Ghost in the Wires_ My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker - Kevin Mitnick [13]
The diverter could also be used to receive incoming calls for call-backs during a social-engineering attack.
In another approach with the diverter, the phreaker dialed the “automatic number identification,” or ANI number, used by phone company technicians, and in this way learned the phone number for the outgoing diverter line. Once the number was known, the phreaker could give out the number as “his” callback. To answer the line, the phreaker just called the business’s main number that diverted the call. But this time, when the diverter picked up the second line to call the answering service, it effectively answered the incoming call.
I used this way of talking with my friend Steve late one night. He answered using the diverter line belonging to a company called Prestige Coffee Shop in the San Fernando Valley.
We were talking about phone phreaking stuff when suddenly a voice interrupted our conversation.
“We are monitoring,” the stranger said.
Steve and I both hung up immediately. We got back on a direct connection, laughing at the telephone company’s puny attempt to scare us, talking about what idiots the people who worked there were. The same voice interrupted again: “We are still monitoring!”
Who were the idiots now?
Sometime later, my mom received a letter from General Telephone, followed by an in-person visit from Don Moody, the head of Security for the company, who warned her that if I didn’t stop what I was doing, GTE would terminate our telephone service for fraud and abuse. Mom was shocked and upset by the idea of losing our phone service. And Moody wasn’t kidding. When I continued my phreaking, GTE did terminate our service. I told my mom not to worry, I had an idea.
The phone company associated each phone line with a specific address. Our terminated phone was assigned to Unit 13. My solution was pretty low-tech: I went down to the hardware store and sorted through the collection of letters and numbers that you tack up on your front door. When I got back to the condo, I took down the “13” and nailed up “12B” in its place.
Then I called GTE and asked for the department that handled provisioning. I explained that a new unit, 12B, was being added to the condominium complex and asked them to adjust their records accordingly. They said it would take twenty-four to forty-eight hours to update the system.
I waited.
When I called back, I said I was the new tenant in 12B and would like to order phone service. The woman at the phone company asked what name I’d like the number listed under.
“Jim Bond,” I said. “Uh, no… why not make that my legal name? James.”
“James Bond,” she repeated, making nothing of it—even when I paid an extra fee to choose my own number: 895-5… 007.
After the phone was installed, I took down the “12B” outside our door and replaced it with “13” again. It was several weeks before somebody at GTE caught on and shut the service down.
Years later I would learn that this was when GTE started a file on me. I was seventeen years old.
About the same time, I got to know a man named Dave Kompel, who was probably in his midtwenties but had not outgrown teenage acne that was so bad it disfigured his appearance. In charge of maintaining the Los Angeles Unified School District’s PDP-11/70 minicomputer running the RSTS/E operating system, he—along with a number of his friends—possessed computer knowledge I highly prized. Eager to be admitted into their circle so they would share information with me, I made my case to Dave and one of his friends, Neal Goldsmith. Neal was an extremely obese guy with short hair who appeared to be coddled by his wealthy parents. His life seemed to be focused only on food and computers.
Neal told me