Ghost in the Wires_ My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker - Kevin Mitnick [162]
I told JSZ that Shimmy might have the OKI source code or the details of his and Lottor’s reverse engineering efforts, not to mention any new security bugs he might have discovered.
On Christmas Day 1994, walking out of a movie at the Tivoli Center in downtown Denver, I powered up my cloned cell phone and called JSZ to jokingly wish him a Jewish Merry Christmas.
“Glad you called,” he said. In a cool, collected voice, he told me, “I have a Christmas present for you. My friend, I got into ariel tonight.” And he gave me the port number where he’d set up the backdoor. “Once you connect, there is no prompt. You just type ‘.shimmy.’ and you get a root shell.”
“No fucking way!”
To me it was a great Christmas present. I had been wanting to get back into Shimmy’s computer to find out more about what he and Mark Lottor were up to with the OKI cell phone project, and I wanted to know if either of them had access to the source code. Either way I was going to grab whatever information I could find on his server related to the OKI 900 and 1150 cell phones.
It was known in the hacker community that Shimmy had a very arrogant demeanor—he thought he was smarter than everyone else around him. We decided to bring his ego down a few notches toward reality—just because we could.
The drive back to the hotel in my rental car felt like just about the longest twenty minutes of my life. But I didn’t dare drive faster than the flow of traffic. If I got pulled over and the cop came up with something suspicious about my driver’s license, it might be a hell of a lot longer than twenty minutes before I could get online again. Patience, patience.
As soon as I walked into my hotel room, I powered up my laptop and dialed up to Colorado Supernet, masking the call as usual by using my cell phone cloned to some random Denverite.
I fired up a network talk program that would make a direct connection to JSZ’s computer in Israel so we could communicate in one window as we hacked Shimmy in another. I connected to Shimmy’s computer using the backdoor that JSZ had set up. Bingo!—I was in with root privileges.
Incredible! What a high! That must be what a kid feels on reaching the top level of a video game that he’s struggled with for months. Or like reaching the summit of Mount Everest. Thrilled, I congratulated JSZ on a job well done.
For openers, JSZ and I probed Shimmy’s system looking for the most valuable information—anything to do with security bugs, his email, and any files that had “oki” in their name. He had tons of files. As I was archiving and compressing everything that matched my criteria, JSZ was also probing around for anything that would be useful. Both of us were very concerned that Shimmy might decide to log in to check his email for Christmas greetings and find out he was being hacked. We wanted to get his stuff before he figured it out. I was worried he might pull the network connection, just as Lottor had done several months earlier.
We were working fast to get the information off Shimmy’s machine. My endorphins were on major overload.
After searching, archiving, and compressing, I needed a place to store the code for safekeeping. No problem: I already had root access to every server at the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link, commonly known as “the Well.” Started by Stewart Brand and a partner, the Well had as its users a who’s who of the Internet, but the celebrity status of the site didn’t matter to me at all. My only concern was whether there was enough disk space and whether I could hide the files well enough that the system admins wouldn’t notice them. In fact, I had been spending lots of time on the site. A few days after John Markoff’s front-page New York Times story appeared, I discovered he had an account on the Well. An easy target: I had been reading his emails ever since, searching for anything related to me.
After I finished moving the targeted stuff, we decided to just grab everything in Shimmy’s home directory. JSZ archived