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 Page B

him, “This is [whatever fictitious name popped into my head at that moment], from DEC support. We’ve discovered a catastrophic bug in your version of RSTS/E. You could lose data.” This is a very powerful social-engineering technique, because the fear of losing data is so great that most people won’t hesitate to cooperate.
    With the person sufficiently scared, I’d say, “We can patch your system without interfering with your operations.” By that point the guy (or, sometimes, lady) could hardly wait to give me the dial-up phone number and access to the system-manager account. If I got any pushback, I’d just say something like, “Okay, we’ll send it to you in the mail” and move on to try another target.
    The system administrator at U.S. Leasing gave me the password to the system manager account without a blink. I went in, created a new account, and patched the operating system with a “backdoor”—software code that sets me up so I’d be able to gain covert access whenever I want to get back in.
    I shared details of the backdoor with Lewis when we next spoke. At the time Lewis was dating a wannabe hacker who sometimes went by the name of Susan Thunder and who later told one interviewer that in those days she had sometimes worked as a prostitute, but only to raise money for buying computer equipment. I still roll my eyes when I think about that line. Anyway, Lewis told Susan that I had broken into U.S. Leasing and gave her the credentials. Or maybe, as he later claimed, he didn’t give them to her but she saw them written on a notepad he had left alongside his computer.
    Shortly after, the two of them had a falling-out and parted company, I guess with some bad feelings. She then took revenge
on me
. To this day, I don’t know why I was the target, unless perhaps she thought Lewis had broken up with her so he could spend more time with me, hacking, and so blamed me for the breakup.
    Whatever the reason, she reportedly used the stolen credentials to get into the U.S. Leasing computer systems. The later stories about the incident said she had destroyed many of their files. And that she had sent messages to all their printers to print out, over and over until they ran out of paper:
    MITNICK WAS HERE
    MITNICK WAS HERE
    FUCK YOU
    FUCK YOU
     
    What really burned me about this whole affair was that in a later plea agreement, the government insisted on including this act that I didn’t commit. I was faced with a choice between confessing to this abusive, ridiculous act and going to juvenile prison.
    Susan waged a vendetta against me for some time, disrupting my phone service, and giving the phone company orders to disconnect my telephone number. My one small act of revenge came about by chance.Once, in the middle of a phone company hack, I needed one telephone line that would ring and ring, unanswered. I dialed the number of a pay phone I happened to know by heart. In one of those small-world coincidences that happen to most of us now and then, Susan Thunder, who lived nearby, was walking past that particular phone booth just at that moment. She picked up the telephone and said hello. I recognized her voice.
    I said, “Susan, it’s Kevin. I just want you to know I’m watching every move you make. Don’t fuck with me!”
    I hope it scared the hell out of her for weeks.
    I’d been having fun, but my evading the law wasn’t going to last forever.
    By May 1981, still age seventeen, I had transferred my extracurricular studies to UCLA. In the computer lab, the students were there to do homework assignments or to learn about computers and programming. I was there to hack into remote computers because we couldn’t afford a computer at home, so I had to find computer access at places like universities.
    Of course, the machines in the student computer lab had no external access—you could dial out from the modem at each station, but only to another campus phone number, not to an outside number—which meant they