Ghost in the Wires_ My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker - Kevin Mitnick [90]
They gave me the title of “Researcher” so as not to raise any suspicions with my Probation Officer.
I was given my own small office, about as sparse as it could be: desk, chair, computer, and phone. No books, no decorations, completely bare walls.
I found Michael to be intelligent, someone I could easily talk to. Our conversations often boosted my self-esteem because when I showed him things I could do that his other employees couldn’t, he would reward me by expressing his admiration at a “wow factor” level.
What Mark and Michael wanted me to focus on first was a situation they told me they didn’t understand. Those phone taps I had uncovered on Teltec’s lines—why in the world would law enforcement be suspicious of anything they were doing?
They had the names of two people they thought might be working the case from the other side: Detective David Simon, with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, and Darrell Santos, of Pacific Bell Security. “Do you know how to tap the detective’s phone?” one of my bosses asked.
I said, “Sure, but that’s too risky.”
“Well, see what you can find out about this investigation,” I was told.
I would discover, in time, what the Teltec honchos were hiding from me: the detective had led a team that had raided the PI firm a few months earlier for using unauthorized passwords to access TRW credit reports.
Good thing I wasn’t willing to investigate a cop—but taking on PacBell Security was a different story. It sounded like a fun test of my ingenuity, a challenge I might thoroughly enjoy.
TWENTY-ONE
Cat and Mouse
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Since Lewis had cut way back on his hacking time to keep Bonnie happy, I fell into hacking with a buddy of his. Terry Hardy was definitely not your everyday sort of guy. Tall and with a high forehead, he talked in a monotone, like a robot. We nicknamed him “Klingon,” after the race of aliens in Star Trek, because we thought he shared some of their physical characteristics. A variety of savant, he could carry on a conversation looking you in the eye while at the same time typing eighty-five words a minute on the computer. It was incredible to watch, and distinctly unnerving.
One day when Terry, Lewis, and I were with Dave Harrison at Dave’s office, I said, “Hey, let’s see if we can get Darrell Santos’s voicemail password.” This could be a way of proving myself to the people at Teltec. If I could actually pull it off.
I called the frame that served the telephone numbers at the offices of PacBell Security, and had the tech look up the cable-and-pair for a phone number I gave him: the number for PacBell Security Investigator Darrell Santos.
My goal was to get an SAS connection put up on Santos’s line, but I wanted it done in a special way. From my research into SAS, I had learned about something called an “SAS shoe,” a physical connection that had the advantage of letting you drop in on a line and stay on, listening to any calls the subscriber made or received. And with this method, there was no audible click on the line when the SAS connection was established.
What would the tech have thought if he’d known that the phone tap he was setting up was on a line belonging to PacBell Security!?
My timing couldn’t have been better. As soon as I popped onto the line, I heard a recorded female voice saying, “Please enter your password.” Terry Hardy happened to be next to me at the time. Another of his unusual abilities was that he had perfect pitch, or at least some variety of that rare aptitude: he could listen to the touch tones of a phone number being keyed in and tell you what number had just been called.
I shouted across the room for Lewis and Dave to be quiet, then said, “Terry, listen, listen!” He got closer to the speakerphone just in time to hear the touch tones as Santos entered his voicemail password.
Terry just stood there,