Ghost in the Wires_ My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker - Kevin Mitnick [152]
As I ran, I calculated an escape route: get to the alley, turn left, then run like hell for two blocks, across 50th Street and into the business district.
I figured they had ground support on the way, and at any moment I’d begin to hear the yowling wail of police car sirens.
I turned into the alley. I ran on the left side of the alley, next to the apartment complexes that would provide good cover.
Fiftieth Street just ahead. Heavy traffic.
I was going on pure adrenaline.
I ran into the street, dodging between cars to get across.
Damn! Almost hit—close call.
I ran into a Walgreen’s pharmacy, now feeling waves of nausea. My heart was pounding, sweat was running down my face.
Then out of the drugstore again and into another alley. No helicopter—what a relief! But I kept going. Jogging toward University Avenue.
Feeling safer at last, I ducked into a store, and placed another cell phone call.
It wasn’t five minutes before I heard the sound of the helicopter getting louder and louder and louder.
It flew until it was right over the store, then hovered there. I felt like Dr. Richard Kimble in The Fugitive. My stomach was churning again, my anxiety rapidly returning. I needed to escape.
Out the store through the back entrance. Run a couple blocks, duck into another store.
Every time I turned on my cell phone and placed a call, the damned helicopter would reappear. Son of a bitch!
I turned off the phone and ran.
With the phone off, the helicopter wasn’t following me anymore. I knew then. No question. They were tracking me by my cell phone transmissions.
I stopped under a tree and leaned against its solid trunk to catch my breath again. People walking past looked at me with suspicion written all over their faces.
After a few minutes with still no helicopter, I began to calm down.
I found a pay phone and called my dad. “Go to the pay phone at Ralph’s,” I told him, naming the supermarket near his apartment. Again my curious, uncanny memory for phone numbers came in handy.
When I reached him, I told him the story about the helicopter chase. I longed for his sympathy and support, his understanding.
What I got was something else:
“Kevin, if you think somebody was chasing you in a helicopter, you really need help.”
THIRTY-TWO
Sleepless in Seattle
Caem alw Ymek Xptq’d tnwlchvw xz lrv lkkzxv?
If the Feds had a problem with my hacking, would they also have a problem if I was hacking another hacker?
A guy named Mark Lottor, who was under indictment and awaiting trial as one of Kevin Poulsen’s coconspirators, had a company called Network Wizards, marketing what he called a “Cellular Telephone Experimenter’s Kit.” It had been designed for enabling hackers, phone phreaks, and fraudsters to control the OKI 900 and OKI 1150 cell phones from their personal computers. Some people were convinced that Lottor had the source code for the OKI 900; others thought he might have reverse-engineered the firmware to develop his kit. I wanted to get a copy of whatever he had—source code or reverse-engineering details.
Through my research, I found the name of Mark’s girlfriend: Lile Elam. And whadda ya know? She worked at Sun! Perfect, couldn’t be better. I still had access to Sun’s internal network through some of the systems I had hacked into in Canada, and by that route it didn’t take me long to hack into Lile’s workstation at Sun. Setting up a “sniffer”—a program that would capture all her network traffic—I waited patiently for her to connect to either Mark’s system or her own home system. Finally I hit pay dirt:
PATH: Sun.COM(2600) => art.net(telnet)
STAT: Thu Oct 6 12:08:45, 120 pkts, 89 bytes [IDLE TIMEOUT]
DATA:
lile
m00n$@earth
The last two lines are her log-in name, followed by her password, allowing me to log in to her account on her server at home and, using an unpatched local exploit, gain root privileges.
I set up another sniffer on her home system,