Ghost in the Wires_ My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker - Kevin Mitnick [19]
In the end, UCLA didn’t find anybody who could make sense of my printouts. The university never filed any charges. No action at all beyond referring my case to the county Probation Department, which could have petitioned Juvenile Court to hear the case… but didn’t.
Perhaps I was untouchable. Perhaps I could keep on with what I was doing, facing a shake-up now and then but never really having to worry. Though it had scared the hell out of me, once again I had dodged a bullet.
Escape Artist
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stq lec qma e wzerg mzkk!”?
Over Memorial Day Weekend, 1981, Lewis De Payne and I joined a bunch of phone phreakers who were gathering for a “party.” The quotation marks are because who besides a six-year-old having a birthday or a bunch of geeks would choose a Shakey’s pizza parlor as a place to gather and frolic?
Something like two dozen people showed up, each one almost as much of a nerd as the worst of the ham radio enthusiasts. But some of them had good technical know-how, which made me feel I wasn’t entirely wasting my time.
The conversation inevitably got around to one of my favorite targets, COSMOS, the Computer System for Mainframe Operations, the Pacific Telephone mission-critical system that could bestow so much power on any phreaker who could access it.
Lewis and I already had access to COSMOS, one of the first Pacific Telephone computers I had hacked into, but probably only a few of the others had gotten in at the time, and I wasn’t going to tell them how I had. As we started talking, I realized the building that housed COSMOS was nearby, only a few miles away. I figured if a few of us went over there and had a go at a little Dumpster-diving, we might find some useful information.
Lewis was always ready for just about anything. We invited only one other guy, a fellow named Mark Ross, who was very familiar with phone systems and someone we thought we could trust.
En route, we swung by an all-night pharmacy and picked up gloves and flashlights, then on to the COSMOS building. The Dumpster-diving turned up a few interesting items but nothing of real value. After about an hour, discouraged, I suggested, “Why don’t we see if we can get inside?”
They both wanted me to go in, see if I could social-engineer the guard, and then send a touch-tone signal from my handheld ham radio. Nothing doing—we were going to be the Three Musketeers or nothing.
We walked in. The guard was a young guy, the kind who looked like he might enjoy a toke pretty often. I said, “Hey, how you doing? We’re out late, I work here, I wanted to show my friends where I work.”
“Sure,” he said. “Just sign in.” Didn’t even ask for ID. Smooth.
We had been calling departments, analyzing phone company operations for so long that we knew where the COSMOS employees worked: “Room 108” kept coming up in Pacific Telephone communications. We found our way to it.
COSMOS. The mother lode. The jackpot.
A folder on the wall held sheets of paper listing dial-up numbers for every wire center in Southern California. They looked exactly like those glossy brochures in a doctor’s office, where the sticker says “Take One!” I couldn’t believe our luck. This was a real treasure, one of the things I most coveted.
Each central office has one or more wire centers. The telephone exchanges in each central office are assigned to a particular wire center. Armed with the list of dial-up numbers for each wire center, and log-in credentials, I’d have the ability to control any phone line in Pacific Telephone’s Southern California service area.
It was an exciting find. But I needed passwords to other administrative accounts as well. I wandered through the offices around the COSMOS room, opening folders and looking into desk drawers. I opened one folder and found a sheet labeled “Passwords.”
Whoa!
Fantastic. I was grinning from ear to ear.
We should have left then.
But I spotted a