Ghost in the Wires_ My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker - Kevin Mitnick [118]
She said he had brown hair and brown eyes, was six feet tall, and weighed 145 pounds. I had always thought of Eric’s hair color as being blond, but otherwise the description fit him to a T.
I had finally cracked his cover. I now knew the real name of the man who called himself Eric Heinz. And he wasn’t a Fed; he was just a snitch, trying to trap me and probably as many other hackers as he could to save his own ass.
After all of that work—all of my thinking and worrying about who and what Eric was—I was smiling from ear to ear. I was elated. The FBI was so proud of its global reputation, but hadn’t been able to protect a snitch from being unmasked by one lone hacker.
With my South Dakota research and my weekend of skiing behind me, it was time for my first day of work at the law firm. I was shown to a desk in an office inside the computer room, adjacent to the desks of two other members of the department’s staff, Liz and Darren. Both made me feel welcome, which I was coming to find was typical of Denver, where the people seemed laid-back, open, and friendly. Ginger, although a coworker, had an office on the other side of the computer room; she, too, was very friendly.
I was starting to get comfortable with my new life, while at the same time never forgetting that at any moment I might be forced to run to avoid being locked up again in the tiny coffin of a cell in solitary. Still, working at a law firm came with some unexpected benefits. The firm occupied five floors near the top in the posh fifty-story skyscraper known as the Cash Register building because the top of the building was curved like a cash register. After hours, I’d log on to the Westlaw account and read law books in the law library, researching how to get out of the scrape I had gotten myself into.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Here Comes the Sun
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My main duties in the Information Technology Department at the law firm fell into the “computer operations” category: solving problems with printers and computer files, converting files from WordPerfect to Word and several other formats, writing scripts to automate procedures, and doing system and network administration tasks. I was also given a couple of major projects: connecting the firm to the Internet (this was just when the Internet was beginning to be much more widely used) and installing and managing a product called SecurID, which provides “two-form-factor” authentication. Authorized users have to provide the six-digit code displayed on the SecurID device in conjunction with a secret PIN for remote access to the firm’s computer systems.
One of my collateral duties—and I couldn’t have designed this better if I had been handing out job assignments myself—was a shared responsibility for supporting the firm’s telephone billing management system. That meant studying the telephone accounting application, on company time, no less. This was how I learned exactly where to add some programming instructions that would turn the application into an early-warning system for me.
I wrote a script that would check every outgoing phone call from the law firm against a hit list of area codes and telephone prefixes. And my list of numbers included, guess what? Right: the FBI and U.S. Attorney’s offices in Los Angeles and Denver. If a call was made to any number within those agencies, the script I wrote would send a message to my pager with the code “6565”—easy for me to remember because it was the last four digits of the main number assigned to the Los Angeles FBI office.
While I was at the firm, I actually got that code twice, and it scared the crap out of me both times. On each occasion, I waited a few minutes with a knot in my stomach, then looked up the number