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I dropped out.

I had lost my access to a great system, but in the late 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, the world of personal computing went through a dramatic transition period, bringing the first desktop machines that included a monitor or even had one built in. The Commodore PET, the Apple II, and the first IBM PC began to make computers a tool for everyone, and to make computers much more convenient for heavy users… including computer hackers. I couldn’t have been happier.

Lewis De Payne had been my closest hacking and phreaking partner just about from that first time he called and said he wanted to get together and learn from me. Even though he was five years older—which at that stage of life makes quite a difference—we shared the same boyish exhilaration from phone phreaking and hacking. And we shared the same goals: access to companies’ computers, access to passwords, access to information that we weren’t supposed to have. I never damaged anyone’s computer files or made any money from the access I gained; as far as I know, Lewis didn’t either.

And we trusted each other—even though his values were, well, different from mine. A prime example was the U.S. Leasing hack.

I got into U.S. Leasing’s system using a tactic that was so ridiculously easy I should have been embarrassed to try it. It went like this.

I would call the company I’d targeted, ask for their computer room, make sure I was talking to a system administrator, and tell him, “This is [whatever fictitious name popped into my head at that moment], from DEC support. We’ve discovered a catastrophic bug in your version of RSTS/E. You could lose data.” This is a very powerful social-engineering technique, because the fear of losing data is so great that most people won’t hesitate to cooperate.

With the person sufficiently scared, I’d say, “We can patch your system without interfering with your operations.” By that point the guy (or, sometimes, lady) could hardly wait to give me the dial-up phone number and access to the system-manager account. If I got any pushback, I’d just say something like, “Okay, we’ll send it to you in the mail” and move on to try another target.

The system administrator at U.S. Leasing gave me the password to the system manager account without a blink. I went in, created a new account, and patched the operating system with a “backdoor”—software code that sets me up so I’d be able to gain covert access whenever I want to get back in.

I shared details of the backdoor with Lewis when we next spoke. At the time Lewis was dating a wannabe hacker who sometimes went by the name of Susan Thunder and who later told one interviewer that in those days she had sometimes worked as a prostitute, but only to raise money for buying computer equipment. I still roll my eyes when I think about that line. Anyway, Lewis told Susan that I had broken into U.S. Leasing and gave her the credentials. Or maybe, as he later claimed, he didn’t give them to her but she saw them written on a notepad he had left alongside his computer.

Shortly after, the two of them had a falling-out and parted company, I guess with some bad feelings. She then took revenge on me. To this day, I don’t know why I was the target, unless perhaps she thought Lewis had broken up with her so he could spend more time with me, hacking, and so blamed me for the breakup.

Whatever the reason, she reportedly used the stolen credentials to get into the U.S. Leasing computer systems. The later stories about the incident said she had destroyed many of their files. And that she had sent messages to all their printers to print out, over and over until they ran out of paper:

MITNICK WAS HERE

MITNICK WAS HERE

FUCK YOU

FUCK YOU

What really burned me about this whole affair was that in a later plea agreement, the government insisted on including this act that I didn’t commit. I was faced with a choice between confessing to this abusive, ridiculous act and going to juvenile prison.

Susan waged a vendetta against me for some time, disrupting my phone service,