Ghost in the Wires_ My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker - Kevin Mitnick [55]
Here I was, getting in touch with Eric while telling myself I was doing it out of courtesy to my half-brother.
How could I have known that this one innocent call would be the beginning of an insane adventure that would change my life forever?
When Eric came on the phone that first time, he busied himself by dropping enough hints to make sure I understood he knew a lot about phone phreaking and computer hacking.
He said something like, “I’ve been working with Kevin. You know—the other one, Kevin Poulsen.” He was trying to build cred with me on the shoulders of a hacker who had just been busted for rigging radio contests and supposedly stealing national security secrets.
He told me, “I’ve been on break-ins to telco offices with him.” If it was true that he had been inside telephone company offices, that was really interesting. It meant Eric had inside information from actually using and controlling the equipment in central offices and other telco facilities. So he definitely had my attention. Eric’s claim of knowing a bunch of Poulsen’s tactics was good bait.
To set the hook, he sprinkled his gab with details about phone company switches like the 1AESS, 5E, and DMS-100, and talked about systems like COSMOS, Mizar, LMOS, and the BANCS network, which he said he and Poulsen had accessed remotely. I could tell he wasn’t just bluffing his way through: he knew more than a little about how the systems worked. And he made it sound like he had been part of the small team that had worked with Poulsen to rig those radio contests, which newspaper articles said Poulsen had won a couple of Porsches from.
We talked for about ten minutes. Over the next week or so, I called Spiegel a few more times for conversations with Eric.
A couple of things nagged at my gut. Eric didn’t talk like other hackers; he sounded more like Joe Friday, like a cop. He asked questions like, “What projects have you been up to lately? Who are you talking with these days?”
Asking a hacker that kind of stuff was a little like going into a bar where bank robbers hung out and saying to one of them, “Ernie sent me. Who’d you pull your last job with?”
I told him, “I’m not hacking anymore.”
“Neither am I,” he said.
This was pretty much the standard cover-your-ass line with somebody you didn’t know. Of course he was lying, and he meant for me to know it. He must have figured I was lying, too. In my case, the statement was pretty much true. But, thanks to this guy, it wouldn’t be for long.
I told him, “There’s a friend of mine I think you’d like to talk to. His name is Bob. What number should I have him call you at?”
“Tell him to call Henry the same way you just did,” he said. “He’ll conference me in again.”
“Bob” was my on-the-spur-of-the-moment alias for Lewis De Payne.
It would have been hard to find another hacker with Eric’s inside information. Yes, I was drawing Lewis even deeper into my hacking, but with him acting as my front guy, I could find out what information Eric had that Lewis and I didn’t, while still protecting myself.
Why was I willing to be tempted into exchanging information with Eric, when for me to even talk with him violated my terms of release? Think of it like this: I was living in Las Vegas, a city I didn’t know well and didn’t much like. I kept driving past the gaudy hotels and casinos, all tarted up to draw the tourists and gamblers. For me this was no fun-town. There was no sunshine in my life, none of the thrill and intellectual challenge I’d experienced when hacking into the phone companies. None of that adrenaline flow from finding software flaws that would let me electronically march right into a company’s network—the rush I’d felt back in the days when I was known in the online underworld as “Condor,” my hacker handle. (I had originally chosen that name out of admiration for a character who was a particular hero of mine, the one-step-ahead-of-everybody guy played by Robert Redford