Ghost in the Wires_ My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker - Kevin Mitnick [63]
Next Dave “punched the pair down” in the terminal, connecting that line to an unused phone line running up to his office. Back upstairs, we hooked a phone to the hijacked line and connected a caller ID display box.
From my old VT100 terminal, I dialed in to the Webster Street central office switch and added the caller ID feature to the bait phone line.
Later that night I returned to my dad’s apartment in Calabasas, set my alarm clock to go off at 3:30 a.m., and turned in. When the alarm went off, with my cell phone as usual cloned to someone else’s number, I paged Eric, who by then had loosened up enough to give me his pager number. I left the bait phone number for him to return the call. When Eric dialed the number, the caller ID data would be sent between the first and second rings, capturing the number of his phone. Gotcha!
Hermit-like, Dave secretly lived and slept in his office. As soon as I thought Eric would have returned the page, I phoned Dave. It was 3:40 in the morning. I had to keep calling until he finally answered, really angry. “What is it?!” he shouted into the receiver.
“Did you get the caller ID?”
“Yes!”
“Dave, it’s really important. What is it?”
“Call me in the morning!” he yelled before slamming the phone down.
I went back to sleep and didn’t reach him again until the next afternoon, when he obligingly read me the phone number off the caller ID: 310 837-5412.
Okay, so I had Eric’s phone number. Next to get his address.
Posing as a technician in the field, I called Pacific Bell’s Mechanized Loop Assignment Center, or MLAC, also known simply as the Line Assignment Office. A lady answered and I said, “Hi. This is Terry out in the field. I need the F1 and the F2 on 310 837-5412.” The F1 was the underground cable from the central office, and the F2 was the secondary feeder cable that connects a home or an office building to the serving area interface, which eventually connects to the F1, all the way back to the central office.
“Terry, what’s your tech code?” she asked.
I knew she wasn’t going to look it up—they never did. Any three-digit number would satisfy, so long as I sounded confident and didn’t hesitate.
“Six three seven,” I said, picking a number at random.
“F1 is cable 23 by 416, binding post 416,” she told me. “F2 is cable 10204 by 36, binding post 36.”
“Where’s the terminal?”
“The oh-dot-one is at 3636 South Sepulveda.” That was the location of the terminal box, where the field technician bridged the connection to the customer’s home or office.
I didn’t care about anything I had asked so far. It was just to make me sound legitimate. It was the next piece of information that I really wanted.
“What’s the sub’s address?” I asked. (“Sub” being phone company lingo for the subscriber, or customer.)
“Also 3636 South Sepulveda,” she told me. “Unit 107B.”
I asked, “Do you have any other workers at 107B?”—“workers” being lingo for “working telephone numbers.”
She said, “Yes, we have one other,” and gave me the second number, along with its F1 and F2. As easy as that. It had taken me not much more than a few minutes to discover Eric’s address and both of his phone numbers.
When you use social engineering, or “pretexting,” you become an actor playing a role. I had heard other people try to pretext and knew it could be painfully funny. Not everybody could go on stage and convince an audience; not everybody could pretext and get away with it.
For anyone who had mastered pretexting the way I had, though, it became as smooth as a champion bowler’s sending a ball down the lane. Like the bowler, I didn’t expect to score a strike every