The Art of Deception_ Controlling the Human Element of Security - Kevin D. Mitnick [45]
After another couple of moments, Kowalski came back on the line and said, “My manager wants to talk to you himself,” and gave him the man’s name and cell phone number.
Danny called the manager and went through the whole story one more time, adding details about the project he was working on and why his product team needed to meet a critical deadline. “It’d be easier if someone just goes and fetches my card,” he said. “I don’t think the desk is locked, it should be there in my upper left drawer.”
“Well,” said the manager, “just for the weekend, I think we can let you use the one in the Computer Center. I’ll tell the guys on duty that when you call, they should read off the random-access code for you,” and he gave him the PIN number to use with it.
For the whole weekend, every time Danny wanted to get into the corporate computer system, he only had to call the Computer Center and ask them to read off the six digits displayed on the Secure ID token.
An Inside Job
Once he was inside the company’s computer system, then what? How would Danny find his way to the server with the software he wanted?
He had already prepared for this.
Many computer users are familiar with newsgroups, that extensive set of electronic bulletin boards where people can post questions that other people answer, or find virtual companions who share an interest in music, computers, or any of hundreds of other topics.
What few people realize when they post any message on a newsgroup site is that their message remains on line and available for years. Google, for example, now maintains an archive of seven hundred million messages, some dating back twenty years! Danny started by going to the Web address http://groups.google.com.
As search terms, Danny entered “encryption radio communications” and the name of the company, and found a years-old message on the subject from an employee. It was a posting that had been made back when the company was first developing the product, probably long before police departments and federal agencies had considered scrambling radio signals.
The message contained the sender’s signature, giving not just the man’s name, Scott Baker, but his phone number and even the name of his workgroup, the Secure Communications Group.
Danny picked up the phone and dialed the number. It seemed like a long shot—would he still be working in the same organization years later? Would he be at work on such a stormy weekend? The phone rang once, twice, three times, and then a voice came on the line. “This is Scott,” he said.
Claiming to be from the company’s IT Department, Danny manipulated Baker (in one of the ways now familiar to you from earlier chapters) into revealing the names of the servers he used for development work. These were the servers that could be expected to hold the source code containing the proprietary encryption algorithm and firmware used in the company’s secure radio products.
Danny was moving closer and closer, and his excitement was building. He was anticipating the rush, the great high he always felt when he succeeded at something he knew only a very limited number of people could accomplish.
Still, he wasn’t home free yet. For the rest of the weekend he’d be able to get into the company’s network whenever he wanted to, thanks to that cooperative computer center manager. And he knew which servers he wanted to access. But when he dialed in, the terminal server he logged on to would not permit him to connect to the Secure Communications Group development systems. There must have been an internal firewall or router protecting the computer systems of that group. He’d have to find some other way in.
The next step took nerve: Danny called back to Kowalski in Computer Operations and complained “My server won’t let me connect,” and told the IT guy, “I need you to set me up with an account on one of the computers in your department so I can use Telnet to connect to my system.”
The manager