Chaos Computer Club
More info
- Creator
- Wau Holland et al.
- Released
- 1981
- Type
- Association
- Website
- ccc.de
The German hacker association founded in Berlin in 1981, which has made a tradition of showing the state how its systems can be broken.
The club came together around a table in the offices of the newspaper taz in Berlin, with Wau Holland among the driving forces. Its breakthrough was the 1984 Btx hack: the post office's videotex service, Bildschirmtext, had a hole that gave the CCC access to a Hamburg savings bank's account, and a script had the bank "buy" the club's paid page over and over, to the tune of 134,000 Deutschmarks. The money was handed back the next day, in front of the press. The point was that the system did not hold.
The same year saw the first issue of Datenschleuder and the first Chaos Communication Congress. The late 1980s turned darker: hackers on the club's fringes went through Datex-P into American networks and sold what they found to the KGB, the case Clifford Stoll traced. The CCC distanced itself, and has since become a regular expert witness for Germany's Constitutional Court.