Ghost in the Wires_ My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker - Kevin Mitnick [18]
I said, “Susan, it’s Kevin. I just want you to know I’m watching every move you make. Don’t fuck with me!”
I hope it scared the hell out of her for weeks.
I’d been having fun, but my evading the law wasn’t going to last forever.
By May 1981, still age seventeen, I had transferred my extracurricular studies to UCLA. In the computer lab, the students were there to do homework assignments or to learn about computers and programming. I was there to hack into remote computers because we couldn’t afford a computer at home, so I had to find computer access at places like universities.
Of course, the machines in the student computer lab had no external access—you could dial out from the modem at each station, but only to another campus phone number, not to an outside number—which meant they were essentially worthless for what I wanted to do.
No sweat. On the wall of the computer room was a single telephone with no dial: it was for incoming calls only. Just as I had in Mr. Christ’s computer lab in high school, I would pick up the handset and flick the switch hook, which had the same effect as dialing. Flashing nine times in quick succession, equivalent to dialing the number “9,” would get me a dial tone for an outside line. Then I would flash ten times, equivalent to dialing “0,” for an operator.
When the operator came on the line, I’d ask her to call me back at the phone number for the modem at the computer terminal I was using. The computer terminals in the lab at that time did not have internal modems. Instead, to make a modem connection, you had to place the telephone handset into an adjacent acoustic coupler, which sent signals from the modem into the telephone handset and out over the phone lines. When the operator called back on the modem telephone, I’d answer the call and ask her to dial a phone number for me.
I used this method to dial in to numerous businesses that used DEC PDP-11’s running RSTS/E. I was able to social-engineer their dial-ups and system credentials using the DEC Field Support ruse. Since I didn’t have a computer of my own, I was like a drifter moving from one college campus to another to get the dose of computer access that I so desperately wanted. I felt such an adrenaline rush driving to a college campus to get online. I would drive, over the speed limit, for forty-five minutes even if it meant only fifteen minutes of computer time.
I guess it just never occurred to me that a student at one of these computer labs might overhear what I was doing and blow the whistle on me.
Not until the evening when I was sitting at a terminal in a lab at UCLA. I heard a clamor, looked up, and saw a swarm of campus cops rushing in and heading straight for me. I was trying hard to appear concerned but confident, a kid who didn’t know what the fuss was all about.
They pulled me up out of the chair and clamped on a pair of handcuffs, closing them much too tightly.
Yes, California now had a law that criminalized hacking. But I was still a juvenile, so I wasn’t facing prison time.
Yet I was panicked, scared to death. The duffel bag in my car was crammed with printouts revealing all the companies I had been breaking into. If they searched my car and found the treasure trove of printouts and understood what it was, I’d be facing a lot worse than any punishment they might hand out for using the school’s computers when I wasn’t a student.
One of the campus cops located my car after seizing my car keys and found the bag of hacking contraband.
From there, they hustled me to a police