Ghost in the Wires_ My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker - Kevin Mitnick [1]
Here’s a news flash: it doesn’t even have to be all that authentic looking. Ninety-nine percent of the time, it won’t get more than a glance. As long as the essential elements are in the right place and look more or less the way they are supposed to, you can get by with it… unless, of course, some overzealous guard or an employee who likes to play the role of security watchdog insists on taking a close look. It’s a danger you run when you live a life like mine.
In the parking lot, I stay out of sight, watching the glow of cigarettes from the stream of people stepping out for a smoke break. Finally I spot a little pack of five or six people starting back into the building together. The rear entrance door is one of those that unlock when an employee holds his or her access card up to the card reader. As the group single-files through the door, I fall in at the back of the line. The guy ahead of me reaches the door, notices there’s someone behind him, takes a quick glance to make sure I’m wearing a company badge, and holds the door open for me. I nod a thanks.
This technique is called “tailgating.”
Inside, the first thing that catches my eye is a sign posted so you see it immediately as you walk in the door. It’s a security poster, warning not to hold the door for any other person but to require that each person gain entrance by holding up his card to the reader. But common courtesy, everyday politeness to a “fellow employee,” means that the warning on the security poster is routinely ignored.
Inside the building, I begin walking corridors with the stride of someone en route to an important task. In fact I’m on a voyage of exploration, looking for the offices of the Information Technology (IT) Department, which after about ten minutes I find in an area on the western side of the building. I’ve done my homework in advance and have the name of one of the company’s network engineers; I figure he’s likely to have full administrator rights to the company’s network.
Damn! When I find his workspace, it’s not an easily accessible cubicle but a separate office… behind a locked door. But I see a solution. The ceiling is made up of those white soundproofing squares, the kind often used to create a dropped ceiling with a crawl space above for piping, electrical lines, air vents, and so on.
I cell-phone to my buddy that I need him, and make my way back to the rear entrance to let him in. Lanky and thin, he will, I hope, be able to do what I can’t. Back in IT, he clambers onto a desk. I grab him around the legs and boost him up high enough that he’s able to raise one of the tiles and slide it out of the way. As I strain to raise him higher, he manages to get a grip on a pipe and pull himself up. Within a minute, I hear him drop down inside the locked office. The doorknob turns and he stands there, covered in dust but grinning brightly.
I enter and quietly close the door. We’re safer now, much less likely to be noticed. The office is dark. Turning on a light would be dangerous but it isn’t necessary—the glow from the engineer’s computer is enough for me to see everything I need, reducing the risk. I take a quick scan of his desk and check the top drawer and under the keyboard to see if he has left himself a note with his computer password. No luck. But not a problem.
From my fanny pack, I pull out a CD with a bootable version of the Linux operating system that contains a hacker toolkit and pop it into his CD drive, then restart the computer. One of the tools allows me to change the local administrator’s password on his computer; I change it to something I know, so I can log in. I then remove my CD and again restart the computer, this time logging in to the local administrator account.
Working as fast as I can, I install a “remote access Trojan,” a type of malicious software that gives me full access to the system, so I can log keystrokes, grab password hashes, and even instruct