Ghost in the Wires_ My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker - Kevin Mitnick [41]
We also tried to set ourselves up on the computer systems at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, California, using our customized version of the Chaos patch.
JPL eventually realized one of their systems had been compromised, possibly because they were watching for any unauthorized changes to the VMS Loginout and Show programs. They must have reverse engineered the binaries to identify how the programs were being modified and decided it was the Computer Chaos Club who had gained access. JPL management went to the media with that version of the story, which led to huge news coverage about the German hackers who had been caught breaking into the JPL computers. Lenny and I chuckled over the incident. But at the same time, we were a bit nervous because we were detected.
Once we started the transfers, we had to keep them going night and day, moving the code bit by bit. It was a very slow process. The dial-up speed of the connections at the time (if you could even use the word “speed”) was a maximum of T1 speeds, which was about 1.544 megabits per second. Today, even cell phones are much faster than that.
Soon DEC detected our activity. The guys responsible for keeping the systems up and operational could tell that something was going on because of the heavy network traffic in the middle of the night. To make matters worse, they discovered that their available disk space was disappearing. They didn’t usually have a lot of volume on the system: it would be counting in megabytes, whereas we were moving gigabytes.
The nighttime activity and the disappearing disk space pointed to a security issue. They quickly changed all the account passwords and deleted all the files we stored on the system. It was a challenge, but Lenny and I weren’t deterred. We just kept hacking back in, night after night, despite their best efforts. In fact, because the staff and users of the system didn’t realize that we had their personal workstations under our control and could intercept their keystrokes, it was easy for us to immediately obtain their new log-in credentials every time they changed them.
DEC’s network engineers could see all along that lots of large files were being transferred, but they couldn’t figure out how to stop it. Our unrelenting assault had them convinced that they were under some kind of corporate espionage attack by international mercenaries who’d been hired to steal their flagship technology. We read their theories about us in their emails. It was clearly driving them crazy. I could always log on to see how far they were getting and what they were going to try next. We did our best to keep them chasing red herrings along the way. Because we had full access to Easynet, we could dial in from the United Kingdom, and other countries throughout the world. They couldn’t identify our entry points because we were constantly changing them.
We were facing a similar challenge at USC. Administrators there had likewise noticed that disk space on a few MicroVAXes was disappearing. We’d start transferring data at night, and they’d come on and kill the network connection. We’d start it up again, and they’d bring the system down for the night. We’d just wait them out, then start up our transfer again. This game continued for months.
Sometimes, between fending off the system admins, grappling with the gigabytes of code, and putting up with the painfully slow bandwidth, we felt like we were trying to suck an ocean through a straw. But we endured.
Once all the VMS source code had been moved to several systems at USC, we needed to put it on magnetic tape so we could sift through the code without worrying about being tracked back while dialed into Easynet. Moving the source code onto tape was a three-man operation.
Lewis De Payne was stationed on campus, posing as a student. He would ask one of the computer operators to mount a tape he provided onto