An 11 year-old named Dade Murphy aka Zero Cool has crashed hundreds of computers on Wall Street and brought about a worldwide financial crisis. For his punishment, he is ordered not to go near another computer until his 18th birthday. Flash forward to Dade's 18th year, he was forced to move to New York with his mother who has to take a new job, finds that there are others like him that work beneath the public radar in an online capacity. He assumes the name “Crash Override” to hide his past from others who might recognize his hacker celebrity status. As a new highschooler, he quickly meets those within the local scene who possess comparable elite abilities namely Kate aka Acid Burn, Cereal Killer, Lord Nikon, The Phantom Phreak, Razor, Blade, among others . At first they compete with one another. Then discover they have a common enemy: the gifted but evil hacker, code-named The Plague, who is in charge of security of multinational conglomerate Ellington. It started when they stumble upon an insider plan to defraud a shipping corporation through its computer systems. He wants to frame them as a cover for his own crimes, which involve transferring large sums into accounts belonging to both him and his accomplice. . Together, they have to prove their innocence, foil the theft and avoid having numerous felony charges pinned on them, plus save the world from ecological disaster thanks to a Plague-written virus that capsizes oil tankers. the team of hackers are forced to defeat this worm virus by enlisting the help of others in the cybernet underground who ultimately have to recover the data and bring down a powerful computer known as the “Gibson” that resides at the Ellington corporation whuch eventually clear their names.

In opener sections we still see tapes being mechanically passed back and forth to play a local TV station.

We see the era of modems attached to older model commuters that can be infiltrated simply by making

an anonymous phone call (social engineering). We even learn about the 4 common passwords such as

love, secret, sex and God that wouldn’t even be an option with today’s high tech IT administrators.

Tech points to ponder (this was 1995!):Oggling over a laptop with a 28.8bps modem and an active matrix

display Most common passwords: love, sex, secret, and god. 0.01 points for old-school Screwing with the Feds via computer records.