Ghost in the Wires_ My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker - Kevin Mitnick [70]
I needed to know when that intercept had been installed on my dad’s line.
Maybe if I knew who had ordered the taps, I could find a way to discover whether they had picked up anything I should worry about.
The phone companies had been getting so many phone phreaks and PIs calling in lately that they had started requiring verification. So I called Dispatch, the office at Pacific Bell that handed out assignments to the techs in the field, and said, “I’ve got an arson situation here, I need to page some other techs. Who’s on call tonight?”
The operator gave me four names and pager numbers. I paged each of them to call the internal Pacific Bell number I had set up, then once again reprogrammed the call forwarding to go to the number that my cell phone was currently cloned to. When each tech responded to my page, I launched into my “setting up a database” routine.
Why? Because I was asking them for very sensitive information, and they weren’t going to give that out to just anybody. So my pretext was, “I’m setting up a database of people on call to handle mission-critical problems.” One by one, I’d first ask a series of innocuous questions—“May I get your name, please?” “You work out of which Dispatch Center?” “Who’s your manager?” Once they’d established a pattern of answering my questions, I’d ask for what I really wanted: “What’s your UUID? And your tech code?”
I got what I needed every time, as each tech rattled off his two pieces of verification (UUID, or “universally unique identifier,” and tech code), his manager’s name, and his callback number. A walk in the park.
With these credentials, I could now get back into the Line Assignment Office, the department I next needed information from.
Once my credentials had been verified, my request went like this: “I have an internal number here out of Calabasas—it’s one of ours. Can you find out the CBR number of the person who placed the order?”
“CBR” is telco-speak for “can be reached.” In effect, I was asking for the phone number where I could reach the person who’d issued the order to set up the line—in this case, the line for the thousand-cycle tone on the box tapping one of my dad’s phones.
The lady went off to do her research, then came back and told me, “The order was placed by Pacific Bell Security; the contact name is Lilly Creeks.” She gave me a phone number that began with the San Francisco area code.
I was going to enjoy this part: social-engineering the phone company’s Security Department.
Turning on the TV, I found a show with background conversation that I set at low volume, to sound like the occasional voices of typical office background noise. I needed to influence my target’s perception that I was in a building with other people.
Then I dialed the number.
“Lilly Creeks,” she answered.
“Hi, Lilly,” I said. “This is Tom from the Calabasas frame. We have a few of your boxes over here, and we need to disconnect them. We’re moving in some heavy equipment, and they’re in the way.”
“You can’t disconnect our boxes,” she answered in a voice verging on a screech.
“Listen, there’s no way around it, but I can hook them back up tomorrow afternoon.”
“No,” she insisted. “We really need to keep those boxes connected.”
I gave an audible sigh that I hoped sounded exasperated and annoyed. “We have a lot of equipment being swapped out today. I hope this is really important,” I said. “But let me see what I can do.”
I muted my cell phone and waited. After listening to her breathe into the handset for something like five minutes, I got back on the phone with her. “How about this? You stay on the line, I’ll disconnect your boxes, we’ll move the equipment into place, and then I’ll reconnect them for you. It’s the best I can do—okay?”
She reluctantly agreed. I told her it would take a few minutes.
I muted the call again. Using