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The commands and log-ins for COSMOS wire centers for northern and Southern California.

The commands for line monitoring and the seizure of dial tone.

References to the impersonation of Southern California security agents and ESAC employees to obtain information.

The commands for placing terminating and originating traps.

The addresses of Pacific Bell locations and the electronic door lock access codes for the following Southern California central offices ELSG12, LSAN06, LSAN12, LSAN15, LSAN56, AVLN11, HLWD01, HWTH01, IGWD01, LOMT11, and SNPD01.

Intercompany electronic mail detailing new log-in/password procedures and safeguards.

The worksheet of an UNIX encryption reader hacker file. If successful, this program could break into any UNIX system at will.

I imagine a lot of people in the company must have been more than a little upset to find out how deeply I had penetrated their systems, bypassing all of their elaborate security safeguards. Based on what had been found on those disks, I was just stunned that the FBI didn’t show up at my door.

Several months later, by the fall of 1988, I was back at work with Don David Wilson at Franmark. Bonnie was still at GTE, though she was sure their security department had tried to find evidence that she had been hacking into company computers. We were saving money again, trying to put together enough for the down payment on a house. There were some nice places we could afford, but they were so far out of town that the commute would have been daunting and wearing on our nerves and patience.

Trying to support our home-ownership goal, my mom offered us the spare bedroom in her home so we could save on rent and build our down-payment fund quicker. Though neither Bonnie nor I much liked the idea, we decided to give it a try.

Our living with my mom turned out to be a bad idea. As eager as she was to make it work for us, we simply had no privacy. Bonnie would later complain, in a personal memo that she left behind at my mom’s, that she was “reluctant and a bit bitter… about it.”

We were growing apart, and I was getting deeper and deeper back into hacking, spending all my days at work at Franmark and my nights almost until sunup with Lenny DiCicco, largely focused on hacking into Digital Equipment Corporation.

When Lenny told me he was signing up to take a computer course at nearby Pierce College, I said I’d sign up as well to keep him company, despite my earlier run-in with the chair of the Computer Science Department, which had led to my quitting the program. It turned out the administrators had not forgotten me, but I didn’t know it at the time.

One day, Lenny and I went into the student computer room, which had a bunch of terminals connected to a MicroVAX VMS system. We hacked into the machine quickly and obtained all privileges. Lenny had written a script that would allow us to make a backup of the entire system. We had no real use for it: we just planned to treat it as a trophy. So, once we got in, Lenny put a cartridge tape into the computer tape drive, and ran his script to start the backup, and we left. We were going to return for it a few hours later, after the copy had finished.

A bit later as we were walking across campus, I got a page from Eliot Moore, a longtime friend I hadn’t been in touch with for a while. I went to a pay phone to call him back.

“Are you at Pierce College?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Did you leave a tape in the tape drive?”

“Oh, shit… how did you know?” I said.

“Don’t go back to the computer room,” he warned me. “They’re waiting for you.” By some strange chance, Eliot had been in the computer lab when the instructor noticed the blinking light on the MicroVAX tape drive. It was obvious that someone had inserted a cartridge tape and was copying some files.

The computer science instructor, Pete Schleppenbach, had immediately suspected us. Eliot overheard the instructor discussing the situation with another staff member and called me right away. If he hadn’t, we would’ve walked right into a trap.