Ghost in the Wires_ My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker - Kevin Mitnick [34]
On the nights when I didn’t go out, I’d sit at my computer in the apartment, using Bonnie’s telephone line for hacking while she read by herself, watched television by herself, and then went to bed by herself. I could say it was my way of handling the disappointment of those two almost-but-oh-never-mind jobs, but I’d be lying. Sure, I was having problems handling the massive disappointment. But that wasn’t the reason. The real reason was simply that I was in the thrall of a powerful obsession.
Though that had to be frustrating for her, she was somehow as accepting as I was about her less-than-admirable housekeeping. After a few months of living together, we both knew we were committed to the relationship. We were in love, we started talking about getting married, and we began saving money. Whatever was left over from my paycheck (I was hired by Fromin’s Delicatessen to migrate them over to a point-of-sale system), I would convert into hundred-dollar bills that I stashed in the inside breast pocket of a jacket in our coat closet.
I was twenty-three years old, living in my girlfriend’s apartment and spending virtually every waking hour on my computer. I was David on my PC, attacking the Goliath networks of the major telephone companies throughout the United States.
The phone company control systems used a bastardized version of Unix, which I wanted to learn more about. A company in Northern California called Santa Cruz Operations, or SCO, was developing a Unix-based operating system called Xenix for PCs. If I could get my hands on a copy of the source code, that would give me a chance to study the inner workings of the operating system on my own computer. From Pacific Bell, I was able to obtain SCO’s secret dial-up numbers for its computer network, and then manipulated an employee into revealing her username and changing her password to a new password that I had provided, which gave me access.
At one point while immersed in studying the details of SCO’s system trying to locate the source code I wanted to study, I noticed a system admin was watching my every move. I sent him a message, “Why are you watching me?”
To my surprise, he answered: “It’s my job,” his message said.
Just to see how far he’d allow me to go, I wrote back that I wanted my own account on the system. He created an account for me, even giving me the username I requested: “hacker.” Knowing that he’d be keeping the account under surveillance, I just distracted him by poking around at nothing in particular. I was able to locate the code I wanted, but in the end I never tried to download it because the transfer would have taken forever over my 2,400-baud modem.
But that wasn’t going to be the end of this tale.
Bonnie came home from work one day at the beginning of June to find everything in disarray: we had been robbed. She paged me, I called, and I could hear the alarm and upset in her voice.
I asked her to check my coat pocket for the money I’d been saving for our wedding. But then she noticed that my stash of hundred-dollar bills—totaling about $3,000—had been neatly laid out on the kitchen table… along with a search warrant.
We hadn’t been robbed; we’d been raided. By officers of the Santa Cruz Police Department. Santa Cruz! I knew it had to be connected to my nighttime hacking excursions into the computers of Santa Cruz Operations.
When Bonnie said my computer and disks were gone, my world immediately crumbled. I told her to quickly pack some clothes and meet me. I knew there would be a lot of trouble coming my way. I needed to get a lawyer to do damage control. Fast!
Bonnie joined me at a local park, and my mom came, too. I told them both it wasn’t a big deal, since I had just poked around—I hadn’t damaged any of the SCO files or even downloaded their source code. I wasn’t as worried about dealing with the law as I was about the pain and suffering I was bringing down on these two and