Ghost in the Wires_ My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker - Kevin Mitnick [50]
After that first month, I was allowed to leave the halfway house for some selected appointments and visits. I often went to see Bonnie, trying to win her back. On one of those visits, I noticed that she’d carelessly left her latest phone bill sitting on the table. It showed that she’d been spending hours on the phone with Lewis De Payne, who until that moment I’d still believed was my closest friend.
Well, of course, I had to find out for sure. I casually asked if she ever heard from any of my buddies, like Lewis.
She lied, flatly denying having ever been in touch with him at all—and confirming my worst fear. In my mind, she had completely blindsided me. Where were the faith and trust that I thought I had finally found in her? I confronted her but got nowhere. I was devastated. Licking my wounds, I walked out and cut off all contact with her for a long time.
Soon after, she moved in with Lewis. To me it made no sense at all: she was leaving a guy with a hacking addiction for another guy with the same propensities. But more important was that Bonnie hadn’t been just my girlfriend: she had been my wife. And now she’d taken up with my best friend.
After my release, I traded my hacking addiction for an addiction of a different kind: I became an obsessive gym rat, working out for hours every day.
I was also able to find a short-term job as a tech-support person for a firm called Case Care, but that lasted only three months. When it ended, I obtained permission from the Probation Office to relocate to Las Vegas, where my mom had moved and would welcome me living with her until I could get my own place.
Over a period of months, I dropped a hundred pounds. That put me in the best shape of my life. And I wasn’t hacking. I was feeling great, and if you had asked me then, I would have said the hacking days were all behind me.
That was what I thought.
The Kevin Mitnick Discount Plan
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Imagine a trade-show floor with 2 million square feet of space, packed with 200,000 people crammed wall to wall, sounding like they’re all talking at once, mostly in Japanese, Taiwanese, and Mandarin. That’s what the Las Vegas Convention Center was like in 1991 during CES, the annual Consumer Electronics Show—a candy store, drawing one of the biggest crowds in the world.
I had traveled across town to be there one day during the show, but not just to visit the booths or see the new electronic gadgets that would dazzle buyers the next Christmas. I was there for the background noise. It was essential for an air of believability on the phone call I was about to place.
This was the challenge: I had a Novatel PTR-825 cell phone, which back then was one of the hottest phones on the market. I wanted to feel safe talking to my friends on it, and not have to wonder if somebody from the FBI or local law enforcement was listening in. I knew a way that might be possible. Now I was trying to find out if what I had in mind could really work.
My plan was based on a trick involving the phone’s electronic serial number, or “ESN.” As every phone hacker knows, each cell phone has a unique ESN, which gets transmitted along with the mobile phone number, or MIN, to the nearest cell tower. It’s part of how the cell phone company validates that a caller is a legitimate subscriber, and part of how it knows whom to charge calls to.
If I could keep changing my phone so it would transmit the MINs and ESNs of legitimate subscribers, then my calls would be completely safe: every attempt to trace a call would lead to some stranger, the person who owned the real phone associated with the ESN that I was using at the moment. (Okay, the customer