Ghost in the Wires_ My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker - Kevin Mitnick [11]
By now I know enough names and titles at Pacific Telephone to try a ploy. I explain, “I work at the COSMOS in San Diego, and I’m just showing a friend what a central office looks like. You can call my supervisor and check me out.” And I give him the name of a COSMOS supervisor. Thank God for a good memory, yet I know we don’t look like we belong there, and the story is lame.
The guard looks up the supervisor’s name in the intercompany directory, finds her home phone number, and places the call. Ring, ring, ring. He starts with an apology for calling so late and explains the situation.
I say, “Let me talk to her.”
He hands me the phone, which I press hard against my ear, praying he won’t be able to hear her voice. I ad-lib something along the lines of, “Judy, I’m really sorry about this—I was giving my friend a tour of the switching center and left my company ID card in the car. The security guard is just verifying I’m from the COSMOS center in San Diego. I hope you won’t hold this against me.”
I pause a few beats, as if listening to her. She’s ranting. “Who is this? Do I know you? What are you doing there?!”
I start in again. “It was just that I had to be here in the morning anyway, for the meeting on that new training manual. And I have a review session with Jim on Monday at eleven, in case you want to drop in. You and I are still having lunch on Tuesday, right?”
Another pause. She’s still ranting.
“Sure. Sorry again for disturbing you,” I say.
And then I hang up.
The guard and switch techs look confused; they were expecting me to hand the phone back to the security guard so she could tell him it was okay. You could just see the look on the guard’s face: Did he dare disturb her a second time?
I tell him, “She sure was upset at being woken up at two thirty in the morning.”
Then I say, “There’s just a couple other things I want to show my friend. I’ll only be another ten minutes.”
I walk out, Rhoades following close behind.
Obviously I want to run but know I can’t.
We reach the elevator. I bang the button for the ground floor. We sigh with relief when we get out of the building, scared shitless because it was such a close call, happy to be out of there.
But I know what’s happening. The lady is calling around desperately, trying to find somebody who knows how to get the phone number for the guard’s desk at the Sunset-Gower CO, in the middle of the night.
We get to the car. I drive a block away without turning on my headlights. I stop and we sit there, watching the front door of the building.
After about ten minutes, the burly guard comes out, looking around in every direction but knowing damned well we’re long gone. Of course, he’s wrong.
I wait until he goes back inside, then drive away, turning on my headlights after rounding the first corner.
That was too close. If he had called the cops, the charge would have been breaking and entering, or even worse, burglary. Steve and I would have been headed to Juvenile Hall.
I wouldn’t be going back into a telephone company facility again anytime soon, but I was keen to find something else—something big—to challenge my ingenuity.
THREE
Original Sin
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After I figured out how to obtain unpublished numbers, finding out information about people—friends, friends of friends, teachers, even strangers—held a fascination for me. The Department of Motor Vehicles is a great storehouse of information. Was there any way I could tap it?
For openers, I simply called a DMV office from the pay phone in a restaurant and said something like, “This is Officer Campbell, LAPD, Van Nuys station. Our computers are down, and some officers in the field need a couple of pieces of information. Can you help me?”
The lady at the DMV said, “Why aren’t you calling on the law enforcement line?”
Oh, okay—there was a separate phone number for cops to call. How could I find out the number? Well, obviously the cops at the police station