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The caller would give his personal identifying information. Eric would go through some pretense of verifying the information, and then tell the caller that the identifying information had been confirmed, and ask for the details of what the caller wanted to find out from the DMV. He’d pretend to start looking up the name, with the caller able to hear the clicking of the keys, and then say something like, “Oh, damn, my computer just went down again. Sorry, detective, my computer has been on the blink all week. Would you mind calling back and getting another clerk to help you?”

This way he’d end the call tying up the loose ends without arousing any suspicion about why he wasn’t able to assist the officer with his request. Meanwhile Eric had a stolen identity—details he could use to obtain confidential DMV information whenever he needed to.

After taking calls for a few hours and obtaining dozens of requestor codes, Eric dialed into the switch and deactivated the call forwarding.

For months after that, he’d carry on the assignments jobbed out to him by legitimate PI firms that didn’t want to know how he was getting his information. Whenever he needed to, he’d dial back into the switch, turn on call forwarding, and gather another stack of police officer credentials.

Analyzing the Con

Let’s run a playback on the ruses Eric pulled on a series of people to make this deceit work. In the first successful step, he got a sheriff’s deputy in a Teletype room to give out a confidential DMV phone number to a complete stranger, accepting the man as a deputy without requesting any verification.

Then someone at the state Telecom Department did the same thing, accepting Eric’s claim that he was with an equipment manufacturer, and providing the stranger with a phone number for dialing into the telephone switch serving the DMV.

Eric was able to get into the switch in large measure because of weak security practices on the part of the switch manufacturer in using the same account name on all their switches. That carelessness made it a walk in the park for the social engineer to guess the password, knowing once again that switch technicians, just like almost everybody else, choose passwords that will be a cinch for them to remember.

With access to the switch, he set up call forwarding from one of the DMV phone lines for law enforcement to his own cell phone.

And then, the capper and most blatant part, he conned one law enforcement officer after another into revealing not only their requestor codes but their own personal identifying information, giving Eric the ability to impersonate them.

While there was certainly technical knowledge required to pull off this stunt, it could not have worked without the help of a series of people who had no clue that they were talking to an imposter.

This story was another illustration of the phenomenon of why people don’t ask “Why me?” Why would the Teletype officer give this information to some sheriff’s deputy he didn’t know—or, in this case, a stranger passinghimself off as a sheriff’s deputy—instead of suggesting he get the information from a fellow deputy or his own sergeant? Again, the only answer I can offer is that people rarely ask this question. It doesn’t occur to them to ask? They don’t want to sound challenging and unhelpful? Maybe. Any further explanation would just be guesswork. But social engineers don’t care why; they only care that this little fact makes it easy to get information that otherwise might be a challenge to obtain.

mitnick message

If you have a telephone switch at your company facilities, what would the person in charge do if he received a call from the vendor, asking for the dial-in number? And by the way, has that person ever changed the default password for the switch? Is that password an easy-to-guess word found in any dictionary?

PREVENTING THE CON

A security code, properly used, adds a valuable layer of protection. A security code improperly