Ghost in the Wires_ My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker - Kevin Mitnick [141]
And just like that, I was cut off without any income. Even worse, I was worried that the law firm might have investigated my background, or maybe the IRS had discovered that the Social Security number I was using belonged to the real Eric Weiss.
Afraid to stay in my apartment overnight, I found a motel near Cherry Creek, my favorite part of Denver. The next morning I rented a fourteen-foot U-Haul truck, packed all my stuff into it, and on the way back to the motel stopped by the furniture rental place, where I gave the story about a family emergency, handed over my apartment key, settled my bill, and left the furniture people to pick up their bed, table, dresser, TV, and so on.
As I pulled up at the motel, I didn’t notice that the U-Haul was too tall for the carport, and I hit it. Worried that the cops were going to be summoned to take an accident report, I offered to pay for the damage on the spot. The guy said five hundred bucks, which maybe was a fair price or maybe not, but I paid it anyway, even though it was a terrible time to be handing out money I would need for living expenses—the cost of carelessness, but also the cost of not wanting to run the risk of talking to a police officer.
Of course, my next task was to find a way to wipe squeaky-clean the computer I had been using at the law firm. But how, when I no longer worked there?
A couple of weeks later, Elaine said she’d allow me to come in and transfer my “personal” files to floppies, which of course meant all my source code riches from the recent hacks. She sat with me while I did it, and looked concerned when she saw that I was deleting each file after saving it to a floppy. To throw her off the scent, I created an “Eric” folder on the computer and moved each file there instead of deleting it. Later I’d somehow have to either connect to the computer remotely or slip into the building to wipe all the files in that directory.
Not long after, I regrouped and decided to call Ginger, on the pretext of “just staying in touch” but really in the hope of gathering some useful information. During the call, she mentioned that she was having problems with the “BSDI” system that connected the law firm to the Internet, which I had installed and managed.
I told her I could help her out over the phone. As I walked her through fixing the problem, I had her type:
nc–l–p 53–e/bin/sh &
She didn’t recognize the command, which gave me full root access to the firm’s gateway host. When she typed that command, it ran a program called “netcat,” which set up a root shell on port 53, so I could connect to the port and be granted with an instant root shell, requiring no password. All unaware, Ginger had effectively set up a simple backdoor for me with root access.
Once I was in, I connected to the law firm’s AViiON Data General computer system, running the firm’s telephone accounting application, where I had previously set up my early-warning system. The reason I connected to the AViiON first was as a safety measure: if after firing me my bosses had decided to change the passwords on the VMS Cluster—the firm’s primary computer systems—then any attempt I might have made to log in directly to the VMS Cluster with an incorrect password would have triggered a log-in-failure security alarm from the system that acted as the firm’s Internet gateway. By accessing the VMS Cluster through the AViiON instead, I ensured that an incorrect password would appear to be an attempt made from inside the firm. So any security alarm would not appear to be coming from the Internet gateway system, which would likely point to me since I was the only person who had previously had access to it.
Successfully logged in to the VMS system, I remotely mounted my old workstation’s hard drive; that way I could gain access to my files and securely wipe all the potential evidence.
Searching Elaine’s email for mentions of my name, I learned that the firm was trying to put together a defense in case I sued for wrongful termination—which I had grounds for doing but obviously couldn’t risk. Liz had been asked