Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World’s Most Wanted Hacker by William L. Simon, Kevin Mitnick, Steve Wozniak Read Free Book Online

numbers and privileged account passwords.
    In December 1980, I ran into a kid named Micah Hirschman, whose father happened to have an account with a company called Bloodstock Research, which used a RSTS/E system; I assume the company kept historical records on the bloodlines of racehorses for breeders and bettors. I used the Hirschman account to connect to Bloodstock Research so I could exploit a security flaw and gain access to a privileged account, then Micah and I played with the operating system to teach ourselves about it, basically for kicks.
    The episode blew up in our faces. Micah logged in late one night without me, and Bloodstock spotted the break-in and alerted the FBI, telling them that the attack had been through the Hirschman account. The Feds paid Mr. Hirschman a visit. He denied knowing anything about the attack. When they pressured him, he fingered his son. Micah fingered me.
    I was in my bedroom on the second floor of our condo, online, hacking into the Pacific Telephone switches over a dial-up modem. Hearing a knock at the front door, I opened my window and called down, “Who is it?” The answer was one that I would come to have nightmares about: “Robin Brown, FBI.”
    My heart began pounding.
    Mom called to me, “Who is it?”
    “A man who says he’s from the FBI,” I called back.
    Mom just laughed. She didn’t know who it was but she didn’t think it could possibly be the FBI.
    I was in a panic, already hanging up the phone from the computer modem cradle and stashing under the bed the TI-700 computer terminal Lewis De Payne had lent me for a few weeks. Back then, before the daysof the personal computer, all I had was a terminal and a modem that I was using to connect to a system at a company or university. No computer monitor: the responses to my commands would print out on a long roll of thermal paper.
    I was flashing on the fact that I had a
ton
of that thermal paper under my bed, filled with data that would show I had been hacking for many hours a week into telephone company computers and switches, as well as a load of computers at private firms.
    When I went downstairs, the agent offered me his hand, and I shook it. “I busted Stanley Rifkin,” he told me, understanding that I’d know whom he was talking about: the guy who had pulled off the biggest theft of its kind in history, stealing $10 million from Security Pacific National Bank by a wire-transfer ruse. The agent thought that would scare me, except I knew that Rifkin had been caught only because he had returned to the States and then blabbed about what he had done. Otherwise he’d still be living abroad in luxury.
    But this guy was a Fed, and there
still
weren’t any federal laws covering the kind of computer break-ins I was doing. He said, “You can get twenty-five years if you continue messing with the phone company.” I knew he was powerless, just trying to scare me.
    It didn’t work. As soon as he left, I went right back online. I didn’t even burn the printouts. Yes, it was stupid. I was already incorrigible.
    If the agent’s visit didn’t give me any chills, my mother’s reaction was not what you might expect. To her, the whole thing was like a dumb joke: What harm could a boy come to just from playing with a computer at home? She had no concept of what I was up to.
    The thrill and satisfaction of doing things I wasn’t supposed to do were just too great. I was consumed by a fascination with the technology of phones and computers. I felt like an explorer, traveling cyberspace without limitations, sneaking into systems for the pure thrill and satisfaction, outsmarting engineers with years of experience, figuring out how to bypass security obstacles, learning how things worked.
    It wasn’t long before I began experiencing some turbulence from the authorities. Micah had left shortly after for a trip to Paris. The Air France flight had been in the air for a couple of hours when an announcement came over the PA system: