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The college later contacted the LAPD to report the incident.

Since we never went to pick up the tape, they had no evidence, and we were allowed to continue as students, attending classes and using the computer lab. But the LAPD kept an eye on us, positioning their team on the classroom rooftops and trailing us for days. Apparently, attempting to copy student lab work became a top priority. You’d think they’d have more interesting cases to work on. At night, they’d follow us to Lenny’s work, where we stayed at his office hacking until the wee hours of the morning. They knew we were up to no good, but they couldn’t prove anything.

I guess the Pierce College folks were disappointed, and weren’t ready to drop it. I noticed a DEC company vehicle in the college parking lot. So I called the local DEC field office for Los Angeles, said I was from Accounts Payable at Pierce College, and asked what support they were providing at the time.

“Oh,” the guy told me, “we’re trying to help you catch some hackers.”

At a terminal in the Pierce computer lab, I was able to examine a memory location from my student account that showed me that all “security auditing” was enabled on my account. Lenny checked his account using the same technique; security auditing was enabled on it, as well. The guy from DEC was closeted in a small room with a computer and printer, watching everything we were doing from our student accounts. (I discovered this by showing up early one day before the tech arrived and following him to the room.) I thought this was a bit overkill since the system was only used by students to complete their lab work, and not connected to any network or phone line. But I found a way to keep him busy: I wrote a very simple script that listed the files in my directory, over and over. Since the security auditing was designed to send a detailed alert for every file opened or read, I knew his printer would be working nonstop. I could picture the guy closed up in his tiny room, pulling his hair out that his printer kept running until it was out of paper. And as soon as he would load more paper, the file lists would start printing out again.

A short while later, the instructor pulled Lenny and me out of the computer room and accused us of typing unauthorized commands. I asked, “Is doing a directory of my own files unauthorized?” Both Lenny and I were sent to the dean for further proceedings.

Over the next several weeks, Pierce’s administrators held a kangaroo court hearing on our case. They still suspected we were behind the hacking incident, but still couldn’t prove it. No eyewitnesses. No fingerprints. No confessions. Nonetheless, Lenny and I were both expelled from Pierce, based on circumstantial evidence.

EIGHT

Lex Luthor

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Lenny and I wanted to get the source code for Digital Equipment Corporation’s VMS operating system so we could study it to find security flaws. We would also be able to look for developers’ comments about fixing security problems, which would let us work backward and figure out what those problems were and how we could exploit them. We also wanted to be able to compile parts of the operating system ourselves, so it would be easier for us to install some backdoor patches in the systems we compromised. Our plan was to launch a social-engineering attack on DEC to get into the VMS development cluster. I got the dial-up number for the VMS development modem pool.

When Lenny was at work, he went to the terminal box for the building to find a fax line belonging to another tenant. Because a lot of companies had office suites in the same building, he could punch down someone else’s line on an unused cable pair that went into VPA’s computer room, and no one would be able to trace our outgoing calls.

Meanwhile, I went to the Country Inn hotel near his office and used a pay phone to call Lenny. Once I had him on the line on one phone, I used another pay phone to call DEC’s main number in Nashua, New Hampshire, where its labs