Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey Thearon, Welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the tech are you. Since we're winding down my tenure as host of this venerable podcast, I thought that it would be fun to kind of look at some quirky stories I haven't covered in the past, and this is one that some people refer to as the first cyber attack. Cyber attacks obviously big in the news these days. There are tons of stories surrounding them, everything from using cyber attacks to spread disinformation, to espionage to sabotage. So there's a lot we could talk about. But what if we were to talk about a nineteenth century cyber attack, a cyber attack that happens well before there was ever an internet, in fact, before there was wired telegraphs running through the region we'll be talking about. So allow me to tell you a story. And details of this story may or may not be entirely true, but we're going to go with it anyway. There are certainly some resources that point to this story being true. There are tons of blog posts and videos and stuff that talk about this, but I think most of them are pulling their information from one or two more recent sources. However, there's an article in an eighteen thirty seven edition of a French newspaper that I used for this particular episode. Now I should add I had to rely on auto translation for that article. My French at this point is non existent. But it's the story of how a pair of brothers were able to tap into a communications network and then insert information into that network in an effort to capitalize on stock market and bond information before anyone else could, or at least anyone else in their neck of the woods in France. So I want to point out a few sources that I use while playing this together, because that's going to be very helpful, especially if you want to read up on this too. So I think my starting point was Tom Standige's piece called The Crooked Timber of Humanity in eighteen forty three magazine. That piece was published, as far as I can tell, in twenty seventeen, but Standige had written a book in nineteen ninety eight titled The Victorian Internet that certainly ties in with this. He talks about the network system we're going to chat about in this episode. Now, I have not had the chance to read Standige's book. I want to get a copy because it sounds fascinating, but I'm not sure if this particular incident makes an appearance in the book because I haven't read it yet. However, Standage certainly writes about one of the key elements involved in our story within the Victorian Internet, and from the reviews i've it sounds like it's a really easy read and very informative and entertaining. So it's on my list now. Another piece I relied upon was a nineteen ninety nine article titled taking Stock by Gerard J. Holsman. Holsman has also written about this communications network we're going to be talking about in this episode. He's got a white paper that I found that's all about this particular network, and then in this article he goes into the incident we'll be chatting about. I found that article in INC magazine. By the way, that's INC as an incorporated, not as in tattoos. And finally, thanks to a blog commenter with the handle tATu Tata, and I know I've messed that up on Schneier dot com, I can cite that eighteen thirty seven newspaper article. I mentioned it's in the and I apologize. My French pronunciation is worse than my understanding of French. It's been thirty years since I've studied French. But the newspaper is titled Journal des de bat Politique e leterreer. So again, I know my pronunciation's horrible. Just save it. I'm already aware. So we're going to assume this story is true, or at least mostly true. It definitely has some verifiable elements in it. One big, important verifiable element is that an eighteenth century inventor named Claude Shop came up with a clever way to transmit messages quickly over vast distances. He used signaling towers, which you know, actually has been a way to send messages for hundreds of years, even before the eighteenth century. But his initial approach used two clocks and some large flipboards that had white on one side and black on the other. And the method of communication, honestly, is somewhat opaque to me. I read a very simplified explanation, but it was so simplified as to not have any sticking power on my brain cells. However, it doesn't really matter because by the time our story takes place, he had already evolved his approach to using poles that were mounted on beams, and those beams, in turn were mounted on masts that stood up on the top of signaling towers. So each mast had a beam attached at the top. The beam was attached in the center on like a pivot point, so the beam could rotate and it could hold four different positions. It could be horizontal relative to the mast, so this would be like a person standing up straight and holding their arms out straight off to either side. Or it could be vertical, so this would be if you were to hold your arms at the twelve o'clock and six o'clock positions, assuming you are familiar with anaalog clocks. And then it could also be diagonal, with either the left side higher than the right or vice versa. Now at either end of the beam that's mounted to this mast were poles, a pole on each end, and they were mounted at the ends on a pivot point. So it's like if you were holding a stick, like imagine that you're holding a stick at the end. That's kind of like what this looked like. So the poles could also be rotated into different position, and they could hold multiple positions from their respective end of the beam. The whole thing was meant to be like a human being holding semaphore flags. If you've ever seen those those signaling flags where you hold your arms out and you hold the flags up in specific positions, and that gives a particular meaning according to a shared code. So, using a control system that consisted of chains and pulleys, an operator could manipulate the device to hold one of many different positions, and then by ascribing these positions some sort of meaning. Through creating a code, Shapp was able to create a messaging system. So the towers were constructed so that through the use of a telescope, the operator could see incoming messages from the previous tower. They could then transcribe the symbols that were used in that message. Then they could send that same message further down the chain to the next tower on and so forth. Now, Shap's plan was to give only the origin and the destiny nation cities the endpoints of the communication lines the actual ability to encode and decode those messages. The operators in the middle of the line would have no idea what they were transmitting, they would just be copying what came before and then sending that same sequence of symbols along. This was to maintain message security because this communication systems was primarily used by the French government and nobody else Like the French government had exclusive use of this communication system and there would be special commands that the origin operator could use to indicate that he had made a mistake in the transcription. So let's say that you are operator number one or a number uden, you know, if you're in Paris, France, and you're transcribing a government message to be sent to well, let's say it's Bordeaux, because that's the city that will factor into our story. However, you realize that, gosh darn it, you've only gone and done put the wrong symbol in your last transmission, like you were transmitting, and you accidentally sent a message or a word that means something like cat instead of I don't know military. So then you have to use another signal, and that signal is essentially backspace, meaning that last symbol I sent you was in error. Well, the next operator in the chain is going to transmit everything you sent, including the mistake and the backspace because operator too or do if you will, is unaware of what those symbols actually mean. They're just sending along what it is that they personally have received the message errors, and all continue down the line until they finally get to their destination. There at Bordeaux. The receiving operator at the end of the line writes on the code, notes the indicators that say there's an error here, erases those errors, and decodes the message and records it down. So any errors that were sent along the line, assuming they hadn't been introduced by an intermediary tower, will get taken out. Now, it was this get taken out bit that in eighteen thirty four factors into our store all right. Now, Sadly, Claude Schapp would not live to see this happen. He had taken his own life back in eighteen oh five under circumstances that were never entirely clear, at least not to history, and this provided opportunity to a pair of brothers who are the heroes or perhaps anti heroes of our story. We'll talk about those brothers in just a moment, but first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsors. So before the break, I mentioned we have a pair of brothers, not just brothers. They're twins, Francois and Joseph Blanc. At least according to various sources, those were their names. If you go to that eighteen thirty seven newspaper article, you get a bit more specific. I mean, at first article just as the brothers Blanc over and over and over again without telling you their first names. But eventually you get Louis, Joseph and Francois Blanc. That Louis is very important because Louis and Francois Blanc twin brothers, would indicate that the Francois Blanc in this story would go on to great fame and fortune. More on that in a bit. So, according to this newspaper article, the fact that they were twins actually made it more complicated because they're identical. They were identical twins, not fraternal twins. And I feel like we have the working for a real farcical situation going on here where there's like mistaken identities and conspiracies. Seriously, how has Wes Anderson not made a movie about this already? Anyway, the brothers Blanc were bankers in the city of Bordeaux, which sounds like a tongue twister. They were in the business of trading government bonds or speculating if you are being a little less generous, let's say. However, one problem they ran into was that they were always behind the times when it came to what was going on with the market in Paris. Because this is eighteen thirty four, news about the market would take days to arrive in Bordeaux would be carried aboard a male coach, and obviously male coaches had to traverse hundreds of miles to get to their destination, Like the distance between Paris and Bordeaux is more than three hundred miles, So by the time the Brothers would learn of what was going on in Paris, it would be too late for them to capitalize on that information in Bordeaux. But if they could only find out what was going on faster, if they got news before their competitors did, they could actually make money on speculation. Now, the telegraph system, as I mentioned earlier, was restricted to official government communications, so the brothers had no legal access to that system. And if they had, so would everybody else, and the playing ground would be even across the board. But the brothers came up with a clever scheme. There was a weakness in the line. So, like I said, an operator at the beginning of the communications line could indicate that they had mistakenly transmitted the wrong symbol by including a backspace message. But if mistakes happened in between the origin and the destination, they would go unchecked until they arrived at the endpoint. Now, the longer the chain of communication was, the more likely errors would confound the message, because towers along the way would just make a mistake right, not just at the beginning and endpoints, but all along the way. And since the distance between Paris and Bordeaux was, you know, three hundred miles, actually more than three hundred miles, there were risks that a message arriving at Bordeaux would just end up being gibberish by the time it got there from all the errors. So the French government deemed it necessary to have a sort of midway point established in Tour, which is roughly halfway between Paris and Bordeaux. So at Tour, another operator would be allowed to actually decode the incoming message before encoding it again and then sending it along to Bordeaux. The Tour operator would be able to correct any errors before they became too egregious. And it was this operator that the brothers Blanc targeted. Paris would have been too risky, but tour was a possibility, so they plied this operator with bribery. I like to think they included wine and cheese in the process, but actually, according to the eighteen thirty seven French news paper report, it was through money. The telegraph operations paid out very little, and the brothers were happy to supplement the operator's meager income with bribes. That, in fact, was one of the elements that investigators would point to that the co conspirators in the Blanc crime were able to accumulate wealth far beyond their legal and meager means. Yay capitalism. Also, sadly, it would be those two co conspirators that would end up getting most of the blame. We'll talk about why. But anyway, what did the brothers actually want the tour operator of this communications line to do. Well. They wanted him to insert errors on purpose into the chain of communications, and those errors would be in response to news about the French markets. And there are some variations in the story. At this point in Standage's twenty seventeen Economist article, that's the crooked timber of humanity. He doesn't actually indicate how the tour operator would get information about the Parisian stock market, just that he would pass that information down the communications line to dough in the form of purposefully inserted errors in the communication chain. But the newspaper article from eighteen thirty seven says that someone in Paris would actually indicate where the Parisian markets were going by sending either a pair of gloves or a pair of stockings, or sometimes a necktie by coach to the tour operator. So the package arrives at the tour operator, he opens it up, he sees, Oh, there's a pair of gloves, that means the market is doing this, or oh it's a pair of stockings, that means the market is doing that. Meanwhile, his glove and stocking collection is growing every week. Later versions of the story were, as conveyed in various blogs and such, would say that the color of the fabric inside the package was also an indicator as to how the markets were doing. But I couldn't really glean that from the eighteen thirty seven newspaper article. I'm not saying it's wrong. I'm just saying my ability to read somewhat questionably translated French is a little iffy, all right. So the tour operator gets the indication of where the Parisian stock market is going, and then he inserts an error in to the official messages, indicating essentially either up or down, then includes the backspace symbol to indicate that the up or down message was transmitted an error. So the message with the inserted error would continue on down the line all the way to Bordeaux, where the brothers had hired a former tower operator to watch for incoming messages and look for the tailtale signs of up or down followed by the backspace. So this person wasn't actually working a signal tower. They were just using a telescope to look at a penultimate tower, the one that arrives before the endpoint, to see what the message says. So this co conspirator would then tell the brothers what the messages indicated, and the brothers would quickly capitalize on the situation before the rest of Bordeaux knew where the markets were headed. Meanwhile, at the end of the line in Bordeaux, the innocent operator there the one who's receiving the message would just decode the incoming messages and delete all the errors as indicated like do the backspaces, and that erased the evidence of the brothers crime. And for two years, the story goes, the brothers were able to get the scoop on what was going on and were able to profit from it by acting faster than their competitors. But it all came crashing down. Why well, Sandidge says that the compromised operator in Tour got sick, and in fact, the eighteen thirty seven article tells the same story, sick enough to be on his deathbed and he could no longer work his post. So then he confides in a friend of his and he hoped that his friend would take up that same role in the conspiracy. But his friend was the more honest sort of person, and he went to the gendarme. He went to the authorities, and ultimately the co conspirators and the Blanc brothers were arrested. Now, the co conspirators, the operators, they could actually be charged on issues with compromising the communication systems, but for the brothers it was more complicated because there was no law on the books that the brothers had actually broken This kind of crime was so new there was no law to cover. This is something we have encountered multiple times with technology. So they were released. The two brothers were released not too long after they were arrested. Now some versions of the story say they had to pay some fines, but they got to keep most of the money they made off their schemes, and so ins the tale of the first cyber attack, or what's alleged to be the first cyber attack. But I do have a couple more fun bonus details to share with this story now. First up, the Blanc brothers, according to that newspaper article, were also students of pressed to digitation or stage magic, particularly playing card magic, and they were identified also as gamblers who rarely lost. And the implication in the newspaper, if one were to read between the French lines, is that they use their stage magic skills to cheat at cards. In fact, one of the two, Francois Blanc, would become known as the Magician of Hamburg when a few decades later he would establish a casino in Hamburg. But further down the line, he would play an instrumental part in the establishment of the world famous Monte Carlo Casino in Monaco, which is a totally separate story. I've been to that casino, though I didn't know about this story at the time, and I think it's a really cool story to know. When I first started researching this, I began to worry that it was an apocryphal story because all the sources I could find were after at least after nineteen ninety eight, most of them were after twenty seventeen, and none of them were citing the French newspaper articles, so they all seemed to gather it from this pair of articles from ninety nine in twenty seventeen, and I worried that maybe it was all made up seas. But eventually, when I found that French newspaper, thanks to the commenter on the blog that I mentioned earlier, I was able to at least see that there's some journalistic evidence that Francois Blanc Impresario, founder or co founder of the Monte Carlo Casino in Monaco once upon a time, was a hacker, or at least paid hackers to hack. Kind of cool. Hope you enjoyed that story, Hope you enjoyed this episode. I will talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey Thearon, Welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the tech are you. Since we're winding down my tenure as host of this venerable podcast, I thought that it would be fun to kind of look at some quirky stories I haven't covered in the past, and this is one that some people refer to as the first cyber attack. Cyber attacks obviously big in the news these days. There are tons of stories surrounding them, everything from using cyber attacks to spread disinformation, to espionage to sabotage. So there's a lot we could talk about. But what if we were to talk about a nineteenth century cyber attack, a cyber attack that happens well before there was ever an internet, in fact, before there was wired telegraphs running through the region we'll be talking about. So allow me to tell you a story. And details of this story may or may not be entirely true, but we're going to go with it anyway. There are certainly some resources that point to this story being true. There are tons of blog posts and videos and stuff that talk about this, but I think most of them are pulling their information from one or two more recent sources. However, there's an article in an eighteen thirty seven edition of a French newspaper that I used for this particular episode. Now I should add I had to rely on auto translation for that article. My French at this point is non existent. But it's the story of how a pair of brothers were able to tap into a communications network and then insert information into that network in an effort to capitalize on stock market and bond information before anyone else could, or at least anyone else in their neck of the woods in France. So I want to point out a few sources that I use while playing this together, because that's going to be very helpful, especially if you want to read up on this too. So I think my starting point was Tom Standige's piece called The Crooked Timber of Humanity in eighteen forty three magazine. That piece was published, as far as I can tell, in twenty seventeen, but Standige had written a book in nineteen ninety eight titled The Victorian Internet that certainly ties in with this. He talks about the network system we're going to chat about in this episode. Now, I have not had the chance to read Standige's book. I want to get a copy because it sounds fascinating, but I'm not sure if this particular incident makes an appearance in the book because I haven't read it yet. However, Standage certainly writes about one of the key elements involved in our story within the Victorian Internet, and from the reviews i've it sounds like it's a really easy read and very informative and entertaining. So it's on my list now. Another piece I relied upon was a nineteen ninety nine article titled taking Stock by Gerard J. Holsman. Holsman has also written about this communications network we're going to be talking about in this episode. He's got a white paper that I found that's all about this particular network, and then in this article he goes into the incident we'll be chatting about. I found that article in INC magazine. By the way, that's INC as an incorporated, not as in tattoos. And finally, thanks to a blog commenter with the handle tATu Tata, and I know I've messed that up on Schneier dot com, I can cite that eighteen thirty seven newspaper article. I mentioned it's in the and I apologize. My French pronunciation is worse than my understanding of French. It's been thirty years since I've studied French. But the newspaper is titled Journal des de bat Politique e leterreer. So again, I know my pronunciation's horrible. Just save it. I'm already aware. So we're going to assume this story is true, or at least mostly true. It definitely has some verifiable elements in it. One big, important verifiable element is that an eighteenth century inventor named Claude Shop came up with a clever way to transmit messages quickly over vast distances. He used signaling towers, which you know, actually has been a way to send messages for hundreds of years, even before the eighteenth century. But his initial approach used two clocks and some large flipboards that had white on one side and black on the other. And the method of communication, honestly, is somewhat opaque to me. I read a very simplified explanation, but it was so simplified as to not have any sticking power on my brain cells. However, it doesn't really matter because by the time our story takes place, he had already evolved his approach to using poles that were mounted on beams, and those beams, in turn were mounted on masts that stood up on the top of signaling towers. So each mast had a beam attached at the top. The beam was attached in the center on like a pivot point, so the beam could rotate and it could hold four different positions. It could be horizontal relative to the mast, so this would be like a person standing up straight and holding their arms out straight off to either side. Or it could be vertical, so this would be if you were to hold your arms at the twelve o'clock and six o'clock positions, assuming you are familiar with anaalog clocks. And then it could also be diagonal, with either the left side higher than the right or vice versa. Now at either end of the beam that's mounted to this mast were poles, a pole on each end, and they were mounted at the ends on a pivot point. So it's like if you were holding a stick, like imagine that you're holding a stick at the end. That's kind of like what this looked like. So the poles could also be rotated into different position, and they could hold multiple positions from their respective end of the beam. The whole thing was meant to be like a human being holding semaphore flags. If you've ever seen those those signaling flags where you hold your arms out and you hold the flags up in specific positions, and that gives a particular meaning according to a shared code. So, using a control system that consisted of chains and pulleys, an operator could manipulate the device to hold one of many different positions, and then by ascribing these positions some sort of meaning. Through creating a code, Shapp was able to create a messaging system. So the towers were constructed so that through the use of a telescope, the operator could see incoming messages from the previous tower. They could then transcribe the symbols that were used in that message. Then they could send that same message further down the chain to the next tower on and so forth. Now, Shap's plan was to give only the origin and the destiny nation cities the endpoints of the communication lines the actual ability to encode and decode those messages. The operators in the middle of the line would have no idea what they were transmitting, they would just be copying what came before and then sending that same sequence of symbols along. This was to maintain message security because this communication systems was primarily used by the French government and nobody else Like the French government had exclusive use of this communication system and there would be special commands that the origin operator could use to indicate that he had made a mistake in the transcription. So let's say that you are operator number one or a number uden, you know, if you're in Paris, France, and you're transcribing a government message to be sent to well, let's say it's Bordeaux, because that's the city that will factor into our story. However, you realize that, gosh darn it, you've only gone and done put the wrong symbol in your last transmission, like you were transmitting, and you accidentally sent a message or a word that means something like cat instead of I don't know military. So then you have to use another signal, and that signal is essentially backspace, meaning that last symbol I sent you was in error. Well, the next operator in the chain is going to transmit everything you sent, including the mistake and the backspace because operator too or do if you will, is unaware of what those symbols actually mean. They're just sending along what it is that they personally have received the message errors, and all continue down the line until they finally get to their destination. There at Bordeaux. The receiving operator at the end of the line writes on the code, notes the indicators that say there's an error here, erases those errors, and decodes the message and records it down. So any errors that were sent along the line, assuming they hadn't been introduced by an intermediary tower, will get taken out. Now, it was this get taken out bit that in eighteen thirty four factors into our store all right. Now, Sadly, Claude Schapp would not live to see this happen. He had taken his own life back in eighteen oh five under circumstances that were never entirely clear, at least not to history, and this provided opportunity to a pair of brothers who are the heroes or perhaps anti heroes of our story. We'll talk about those brothers in just a moment, but first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsors. So before the break, I mentioned we have a pair of brothers, not just brothers. They're twins, Francois and Joseph Blanc. At least according to various sources, those were their names. If you go to that eighteen thirty seven newspaper article, you get a bit more specific. I mean, at first article just as the brothers Blanc over and over and over again without telling you their first names. But eventually you get Louis, Joseph and Francois Blanc. That Louis is very important because Louis and Francois Blanc twin brothers, would indicate that the Francois Blanc in this story would go on to great fame and fortune. More on that in a bit. So, according to this newspaper article, the fact that they were twins actually made it more complicated because they're identical. They were identical twins, not fraternal twins. And I feel like we have the working for a real farcical situation going on here where there's like mistaken identities and conspiracies. Seriously, how has Wes Anderson not made a movie about this already? Anyway, the brothers Blanc were bankers in the city of Bordeaux, which sounds like a tongue twister. They were in the business of trading government bonds or speculating if you are being a little less generous, let's say. However, one problem they ran into was that they were always behind the times when it came to what was going on with the market in Paris. Because this is eighteen thirty four, news about the market would take days to arrive in Bordeaux would be carried aboard a male coach, and obviously male coaches had to traverse hundreds of miles to get to their destination, Like the distance between Paris and Bordeaux is more than three hundred miles, So by the time the Brothers would learn of what was going on in Paris, it would be too late for them to capitalize on that information in Bordeaux. But if they could only find out what was going on faster, if they got news before their competitors did, they could actually make money on speculation. Now, the telegraph system, as I mentioned earlier, was restricted to official government communications, so the brothers had no legal access to that system. And if they had, so would everybody else, and the playing ground would be even across the board. But the brothers came up with a clever scheme. There was a weakness in the line. So, like I said, an operator at the beginning of the communications line could indicate that they had mistakenly transmitted the wrong symbol by including a backspace message. But if mistakes happened in between the origin and the destination, they would go unchecked until they arrived at the endpoint. Now, the longer the chain of communication was, the more likely errors would confound the message, because towers along the way would just make a mistake right, not just at the beginning and endpoints, but all along the way. And since the distance between Paris and Bordeaux was, you know, three hundred miles, actually more than three hundred miles, there were risks that a message arriving at Bordeaux would just end up being gibberish by the time it got there from all the errors. So the French government deemed it necessary to have a sort of midway point established in Tour, which is roughly halfway between Paris and Bordeaux. So at Tour, another operator would be allowed to actually decode the incoming message before encoding it again and then sending it along to Bordeaux. The Tour operator would be able to correct any errors before they became too egregious. And it was this operator that the brothers Blanc targeted. Paris would have been too risky, but tour was a possibility, so they plied this operator with bribery. I like to think they included wine and cheese in the process, but actually, according to the eighteen thirty seven French news paper report, it was through money. The telegraph operations paid out very little, and the brothers were happy to supplement the operator's meager income with bribes. That, in fact, was one of the elements that investigators would point to that the co conspirators in the Blanc crime were able to accumulate wealth far beyond their legal and meager means. Yay capitalism. Also, sadly, it would be those two co conspirators that would end up getting most of the blame. We'll talk about why. But anyway, what did the brothers actually want the tour operator of this communications line to do. Well. They wanted him to insert errors on purpose into the chain of communications, and those errors would be in response to news about the French markets. And there are some variations in the story. At this point in Standage's twenty seventeen Economist article, that's the crooked timber of humanity. He doesn't actually indicate how the tour operator would get information about the Parisian stock market, just that he would pass that information down the communications line to dough in the form of purposefully inserted errors in the communication chain. But the newspaper article from eighteen thirty seven says that someone in Paris would actually indicate where the Parisian markets were going by sending either a pair of gloves or a pair of stockings, or sometimes a necktie by coach to the tour operator. So the package arrives at the tour operator, he opens it up, he sees, Oh, there's a pair of gloves, that means the market is doing this, or oh it's a pair of stockings, that means the market is doing that. Meanwhile, his glove and stocking collection is growing every week. Later versions of the story were, as conveyed in various blogs and such, would say that the color of the fabric inside the package was also an indicator as to how the markets were doing. But I couldn't really glean that from the eighteen thirty seven newspaper article. I'm not saying it's wrong. I'm just saying my ability to read somewhat questionably translated French is a little iffy, all right. So the tour operator gets the indication of where the Parisian stock market is going, and then he inserts an error in to the official messages, indicating essentially either up or down, then includes the backspace symbol to indicate that the up or down message was transmitted an error. So the message with the inserted error would continue on down the line all the way to Bordeaux, where the brothers had hired a former tower operator to watch for incoming messages and look for the tailtale signs of up or down followed by the backspace. So this person wasn't actually working a signal tower. They were just using a telescope to look at a penultimate tower, the one that arrives before the endpoint, to see what the message says. So this co conspirator would then tell the brothers what the messages indicated, and the brothers would quickly capitalize on the situation before the rest of Bordeaux knew where the markets were headed. Meanwhile, at the end of the line in Bordeaux, the innocent operator there the one who's receiving the message would just decode the incoming messages and delete all the errors as indicated like do the backspaces, and that erased the evidence of the brothers crime. And for two years, the story goes, the brothers were able to get the scoop on what was going on and were able to profit from it by acting faster than their competitors. But it all came crashing down. Why well, Sandidge says that the compromised operator in Tour got sick, and in fact, the eighteen thirty seven article tells the same story, sick enough to be on his deathbed and he could no longer work his post. So then he confides in a friend of his and he hoped that his friend would take up that same role in the conspiracy. But his friend was the more honest sort of person, and he went to the gendarme. He went to the authorities, and ultimately the co conspirators and the Blanc brothers were arrested. Now, the co conspirators, the operators, they could actually be charged on issues with compromising the communication systems, but for the brothers it was more complicated because there was no law on the books that the brothers had actually broken This kind of crime was so new there was no law to cover. This is something we have encountered multiple times with technology. So they were released. The two brothers were released not too long after they were arrested. Now some versions of the story say they had to pay some fines, but they got to keep most of the money they made off their schemes, and so ins the tale of the first cyber attack, or what's alleged to be the first cyber attack. But I do have a couple more fun bonus details to share with this story now. First up, the Blanc brothers, according to that newspaper article, were also students of pressed to digitation or stage magic, particularly playing card magic, and they were identified also as gamblers who rarely lost. And the implication in the newspaper, if one were to read between the French lines, is that they use their stage magic skills to cheat at cards. In fact, one of the two, Francois Blanc, would become known as the Magician of Hamburg when a few decades later he would establish a casino in Hamburg. But further down the line, he would play an instrumental part in the establishment of the world famous Monte Carlo Casino in Monaco, which is a totally separate story. I've been to that casino, though I didn't know about this story at the time, and I think it's a really cool story to know. When I first started researching this, I began to worry that it was an apocryphal story because all the sources I could find were after at least after nineteen ninety eight, most of them were after twenty seventeen, and none of them were citing the French newspaper articles, so they all seemed to gather it from this pair of articles from ninety nine in twenty seventeen, and I worried that maybe it was all made up seas. But eventually, when I found that French newspaper, thanks to the commenter on the blog that I mentioned earlier, I was able to at least see that there's some journalistic evidence that Francois Blanc Impresario, founder or co founder of the Monte Carlo Casino in Monaco once upon a time, was a hacker, or at least paid hackers to hack. Kind of cool. Hope you enjoyed that story, Hope you enjoyed this episode. I will talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. 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