Ghost in the Wires_ My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker - Kevin Mitnick [29]
We fished around for maybe an hour but came up only with uninteresting information.
Much later, that hour would come back to haunt me.
I was sure there was some way I could fast-track my computer skills to something that could land me a job I coveted: working for General Telephone. I found out the company was actively recruiting graduates from a technical school called the Computer Learning Center. It was an easy drive from my place and I could earn a certificate by going to school there for only six months.
A Federal Pell Grant plus a student loan paid my way, and my mom came up with the bread for some of the extra expenses. The school required male students to wear a suit and tie to class every day. I hadn’t dressed like that since my bar mitzvah at age thirteen, and now, since I was twenty-three and fairly beefed out, that suit would have been a pretty miserable fit. Mom’s cash paid for two new suits.
I really enjoyed programming in “assembler language,” more challenging because the programmer has to master many technical details, but yielding much more efficient code that uses a much smaller memory footprint. Coding in this lower-level language was fun. It felt like I had more control over my applications: I was coding much closer to the machine level than using a higher-level programming language such as COBOL. The classwork was routine to somewhat challenging, but also fascinating. I was doing what I loved: learning more about computer systems and programming. When the subject of hacking came up every now and then, I played dumb, just listening.
But of course, I was continuing to hack. I had been playing cat-and-mouse games with Pacific Bell, as the former Pacific Telephone had restyled itself. Every time I figured out a new way of getting into the company’s switches, somebody there would eventually figure out a way of blocking my access. I’d use the dial-up numbers that RCMAC was using to connect to various switches to process service orders and they’d catch on, then change the dial-up numbers or restrict them so I couldn’t dial in. And then I would remove the restriction when they weren’t paying attention. It went back and forth for months. Their constant interference had gotten to the point where hacking into Pacific Bell switches was getting to be more like work.
Then I got the idea of trying out a higher-level approach: attacking their Switching Control Center System, or SCCS. If I could do that, I’d have just as much control as if I’d been sitting in front of the switches themselves, able to do whatever I wanted without having to social-engineer clueless technicians day after day. Ultimate access and power could be mine.
I started with an attack aimed at the SCCS at Oakland, in Northern California. On my first call, I planned to say I was from ESAC (the Electronic Systems Assistance Center), providing support for all the SCCS software deployed throughout the company. So I did my research, coming up with the name of a legit ESAC worker, then claiming, “I need to get into the Oakland SCCS but our Data kit equipment is down for maintenance, so I’ll have to get access through dial-up.”
“No sweat.”
The man I had reached gave me the dial-up number and a series of passwords, and stayed on the line with me, talking me through each step.
Oops, this was a system with “dial back” security: you had to enter a phone number and wait for the computer to ring you back. What now?
“Look, I’m off-site at a remote office,” I said off the top of my head. “So I won’t be able to take a callback.”
I had magically hit on a reasonable-sounding excuse. “Sure, I can program it to bypass the dial back when you log in with your username,” he assured me—defeating the company’s elaborate security that would otherwise have required that I be at an authorized callback number.
Lenny joined me in the SCCS break-in effort. Each one we got into gave us access to five or six central-office