What is a Phone Phreak?
Phone phreaks are individuals who make up a subculture that experiment with the use of an application of telecommunications activity that is known as phreaking. Essentially, a phone phreak will attempt to identify and manipulate various audio frequencies associated with the tones that are used to provide a variety of services to telephone customers. In more recent years, the technology of the phone phreak has extended to attempts to also make use of audio components as part of a process to study and identify electronic hacking with computer systems and servers. The exact origins of the phone phreak are debated, although there is general agreement that the art of phreaking was born during the middle of the 20th century. As more and more telephone service providers began to deploy automatic switching for most calls rather than relying on manual switching by an operator. Automatic switching involved the use of audio signaling that allowed phone switches to pick up on a series of tones in
A phone phreak is someone who engages in the act of phone phreaking. Commonly, a phone phreak would have a general interest in computer security, using phone phreaking to extend their potential, or perhaps to help hide their tracks, by carrying out their attacks while piggybacking on a phone line belonging to someone else.
