Ghost in the Wires_ My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker - Kevin Mitnick [52]
One more phone call, again to Circus Circus. I explained I would be arriving late and needed to make sure the front desk would hold a FedEx that would be delivered before I checked in. “Certainly, Mr. Bishop. If it’s a large item, the bell captain will have it in the storage room. If it’s small, we’ll be holding it here at the registration desk.” No problem.
For the next call, I found my way to a quiet area and punched in the number for my favorite Circuit City store. When I reached a clerk in the cell phone department, I said, “This is Steve Walsh, LA Cellular. We’ve been having computer failures in our activation system. Have you activated any phones on LA Cellular in the last two hours?”
Yes, the store had sold four. “Well, look,” I said. “I need you to read me the mobile phone number and the ESN of each of those phones, so I can reactivate their numbers in the system. The last thing we need is unhappy customers, right?” I gave him a sarcastic chuckle, and he read off the numbers.
So now I had four ESNs and the phone numbers that went with them. For the rest of the afternoon, the wait was absolutely nerve-racking. I had no idea whether or not I would be able to pull this off. Would the Novatel people sense that something fishy was up, and never send the chips? Would there be FBI agents staked out in the hotel lobby, waiting to pick me up? Or would I, by the next afternoon, have the capability of changing the number of my cell phone as often as I wanted?
The next day, my longtime friend Alex Kasperavicius arrived. An intelligent, friendly guy, expert in IT and telephone systems, Alex liked the adventure of being included in some of my exploits, but he wasn’t really a hacking partner. I could doggedly stick to an effort for months and months until I finally succeeded. Alex wasn’t like that; he had other distractions. He kept busy working as a camp counselor in Griffith Park, playing classical music on his French horn, and looking for new girlfriends.
I filled him in on the situation. What a kick I got out of watching his reaction! At first not believing it would be possible to get the manufacturer to send us the chips, then imagining how great it would be if we could really make calls masking our identities.
Kumamoto-san had provided me with the programming instructions for giving the phone a new ESN, using the special version of the firmware. Today, almost twenty years later, I can still remember the exact code. It was:
Function-key
Function-key
#
39
#
Last eight digits of the new ESN
#
Function-key
(For the technically curious, the ESN is actually eleven decimal digits long, the first three of which designate the phone’s manufacturer. With the chip and the code, I would only be able to reprogram any Novatel ESN into my phone, but not one from another cell phone manufacturer—though later on, when I got Novatel’s source code, I would gain that capability as well.)
By 3:00 p.m., we were pretty sure Federal Express would have delivered to Circus Circus already, and we couldn’t keep our impatience under control any longer. Alex volunteered to do the pickup, understanding without conversation that if I went in and there were cops waiting, I’d be on my way back to prison. I told him to give the name Mike Bishop, say he had to get the package directly over to the Convention Center and would be back later to register. I stayed out front.
In a situation like this, there was always a chance that someone could’ve seen through the ruse and alerted the Feds. We both knew that Alex could be heading into a trap. From the moment he walked in, he’d have to be scoping out the place for people who could be plainclothes cops. But he couldn’t be looking up and down every