Ghost in the Wires_ My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker - Kevin Mitnick [136]
“Fine,” I said. “Do you have the package in front of you?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, please read me the tracking number.”
Instead, she put me on hold yet again.
I didn’t need to be a rocket scientist to figure out that something was seriously wrong.
I fretted for half an hour, wondering what to do. The only sensible option, of course, would be to just walk away and forget the whole thing. But I had gone to so much trouble to get that source code, I really wanted it. “Sensible” didn’t seem to enter into the equation.
After half an hour, I called the hotel again and asked to speak to the manager on duty.
When he came on the line, I said, “This is Special Agent Wilson with the FBI. Are you familiar with the situation on your premises?” I was half expecting him to reply that he didn’t know what I was talking about.
Instead he answered, “Of course I am! The police have the whole place under surveillance!”
His words hit me like a ton of bricks.
He told me that one of the officers had just come into his office, and I should speak with him.
The officer came on the line. In an authoritative voice, I asked for his name. He told me.
I said I was Special Agent Jim Wilson with the White Collar Crime Squad. “What’s happening down there?” I asked.
The cop said, “Our guy hasn’t shown up yet.”
I said, “Okay, thanks for the update,” and hung up.
Way too close for comfort.
I called Lewis. He was just walking out the door to go and pick up the package. I practically yelled into the phone, “Wait! It’s a trap.”
But I couldn’t leave it there. I called a different hotel and made a reservation for K-P Wilska, then phoned back the lady at the Ramada Inn and told her, “I need to have you reship the package to another hotel. My plans have changed, and I’m staying there tonight so I can make an early-morning meeting tomorrow.” I gave her the name and address of the new hotel.
I figured I might as well let the Feds chase another red herring for a while.
When I saw an ad for NEC’s newest cell phone, I didn’t care too much about the phone itself; I just knew I had to have the source code. It didn’t matter that I had already grabbed source code for several other hot cell phones: this was going to be my next trophy.
I knew that NEC, a subsidiary of NEC Electronics, had an account on the Internet service provider called Netcom. This ISP had become one of my principal routes for accessing the Internet, in part because it conveniently offered dial-up numbers in nearly every major city.
A call to NEC’s U.S. headquarters in Irving, Texas, provided the information that the company developed all its cellular phone software in Fukuoka, Japan. A couple of calls to NEC Fukuoka led me to their Mobile Radio Division, where a telephone receptionist found someone who spoke English to translate for me. That’s always an advantage, because the translator lends authenticity: she’s right there in the same building, speaking the same language as your target. The person at the end of the chain tends to assume you’ve already been vetted. And in this case, it also helped that the level of trust is so high in the Japanese culture.
The translator found a guy to help me who she said was one of the group’s lead software engineers. I told her to tell him, “This is the Mobile Radio Division in Irving, Texas. We have a crisis here. We’ve had a catastrophic disk failure and lost our most recent versions of source code for several mobile handsets.”
His answer came back, “Why can’t you get it on mrdbolt?”
Hmmm. What was that?
I tried, “We can’t get onto that server because of the crash.” It passed the test—“mrdbolt” was obviously the name of the server used by this software group.
I asked the engineer to FTP it to the NEC Electronics account on Netcom. But I got push back because that would mean sending this sensitive data to a system outside the company.
Now what? To buy some time, I told the translator that I had to take another