Ghost in the Wires_ My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker - Kevin Mitnick [30]
Lenny and I put a huge amount of time into this, from late 1985 through much of 1986. We eventually got into the switches for all of Pacific Bell, then Manhattan, then Utah and Nevada, and in time many others throughout the country. Among these was the Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company, or C&P, which served the Washington, DC, area, including all of the DC-based departments of the Federal government as well as the Pentagon.
The National Security Agency temptation was an itch I couldn’t resist. NSA’s telephone service was provided through a phone company switch in Laurel, Maryland, which we had already gained access to. Directory assistance listed the agency’s public phone number as 301 688-6311. After randomly checking out several numbers with the same prefix, I proceeded on the reasonable hunch that NSA was assigned the entire prefix. Using a test function for switch technicians called “Talk & Monitor,” I was able to set up a circuit to listen to random calls in progress. I popped in on one line and heard a man and a woman talking. Hardly able to believe I was actually listening in on the NSA, I was thrilled and nervous at the same time. The irony was great—I was wiretapping the world’s biggest wiretappers.
Okay, I’d proved I could do it… time to get out, in a hurry. I didn’t stay on long enough to hear what they were talking about, and I didn’t want to know. If the call had been really sensitive, I’m sure it would have been on a secure line, but even so, it was way too risky. The likelihood of my getting caught was slim if I just did it once and didn’t ever go back.
The government never found out I had gained this access. And I wouldn’t be including it here, except the statute of limitations has long run its course.
For Lenny and me, it was thrilling every time we compromised another SCCS—like getting into higher and higher levels of a video game.
This was the most significant hacking of my career because of the immense control and power it gave us over the phone systems of much of the United States. And yet we never made any use of it. For us, the thrill lay simply in knowing we had gained the power.
Pacific Bell eventually found out about the access we had gained. Yet we were never arrested and charged because, I later learned, company management was afraid of what would happen if others found out what I had been able to do and started trying to duplicate my efforts.
Meanwhile Lenny’s accessing of Dockmaster had not gone unnoticed. NSA traced the break-in back to Hughes, which in turn traced it back to the computer room where Lenny was working on the night I visited. Security at Hughes questioned him first, then the FBI summoned him for an official interview. Lenny hired an attorney who accompanied him to the meeting.
Lenny told the agents he and I had never done anything with Dockmaster. He was grilled several times by Hughes management. He stood his ground and wouldn’t point a finger at me. Much later, though, to save his own neck, he claimed that I had hacked into Dockmaster while I visited Hughes that evening. When they asked why he’d lied about my not being involved in the first place, he said he’d been afraid because I’d threatened to kill him if he gave me up. Clearly, he was desperately trying to come up with an excuse why he lied to Federal agents.
The visitors’ log showed that a Kevin Mitnick had indeed signed in as a guest of Lenny’s. Of course he was summarily canned from Hughes.
Two years later I would be accused of possessing secret access codes for the NSA, when I actually only had the output of a “whois” command—which showed