Ghost in the Wires_ My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker - Kevin Mitnick [12]
Placing a call to the nearest station house, I said I was from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, we needed to call the DMV, and the officer who had the number for the law enforcement desk was out. I needed the operator to give me the number. Which she did. Just like that.
(As I was recounting this story recently, I thought I still remembered that DMV law enforcement phone number or could still get it. I picked up the phone and dialed. The DMV has a Centrex phone system, so all the numbers have the same area code and prefix: 916-657. Only the extension number—the last four digits—varies by department. I just chose those last digits at random, knowing I’d get somebody at the DMV, and I’d have credibility because I was calling an internal number.
The lady who answered said something I didn’t get.
I said, “Is this the number for law enforcement?”
She said, “No.”
“I must have dialed wrong,” I said. “What’s the number for law enforcement?”
She gave it to me! After all these years, they still haven’t learned.
After phoning the DMV’s law enforcement line, I found there was a second level of protection. I needed a “Requester Code.” As in the past, I needed to come up with a cover story on the spur of the moment. Making my voice sound anxious, I told the clerk, “We’ve just had an urgent situation come up here, I’ll have to call you back.”
Calling the Van Nuys LAPD station, I claimed to be from the DMV and said I was compiling a new database. “Is your Requester Code 36472?”
“No, it’s 62883.”
(That’s a trick I’ve discovered very often works. If you ask for a piece of sensitive information, people naturally grow immediately suspicious. If you pretend you already have the information and give them something that’s wrong, they’ll frequently correct you—rewarding you with the piece of information you were looking for.)
With a few minutes’ worth of phone calls, I had set myself up for getting the driver’s license number and home address of anyone in the state of California, or running a license plate and getting the details such as the owner’s name and address, or running a person’s name and getting details about his or her car registration. At the time it was just a test of my skills; in the years ahead the DMV would be a rich lode that I would use in myriad ways.
All these extra tools I was accumulating were like the sweet at the end of a meal. The main course was still my phone phreaking. I was calling a lot of different Pacific Telephone and General Telephone departments, collecting information to satisfy that “What information can I get?” urge, making calls to build my knowledge bank of the companies’ departments, procedures, and lingo and routing my calls through some long-distance carriers to make them harder to trace. Most of this from my mom’s phone in our condominium.
Of course phreakers like to score points by showing other phreakers what new things they’ve learned how to do. I loved pulling pranks on friends, phreakers or not. One day I hacked into the phone company switch serving the area where my buddy Steve Rhoades lived with his grandmother, changing the “line class code” from residential to pay phone. When he or his grandmother tried to place a call, they would hear, “Please deposit ten cents.” Of course he knew who had done it, and called to complain. I promised to undo it, and I did, but changed the service to a prison pay phone. Now when they tried to make a call, an operator would come on the line and say, “This will be a collect call. What is your name, please.” Steve called to say, “Very funny—change it back.” I had my laughs; I changed it back.
Phone phreakers had discovered a way to make free phone calls, taking advantage of a flaw in some types of “diverters”—devices that were used to provide call forwarding (for example, to an answering service) in the days before call forwarding was offered by the phone companies. A phreaker would call at an hour when he