The Art of Deception_ Controlling the Human Element of Security - Kevin D. Mitnick [92]
The next phone company employee knew she wasn’t supposed to change the class of telephone service without a service order, but helped out the friendly man anyway. This made it possible to place calls through to all ten of the public defender phone lines in the detention center.
For the man at the detention center in Miami, the request to help someone at another federal facility with a computer problem seemed perfectly reasonable. And even though there didn’t seem any reason he would want to know the housing unit, why not answer the question?
And the guard on Ten North who believed that the caller was really from within the same facility, calling on official business? It was a perfectly reasonable request, so he called the inmate Gondorff to the telephone. No big deal.
A series of well-planned stories that added up to completing the sting.
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Ten years after they had finished law school, Ned Racine saw his class-mates living in nice homes with front lawns, belonging to country clubs, playing golf once or twice a week, while he was still handling penny-ante cases for the kind of people who never had enough money to pay his bill. Jealousy can be a nasty companion. Finally one day, Ned had had enough.
The one good client he ever had was a small but very successful accounting firm that specialized in mergers and acquisitions. They hadn’t used Ned for long, just long enough for him to realize they were involved in deals that, once they hit the newspapers, would affect the stock price of one or two publicly traded companies. Penny-ante, bulletin-board stocks, but in some ways that was even better—a small jump in price could represent a big percentage gain on an investment. If he could only tap into their files and find out what they were working on ...
He knew a man who knew a man who was wise about things not exactly in the mainstream. The man listened to the plan, got fired up and agreed to help. For a smaller fee than he usually charged, against a percentage of Ned’s stock market killing, the man gave Ned instructions on what to do. He also gave him a handy little device to use, something brand-new on the market.
For a few days in a row Ned kept watch on the parking lot of the small business park where the accounting company had its unpretentious, storefront-like offices. Most people left between 5:30 and 6. By 7, the lot was empty. The cleaning crew showed up around 7:30. Perfect.
The next night at a few minutes before 8 o‘clock, Ned parked across the street from the parking lot. As he expected, the lot was empty except for the truck from the janitorial services company. Ned put his ear to the door and heard the vacuum cleaner running. He knocked at the door very loudly, and stood there waiting in his suit and tie, holding his well-worn briefcase. No answer, but he was patient. He knocked again. A man from the cleaning crew finally appeared. “Hi,” Ned shouted through the glass door, showing the business card of one of the partners that he had picked up some time earlier. “I locked my keys in my car and I need to get to my desk.”
The man unlocked the door, locked it again behind Ned, and then went down the corridor turning on lights so Ned could see where he was going. And why not—he was being kind to one of the people who helped put food on his table. Or so he had every reason to think.
Ned sat down at the computer of one of the partners, and turned it on. While it was starting up, he installed the small device he had been given into the USB port of the computer, a gadget small enough to carry on a key ring, yet able to hold more than 120 megabytes of data. He logged into the network with the username and password of the partner’s secretary, which were conveniently written down on a Post-it note stuck to the display. In less than five minutes, Ned had downloaded every spreadsheet and document file stored on the workstation and from the partner’s network directory and was on his way