Ghost in the Wires_ My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker - Kevin Mitnick [31]
Meanwhile, back at the computer school, the students weren’t all guys. One of the girls was a cute, petite coed named Bonnie. I wasn’t exactly the most attractive guy around, carrying all the extra weight I had put on ever since that friend from my preteen bus-riding days had introduced me to junk food as a basic food group. I was weighing in at around fifty-five pounds overweight. “Obese” would have been a more-than-polite term.
Still, I thought she was really cute. When we were both in the computer room working on school projects, I started sending messages to her across the room, asking her not to stop any of my programs that were running at a higher priority, and her replies were friendly enough. I asked her out to dinner. She said, “I can’t. I’m engaged.” But I had learned from my hacking not to give up easily; there’s usually a way. A couple of days later I asked again about dinner, and told her she had a beautiful smile. And whaddaya know? This time she accepted.
Later, she told me she thought her fiancé might be lying to her about his finances—what cars he owned and how much he owed on them. I told her, “I can find out if you want.” She said, “Yes, please.”
I had lucked my way into accessing TRW, the credit-reporting company, while still in high school. Nothing clever about this. One night I went out to the back of Galpin Ford in the San Fernando Valley and dug through the trash. It took about fifteen minutes, but my little Dumpster-diving expedition paid off. I found a bunch of credit reports on people buying cars from the dealership. Incredibly, printed out on each report was Galpin’s access code for TRW. (Even more incredible: they were still printing out the access code on each credit report years later.)
In those days, TRW was very helpful to its clients. If you called in and gave a merchant’s name and the correct access code, and explained that you didn’t know the procedure, the nice lady would talk you through every step of getting a person’s credit report. Very helpful to real clients, very helpful as well to hackers like me.
So when Bonnie said she’d like me to look into what her boyfriend was really up to, I had all the tricks I needed. A call to TRW and a few hours on the computer gave me his credit report, his bank balance, his property records. Suspicions confirmed: he was nowhere near as well-off as he had been claiming, and some of his assets were frozen. DMV records showed he still had a car he told Bonnie he had sold. I felt bad about all this—I wasn’t trying to undermine her relationship. But she broke off their engagement.
Within two or three weeks, when she had gotten over her initial emotions about the breakup, we started dating. Though six years older than I was and considerably more experienced at this game, she thought I was smart and good-looking, despite my weight. This was my first serious relationship; I was soaring.
Bonnie and I both liked Thai food and going to the movies, and she turned me on to hiking, something far out of my normal comfort zone, showing me the beautiful trails in the nearby San Gabriel Mountains. She was fascinated by my ability to gather information on people. And one thing more, a coincidence I still laugh at: my new girlfriend was having her salary paid and her tuition covered by one of my principal lifelong hacking targets, the phone company GTE.
After finishing the prescribed half year for my certificate at the computer school, I ended up staying on a bit longer. The system admin, Ariel, had been trying to catch me getting administrator privileges on the school’s VM/CMS system for months. He finally nailed me by hiding behind a curtain in the terminal room while I was snooping inside his directory, catching me red-handed. But instead of booting me out of the program, he offered me a deal: he was impressed with the skills that had allowed me to hack into the school’s computers, and if I would agree to write