Ghost in the Wires_ My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker - Kevin Mitnick [8]
Then there was the telephone in the computer lab—the old kind of phone, with a rotary dial. The phone was programmed for only calling numbers within the school district. I started using it to dial into the USC computers to play computer games, by telling the switchboard operator, “This is Mr. Christ. I need an outside line.” When the operator started to get suspicious after numerous calls, I switched to phone-phreaker tactics, dialing into the phone company switch and turning off the restriction so I could just dial into USC whenever I wanted. Eventually he figured out that I had managed to make unrestricted outgoing calls.
Soon after he proudly announced to the class how he was going to stop me from dialing into USC once and for all, and held up a lock made especially for dial telephones: when locked in place in the “1” hole, it prevented the dial from being used.
As soon as he had the lock in place, with the whole class watching, I picked up the handset and started clicking the switch hook: nine fast clicks for the number “9” to get an outside line, seven fast clicks for the number “7.” Four clicks for the number “4.” Within a minute, I was connected to USC.
To me it was just a game of wits. But poor Mr. Christ had been humiliated. His face a bright red, he grabbed the phone off the desk and hurled it across the classroom.
But meanwhile I was teaching myself about RSTS/E (spoken as “RIS-tisEE”), the operating system manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) used on the school’s minicomputer located in downtown Los Angeles. The nearby Cal State campus at Northridge (CSUN) also used RSTS/E on its computers. I set up an appointment with the chairman of the Computer Science Department, Wes Hampton, and told him, “I’m extremely interested in learning about computers. Could I buy an account to use the computers here?”
“No, they’re only for our registered students.”
Giving up easily isn’t one of my character traits. “At my high school, the computer lab shuts down at the end of the school day, three o’clock. Could you set up a program so the high school computer students could learn on your computers?”
He turned me down but called me soon after. “We’ve decided to give you permission to use our computers,” he said. “We can’t give you an account because you’re not a student, so I’ve decided to let you use my personal account. The account is ‘5,4’ and the password is ‘Wes.’ ”
This man was chairman of the Computer Science Department, and that was his idea of a secure password—his first name? Some security!
I started teaching myself the Fortran and Basic programming languages. After only a few weeks of computer class, I wrote a program to steal people’s passwords: a student trying to sign on saw what looked like the familiar login banner but was actually my program masquerading as the operating system, designed to trick users into entering their account and password (similar to phishing attacks today). Actually, one of the CSUN lab monitors had given me a hand debugging my code—they thought it was a lark that this high schooler had figured out how to steal passwords. Once the little program was up and running on the terminals in the lab, whenever a student logged in, his or her username and password were secretly recorded in a file.
Why? My friends and I thought it would be cool to get everyone’s password. There was no sinister plan, just collecting information for the hell of it. Just because. It was another of those challenges I repeatedly put to myself throughout the entire early part of my life, from the time I saw my first magic trick. Could I learn to do tricks like that? Could I learn to fool people? Could I gain