Ghost in the Wires_ My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker - Kevin Mitnick [150]
There was another reason I felt safe with him: he shared with me a very powerful research tool he had learned about from Justin. In a bizarre coincidence, Justin—long before I met him—had snuck into a building I was very familiar with: 5150 Wilshire Boulevard, where Dave Harrison had his offices. Justin was interested in stealing credit card data as it was sent to the card processor for verification, and he was targeting the same GTE Telenet network that I had gone after, though with a different intent.
When Justin started playing back the recording of the modem tones through a setup that translated them into text on the computer screen, he realized that among all the other data was the sign-on credentials of some agency that was accessing California DMV records—credentials he and any other hacker could use to retrieve any information from the DMV. Incredible! I could just picture Justin’s jaw dropping. He probably couldn’t believe his good luck, and began using these credentials himself to run license plates and driver’s licenses.
Ron wasn’t just telling me a story about Justin. He was actually sharing the details with me: “The GTE Telenet address is 916268.05. As soon as the display goes blank, you type ‘DGS.’ The password is ‘LU6.’ And you’re in!”
I couldn’t get off the phone fast enough to try it out. It worked!
From then on, I would never have to social-engineer the DMV for information again. I could get everything I wanted, quickly, cleanly, and safely.
Austin’s sharing of this hack put my mind to rest about whether he might really be a snitch trying to get information to help the Feds find me. If he were an informant, the Feds would never have allowed him to give me access to protected DMV records. I was convinced that he was safe to deal with.
During my investigation of Eric, I had spent countless hours online and on the phone with a well-known Dutch hacker who went by the hacker name “RGB,” working to figure out bugs and hack into different systems. He had been busted in May 1992, arrested at his home in Utrecht, the Netherlands, by government agents posing as salesmen for a computer company—a combined force made up of local police and the PILOT team, a law enforcement group formed to battle hacking-related offenses. RGB told me the police had hundreds of pages of transcripts of his conversations with me.
When he was released from detention, we went back to hacking together again. RGB started probing systems at Carnegie Mellon University and monitoring their network traffic using a program called “tcpdump.” After weeks of monitoring, he finally intercepted a CERT staff member’s password. As soon as he confirmed that the password worked, he contacted me, full of pure excitement, and asked for my help in finding anything of interest, most particularly any reported security vulnerabilities that we could leverage in our hacking.
The Computer Emergency Response Team, CERT, based at Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, was a federally funded research and development center established in November 1988, after the Morris Worm brought down 10 percent of the Internet. CERT was intended to prevent major security incidents by setting up a Network Operations Center to communicate with security experts. The Center created a vulnerability disclosure program with the mission of publishing advisories about security vulnerabilities, usually after the software manufacturer had developed a patch or created a work-around to mitigate the risk of the security flaw. Security professionals relied on CERT to protect their clients’ systems and networks from intrusions. (CERT’s functions would be taken over by the Department of Homeland Security in 2004.)
Now think about this for a moment: if someone discovered and reported a security hole,