Ghost in the Wires_ My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker - Kevin Mitnick [43]
Inside the wallet, I found a slip of paper with the code for the digital door lock written on it. I couldn’t believe it: Lenny was such a clever hacker, but he couldn’t remember a simple number? And he’d been foolish enough to write down the code and leave it in his wallet? It seemed so preposterous that I wondered if he was setting me up. Had he planted the wallet just to jerk my chain?
I went back to his desk, replaced the wallet, and told him he’d have to give me an hour to guess the door code. We agreed that the only rule was that I couldn’t break the lock. Anything else was fair game.
A few minutes later, he went downstairs to get something. When he came back, he couldn’t find me. He searched everywhere, then finally unlocked the door to the computer room. I was sitting inside, typing on the VMS console, logged in with full privileges. I smiled at him.
Lenny was furious. “You cheated!” he shouted.
I stuck out my hand. “You owe me a hundred and fifty bucks.” When he resisted, I said, “I’ll give you a week.” It felt great to knock the ego of the self-important Lenny down a few notches.
He didn’t pay and didn’t pay. I kept giving him extensions, then told him I was going to charge him interest. Nothing. Finally, more as a joke than anything else, I called accounts payable at his company and pretended to be from the IRS’s Wage Garnishment Division. “Do you still have a Leonard DiCicco working there?” I asked.
“Yes, we do,” said the lady on the other end.
“We have a garnishment order,” I said. “We need you to withhold his pay.” The lady said she’d have to have authorization in writing. I told her, “You’ll have a fax on Monday, but I’m giving you official notice to withhold all paychecks until you receive further documentation from us.”
I thought Lenny might be a little inconvenienced, but no worse than that. When no fax arrived on Monday, payroll would just give him his money.
When the people from accounting told Lenny about the IRS call, he knew instantly who’d been behind it.
But he was so over-the-top, out-of-control furious that he lost all sense of reason and did a really stupid thing: he went to his boss and told him that the two of us had been hacking into DEC from VPA’s offices.
His boss didn’t call the cops; instead, he and Lenny together called security staff at DEC and told them who’d been plaguing them over the past several months. Eventually the FBI was called in, and its agents set up a sting.
Personnel from the FBI and Digital Equipment Corporation set up camp at VPA prior to one of our late-night hacking sessions. They placed monitoring software on VPA’s computers that would record everything we did. Lenny was wearing a wire to capture our conversations. That night my target was Leeds University in England. After earlier identifying Neill Clift as one of Digital’s main sources of information about VMS security bugs, I wanted to get into the VMS system in Leeds’s Organic Chemistry Department, where Clift had an account.
At one point I sensed that something a bit weird was going on with Lenny and asked him, “Is everything all right? You’re acting strange.” He said he was just tired, and I shrugged off his odd behavior. He was probably petrified I’d figure out what was really happening. After several hours of hacking, we called it quits. I wanted to keep going, but Lenny said he had to get up early.
Several days later, I got a call from Lenny, who said, “Hey, Kevin, I finally got my vacation pay. I have your money. C’mon over.”
Two hours later I rolled into the small ground-floor parking garage of the building where VPA had its offices. Lenny was standing there, not moving. He said, “I need to get the VT100 terminal emulator software to make a copy for a friend,” referring to software on disks he knew I had in the car. It was already 5:00 p.m. and