Ghost in the Wires_ My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker - Kevin Mitnick [113]
Because of the way the movies portray it, people assume that living as a fugitive means always looking over your shoulder, in constant fear of discovery. In the years that followed, I would have that experience only rarely. For the most part, once I’d established my new identity and solidified it with verifiable, government-issued ID, I felt secure. Just to be on the safe side, I always set up early-warning systems so I’d be tipped off if someone came looking for me. And if I noticed anyone getting close, I would take immediate action. But from the very start, I would be enjoying myself the vast majority of the time.
My first order of business in any new city was to compromise the local phone company so I could prevent anyone from easily tracking me. For starters, I’d need one of the dial-up phone numbers that field techs used to call into the phone company switch. I would get the number for the Central Office that handled the telephone exchanges I wanted to gain control of. I’d call and say something like, “Hi. This is Jimmy over in Engineering. How you doin’ today?”
Then I’d follow up with, “What’s the dial-up for the VDU?”—using the shorthand term for the Visual Display Unit, which gives a tech full access to the switch from a remote location. The neat part was that if the switch was a 1AESS, you didn’t even need a password to access it. Whoever made that decision must have figured that anyone who knew the phone number was authorized.
Usually the guy I got on the line would give me the phone number for dialing into the switch of his Central Office. But if a tech challenged me, I knew enough about the system to make up a plausible excuse on the fly. It might be something like, “We’re setting up a new dial-out system here and programming all the dial-up numbers into our outgoing dialer software. So if any switch engineers have to dial in, they can just instruct the modem to dial a particular office.”
Once I had the phone number for dialing into the switch, I could do pretty much anything I liked. If I wanted to have a series of conversations with someone in, say, Japan, I’d find an unassigned phone number, take it over, add call forwarding, and then activate it to forward any incoming calls anywhere I wanted. Then, from my cell phone, I could make a local call to the previously unassigned phone number and have a clear, direct connection from the switch straight to the guy in Japan, instead of having to deal with an unreliable international cell phone connection.
And I would also routinely use the technique called “masking”—setting up a chain of call-forwarding numbers in switches of several cities in different parts of the country. Then, calling the first number in the chain, my call would be passed along the chain from city to city, ultimately to the number I wanted—making it extremely time-consuming for anyone to trace the calls back to me.
My calls weren’t just free, they were virtually untraceable.
My first morning in Denver, I sat down with a local newspaper and began circling job ads for computer work. I was looking for any company that used my favorite operating system, VMS.
I created a separate résumé for each likely-sounding ad, tailored to the particular qualifications listed. As a rule, I’d read the qualifications they were looking for and tailor a résumé that showed I had around 90 percent of the skills on the company’s wish list. If I claimed every sought-after skill, I figured the HR people or the head of IT might wonder, If he’s that good, why is he applying for such a low-level job?
My résumé would list only a single previous job so I wouldn’t have to create more than one past-job reference. The trick here was to keep copies of all the material I sent out so I’d know what I had written when someone called me in for an interview. Along with the résumé, I’d include a well-polished cover letter to introduce myself.
My skill