth Floor.

If you want the Tales, I recommend checking out that film. It's really good. The short story is that a biology professor was the final straw. Black students had figured out he was scoring their papers lower than their white classmates. To the point that two lab partners, one white, one black, had submitted identical reports and being given different grades. This was a pattern, and students documented it. That information was taken to the university's administration.

Students wanted a hearing. Staff said, oh, they do something about it, and then nothing, nothing came of it. There was a report written on the matter, honest, but it was lost in the mail. I'm not joking about that part. That's actually something that the university admin said to concern students. There eventually was a hearing held,

but faculty decided the makeup of the hearing panel. They didn't consult any of the students that had reported any of these incidents of discrimination. The panel decided they were impartial, and then they also decided there was no discrimination on campus. Of course, that didn't sit very well. A protest was organized.

On January 29th, The ninth floor of the university was occupied. That was the campus computer center. Protesters and university admin negotiated up until February 11th. During that time, no one had access to the computer center. The campus was no longer digital. The university promised to meet demands, to hold hearings, to actually listen to students, and to take student input on the makeup of the committees during those hearings.

Then they called in riot police. Students were barricaded into the computer center. Police broke down the barricades and proceeded to beat and drag students out of the building. We don't have numbers on injuries, but we know that hundreds of students were in the building at the time. During this, some students started throwing punch cards and paper out of the window of the ninth floor, trying to get attention of the people on the street. But the worst part, according to the university, was the ensuing five.

When riot police tore into the floor, something caught on fire. Police claimed that students barricaded in the building, physically unable to leave the floor, set the computer on fire. Students claimed the opposite, that some action of the riot police, maybe a tear gas canister, set the blaze. Whatever the source, the computer center was gutted. This is exactly why a computer was such a good hostage. it was delicate and expensive. If a situation got chaotic, it was very easy for a computer to incidentally be damaged.

In this case, the hostage died. Computers at UC Santa Barbara, New York University, and Northwestern were also used as collateral in this period. But those cases aren't nearly as well documented. What's crucial about these kinds of digital hostage operations is that the computer doesn't actually matter. It's useful because it's important and delicate.

A switchboard or an administration building on campus would work just as well. These situations are ideological. The means is a computer, but the ends are addressing grievances at a university administration, trying to get your college to at least listen to you. When normal channels fail, then controlling access to a valuable resource can help. Later reporting, especially, skips that part. You get articles and books that just say, militant students took a mainframe hostage. As I said, I never knew I'd run into something like this when I first saw the headlines

of computer-held hostage. I didn't think it would lead to serious stories of protest and struggle for rights on college campuses. So let's close with something closer to what I expected. something a little wackier. That's the case of Novar. Novar Electronics Corp was founded in Barbaton, Ohio in 1964. The firm made, from what I can tell, alarm systems. One of these was called the safe sound, trademark. It detected unexpected sounds in your home, and then set off alarms, flashed light bulbs, and honked horns when deemed appropriate. Things were smooth sailing for Novar until 1970. That's when their nemesis rolled onto the scene. Novar Corp. This company was pure evil,

unlike Novar Corp. This Novar was some hot-shot outfit from Silicon Valley. They began operations in 1969 or so, turning out terminals and data acquisition hardware. Around 1970, they were bought by General Telephone and Electric. From there, Novar Carp grew and expanded, opening offices around the country. That's when Novar Electronics Corp first learned of their true enemy. The Ohio Novars jumped into action. They fired off letters and injunctions telling the California Novar that they had to change their name. But the newer Novar claimed they didn't have to. They had filed a trademark a few years previously. The trademark and patent office hadn't stopped them. So why should they listen to the older novar? The crux of the issue came down to what a trademark really means.

Part of the whole point is to prevent customer confusion. If there are two novars, then how does a customer know which one to do business with? That can lead to all kinds of adverse outcomes, including unfair competition and loss of business. Is it fair if I start a company called I and start competing with the older IBM? Well, maybe, but I don't think I'd be able to get very far, legally speaking. There is a cutout to this. If two companies have the same name and offer substantially different products, so much so that there can be no customer confusion, then the names can stand.

The new Novar argued that data terminals and weird electronic alarm gadgets were different enough that there could possibly be no confusion. They were wrong. The story goes that in 1972, a Novar terminal was shipped from California to a customer in Columbus, Ohio. When the delivery truck arrived, the customer wouldn't sign off. They refused to take delivery, so the hardware would have to be sent back to Novar. From the Akron Beacon, quote,

the truck driver then decided rather than return the 305 pounds, computer to California, he would ship it to the nearest Novar facility. He found the Novar Electronics Corp listing in the telephone directory, assumed it was part of Novar Corp, and obtained Novar Electronics Corp address from the answering service, end quote. It's a pretty easy mistake to make. The new California Novar had offices around the country. Novar Electronics Corp had one office in Ohio. The machine's fate was sealed when it showed up at Novar's office. It was signed for by staff because the box was addressed to Novar. Nothing was out of the ordinary until the box was opened, and their enemy's logo was spotted.

Jim Ott, president of Novar and resident of Ohio, saw an opportunity. He decided he'd hold the machine hostage. A letter was sent out to Novar's California. office with two demands. First, they need to send over some legal paperwork to deal with the mix-up. There's certain things you've got to do to prevent litigation and indemnify against damage of property. But that's unimportant. Second, they had to give up the Novar name. This was a funny and actually a kind of smart play. The hostage machine was valued at $25,000. at the time, which is around 200,000 current currency.

So the question becomes, how much is Novar as a name worth? The real canny part here is the press coverage. This story became pretty big news because of how funny it was. It points out the exact issue that concerned Jim Ott. California Novar Corp claimed the two Novartes, couldn't be confused. Well, that really wasn't the case, now, was it? There was initially resistance to Otts demands,

but Novar eventually caved to Novar. In April of 73, almost a year after the debacle started, GT&E agreed to change Novar's name. By that time, the first demand was met, all the paperwork was filed, and the computer had been returned. The hostage, this time, survived to acquire more data. All right, the hostage situation is over.

What have we learned? Folk took computers hostage for many different reasons, from classic extortion to protest to confusing business dealings. This is only a cross-section of the phenomenon. I can't lump this all into one easy explanation. Unlike security procedures or federal reports or newspapers, I'm not going to give it a snappy headline. Computer kidnapping was an activity that many different folk took part in.

Did folk stop holding machines ransom? Well, no, not really. This wasn't some isolated phenomenon in the latter half of the 20th century. I think it follows, of course, similar to the history of the virus. Early viruses existed for a mix of reasons, from experiments to jokes to attempts to make ideological points about piracy. As computers became more common and started connecting the networks, viruses changed. They became more mean-spirited. In the modern period, viruses are tools of espionage, extortion, and destruction.

It's the middle one that matters here. Extortion. Modern viruses are often used to take a computer hostage. I've infected your machine. I've encrypted your files. Send me some cryptocurrency and I'll go away. That kind of computer kidnapping only became possible recently. Up until that point, taking a computer hostage was a much bigger affair.

It's not so much that the phenomenon stopped, but it evolved into mundanity. Thanks for listening to Spook Month here on Advent of Computing. I'll be back next week with the final spooky episode for 2026. You can find links to everything on advent ofcomputing.com. Go support the show on Patreon, listen to the after show, join the Discord. And as always, have a great rest of your day.